Well, the day came when Ethel was converted into joints of pork. She’d had a lovely life at Samphire at Sycamore Farm, so we don’t feel bad about eating the end product.
A couple of days before she arrived on our doorstep, we had a message from Karen Nethercott, who runs Samphire, to tell us that “Ethel was quite a big girl”. That sent us into a minor panic, since although we thought we’d cleared plenty of freezer space, we hadn’t bargained for a larger than average pig.
We made some backup arrangements, but we shouldn’t have worried. The pork arrived immaculately butchered, boned, packed, and labelled.