Pigs are the greatest animals on earth. I shouldn’t really need to explain this because it really is so obvious, but some people just don’t realise it and need it spelling out to them.

Tonight’s dinner was pork chop with roast parsnips and undercooked steamed sliced runner beans. I dislike undercooked vegetables and the green part of my plate still had a squeak and that irritated me. Some people like that sort of thing, but quite frankly, they’re morons. Look at Steve Jobs, for example.

The squeaky beans irritated me because I am now paying full attention to my food as I eat. No distractions at all, just concentrating on savouring my food, chewing it properly and eating slowly. Maybe if I’d eaten the beans even more slowly, they might have cooked in my mouth.

The whole slowing down while I eat thing is all part of a new way of eating that should hopefully retrain my body, or train it in the first place, to feel satisfied when I’ve eaten enough food. Anybody who has seen me eat will have marvelled at how I demolish food, cram it in as quickly as possible and finish everything on my plate. Apparently, you’re not supposed to do this as it means your stomach doesn’t get the chance to send the “stop it, you greedy fat pig, I’m full” signal to the brain. Plus it’s terribly bad mannered. Eventually, I’ll be trained to be satisfied with smaller portions and consequently lose weight and maintain a healthy one.

That all makes sense, it’s simple physiology. I am of course mixing all this with a bit of mumbo jumbo that has now installed a hypnotic gastric band. This involved me listening to a recording that took me through the procedure of having a gastric band fitted. In order to be able to do this, you have to be able to descend into a deeply relaxed trance-like state, something that’s quite difficult for me and my fizzy head. Nonetheless, I did feel very relaxed as things proceeded, until the moment when Paul McKenna pronounced anaesthetist as anaetetist. “What did he just say?” and I was pulled out of the trance slightly. Then he said it again, and again. Now wouldn’t you think that if somebody was doing an audio recording that was intended to relax people they’d be very careful with their pronunciation of words, you know, just in case the audience contained people like me?

Anaetetist, for goodness’ sake.

But back to pigs. You’ve thought about them, haven’t you? Thought about how much of them we can eat, about bacon, sausages, other sausages, prosciutto, salami, sausages, crackling. I like to be assured that any animal I eat has had a decent life prior to being brutally slaughtered, so I don’t buy foreign pork (unless it’s salami or prosciutto because I’m a hypocrite) and I only eat the British stuff where the animals have been reared outdoors and allowed to gambol through meadows of flowers all their lives… before being brutally slaughtered.

I have a spare pork chop from tea tonight. I love you, porcine god.

Soup
I’ve taken to eating canned soup for lunch at work; it’s fairly cheap and moderately filling, and warming during the winter months. As I was working my way through a bowl of Heinz cream of chicken the other day, I wondered how long the chicken in the soup had been separated from living creature. I’d be happy to hazard a guess at four years.

Chickens are stupid, they almost deserved to have their flesh mechanically reclaimed and stuck in a can for years on end. You’d never get that happened to a pig… apart from in tinned ham, or whatever spam is made of.

Pee
It’s the 24hr wee collection tomorrow. I’ve been practising weeing into a jug. It’s been going OK, but I am a little apprehensive of those dual purpose toilet visits that happen in the morning. Let’s just leave it at that.