Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga

by Todd Alexander

  ‘I don’t think I’m ready for her to go outside,’ I said to Jeff as the day marking Helga’s full recovery drew near.

  ‘We can still let her sleep inside if you like but don’t you think she’d prefer to be outside during the day?’

  We talked through the pros and cons. And really, the only pro was for me: I’d miss having so much time with my pig. Helga was growing at an astronomical rate, even in the two weeks since leaving Sugarloaf it looked like she’d doubled in size. She needed more exercise than an occasional explore of the shed and all that aside, she needed to do what a pig does best and a pig can’t forage or root on concrete or wood.

  Any time outside meant freedom, mud and dirt. Inside meant constriction and, in time, broken furniture and fixtures. What would happen when we’d finished our renovation and had all that new stuff and of an evening Helga barrelled in and ran about, just like a pig should? Rainy days would result in trotter prints and body smears all over the house (and more gasps of horror from the masseur). There was only one scenario worth entertaining – it was time for Helga to leave the nest – and though I longed for her company often, during the day she bounded with happiness, playfulness and independence. Helga was always going to grow from piglet to pig and it would have been grossly unfair to force her to stay in my semi-ordered human world.

  Outside, I made sure I spent quality time with her every morning and brought her treats throughout the day. Some of those first mornings she spent outside I’d lie with her or just sit and watch her for anywhere from ten minutes upwards to an hour, then every afternoon I took her and the goats for walks around the property. I missed her most in the evening, when I’d stroked and scratched her as she snored lightly in my lap, and I had to be strong during her first rains and storm, forcing myself not to go outside and check on her or (and yes it was considered) climb into her wooden house and comfort her if she was scared. But rain also turned her pen into her favourite thing: mud. Within days she’d turned over the entire floor of her pen, churned up all the hay and forest debris we’d lined it with, and found herself a discreet corner to do her business in.

  My longing to spend evenings with her eventually subsided but I was convinced it was more than mere coincidence that on those first few nights without Helga in the villa Leroy became more needy and was regularly smothered with cuddles and affection.

  *

  Two goats, a pig and a farmer walk into a bar . . . it’s a line that occurs to me almost every time I take the goats and Helga for a walk. I try to do it every day, whether that’s a quick trip for some grazing or a longer walk exploring corners of the property. I realise how ridiculous my life might look to those outside looking in – a middle-aged man taking his pet goats and pig for a daily walk – and it’s true that more often than not when guests see me on the walk they point and laugh. I guess it is truly a spectacle for the mostly city-dwelling visitors we get at the farm. But I enjoy being the punchline because not only does it bring joy to others; it never fails to make me laugh too.

  One stubborn and strong-willed goat, barrel-gutted with a stumpy gait and mischievous eyes, Winston is so independent I always have to put that dog’s harness around his chest just in case I need to pull him away from a guest’s private deck, or pot plants or some other no-go zone he gets the notion for. The bright orange straps of the harness only add to the humorous nature of the scene, I am sure. (‘You really need to get his permission if you’re going to post photos of him in that bra,’ Vicky wrote once.)

  Wesley, by contrast, is so determined to do the right thing he rarely gets much further than a metre or two from my side and often insists on walking right against my legs so I can tickle the hairs on his back. But on some days Winston leads him astray and he then thoroughly enjoys leading me on a wild goat chase into some forbidden corner of the property. Helga remains every inch my baby, and while she will run up to about twenty metres from me, she will then come straight back to be by my side, and if I rest on the ground she insists on lying on my lap for belly rubs and scratches, even though she is way too big and much too heavy for it nowadays.

  Barely a day passes that I don’t find myself chuckling at their antics on these walks. The bouncy way Helga runs (particularly that view from behind), her excited barks as she laps up the open space, Wesley’s Nadia Comăneci impressions off the bench we’d placed to admire the view in front the olives and yes, even Winston’s naughtiness; it all fills me with such glee that I don’t care how funny I appear to others.

  Helga is like those kids who can’t stand to have different foods on her plate touch each other – only for her it isn’t the touching that’s a bother, it’s eating in a haphazard order. For her evening meal I deliver a carefully divided tray of different food groups, which Jeff christened her ‘bento box’, claiming Helga got better meals than he did. She immediately sets to it with her snout and in mere seconds has systematically rated the food items from most to least interesting. Poor farmer choices get shoved over to the side of the tray to perhaps be considered for afters. The most appealing morsel is greedily devoured, with Helga (who quickly mixes up all my careful division) rooting through the whole tray in search of any hidden gems. Only when she’s confident the best choice is all gone will she consider moving on to ingredient number two, her second favourite, and so on.

  Cheese is almost exclusively the first choice, particularly her favourite: herb and garlic fromage frais, which I buy just for Helga from our local dairy when I’m placing orders for our guests’ cheese platters. A close second is cookies leftover from my baking for the guests, or rice crackers (also loved by Winston but never ever by Wesley). Bread generally follows next, especially if I hide chunks of peanut butter within, or if it’s been soaked in milk, or if it is sugary bread like brioche, which our guests sometimes leave behind. One day, felafels were her second choice. Unlike Rodney and Billy before her, who would eat practically anything (except onion and capsicum), Helga has a more refined palate and doesn’t enjoy herby crackers, cereal, eggplant or cucumber and, like the boys, onion and capsicum are a definite no-go.

  The goats are also fussy eaters. Anything that has touched dirt is met with utter disdain. Wesley scoffs at any food he does not like, sneezes over it and shakes his head violently from side to side. I will not be eating that, thank you very much! (Just like Charlie with tomatoes.) Over-ripe bananas are the most disgusting things on the planet, apparently, and the goats also deign only to sup at water freshly supplied from the tap.

  Sometimes I checked on Helga before the sun went down and the two or three items in the tray she had chosen not to devour straightaway had found their way into her gut, as though, on realising she was getting no more of her first choices, she had shrugged and figured might as well.

  It took me a few more days, but in time I also taught Helga to sit. When she achieved it, she seemed to open her mouth in an enormous, proud-of-herself smile. She so enjoyed walk time with the goats that I worried she was getting lonely through the day, so Jeff did some research.

  ‘It does say here that pigs are really prone to loneliness . . .’

  ‘Do you think we should get her a friend?’

  The thought of going through more months of training, the anguish of having another pig spayed . . . as much as I loved my Helga, repeating all of that held little appeal. But if your baby piggy needs a friend, well then you just do what you have to do, so within a few days we were on our way to purchase her a friend. On the way to the pig farm I decided to do a bit more last-minute research.

  ‘I found this article listing all the animals pigs get along best with. Guess what’s number one?’

  ‘Goats?’

  ‘Yep!’

  We turned the car around, called the pig farmer to apologise, then cut a hole in the fence between Helga’s pen and the goats’. Now in case you hadn’t guessed I’m probably the world’s guiltiest person when it comes to anthropomorphism but I swear when she burst in to be with the goats, Helga’s whole
face lit up. It melts my heart to watch them sleeping together, or Helga chasing Winston around the pen, proving she indeed has become the boss of them all.

  A Reality Self-check

  While I’d taken care of all of the animals over the years, I’d neglected to look after myself. By the middle of 2016, just after Mum had beaten her cancer, I was teetering on morbidly obese on any BMI scale. Let’s not mince words here – I was fucking fat. It felt like my blood had solidified and my organs were struggling. I had never been less happy with my body. I felt as if I was walking around in a fat suit made of jelly. Everything was heavy and clumsy. I’ve struggled with eating and weight my whole life but never knew I was fat until some kid called me ‘Ten-tonne Toddy’ when I was about ten.

  Around the same time, my family went on our first-ever beach holiday. The first morning we suburbanites trudged up to the local beach and it was jam-packed – I’d never seen so many lovely semi-naked bodies in all my life. I suppose I was on the cusp of puberty but didn’t know it at the time.

  As we settled onto an impossibly small area of sand, wedged between other families that all looked tanned and taut, I suddenly began to feel uncomfortable. Ten-tonne Toddy had no place being here. My family members stripped off but I sat quietly drinking it all in, psyching myself up to show the world what I’d only recently become so conscious of.

  ‘Why don’t you take your shirt off, Toddy?’

  ‘I will soon, Dad . . .’

  ‘Why don’t you take your shirt off, Toddy?’

  ‘I said, I will soon!’

  ‘No, why don’t you take it off now?’

  Then in one fell swoop, my father jumped to his feet, marched over to my side of the blanket and literally ripped the t-shirt from my back.

  ‘There. Now it’s done,’ he said, rather pleased with himself, and plonked back down onto the sand to puff away on his cigarette and help himself to another joint of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  Though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, that afternoon I’d joined a new club.

  ‘Hello? Body Dysmorphia Association.’

  ‘Hello, yes? I’d like to take out lifetime membership.’

  ‘Oh you’re in luck. We have an easy payment plan on offer at the moment! Each month, all you need to do is alternate between binge eating and crash dieting.’

  ‘Where do I sign up?’

  ‘In the fine print you just need to promise never to like what you see when you look in the mirror.’

  ‘It’s a deal!’

  ‘One last thing?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When you grow up to realise you’re gay, you will never ever feel comfortable on the gay scene so you’ll only get intimate with anyone when you’re drunk enough to forget what you look like and you’ll find yourself being alone until well into your thirties as a result.’

  ‘Great! Where do I sign?’

  *

  Thirty-odd years later, to realise at the age of forty-two I was heavier than ever, and having seen what Mum went through, gave me the kick up the arse I needed.

  Mel and Jesus were visiting and I expressed how unhappy I was.

  ‘Let’s do it!’ Jesus said.

  We got out the scales and weighed ourselves and agreed to check in with each other every week – we called it Weigh-in Wednesday. Like Vicky, I love a competition, so it was a great motivator.

  In essence, I stripped fat, alcohol, dairy, gluten and sugar out of my diet and I exercised for between forty and eighty minutes every single day. I was running more than the equivalent of a marathon every week and as my body began to change, I became addicted to seeing those kilograms fall away. Over the years I’ve learned the only way for me to lose weight is to religiously keep track of calories in and calories burned, because seeing the numbers in print is the only way I can hold myself accountable. My body becomes a spreadsheet, a scientific experiment in weight loss.

  As the diet progressed, we ate less and less meat. Meat just represented one big fat chunk of calories to avoid. Portions went from five hundred grams pre-diet to a hundred grams. White fish dishes became a much more sensible spending of calories. Jeff would often leave his meat until the last thing on his plate and then only eat it because he didn’t want it to go to waste.

  ‘Can we have vegetarian tonight?’ he would ask. But I resisted because all meals aside from breakfast were just better with a slab of meat, even if it was only a hundred grams.

  I lost more weight than Jesus almost every week and in just over three months I lost a total of twenty-six kilograms. I had never felt better, never looked better. One day I caught my naked reflection in the mirror at the local swimming pool and did a double take. I truly could not believe that the body I was looking at was mine, the eternal fat kid. Parts of my body now revealed themselves for the first time and I no longer had one iota of self-consciousness. Would my BDA life membership be revoked?

  When we were spending cosy evenings watching Netflix with Helga on my lap, some of the films we watched were Cowspiracy, What the Health? and Forks Over Knives. It was eight months after my initial weight loss and shamefully I’d put twelve kilos back on thanks in large part to too much wine and a reduced exercise regime. Watching those films (which I admit are propaganda for their own causes), I could not believe how closely diet was linked to significant diseases such as cancer and diabetes, and when I looked at my immediate family I found a Who’s Who of dietary and genetic problems: many cancers (though Mum’s was perhaps the most severe), type 2 diabetes, Crohn’s disease, diverticulitis, gout, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, kidney stones, gall bladder stones, arthritis, obesity . . . add my grandparents and the list grows to include heart disease, stroke and yet more cancers. I was still within a healthy weight range but I could not deny that with my family’s history I felt like a ticking time bomb. And we had one thing in common aside from genetics: we were all raised on a diet high in animal protein from meat and dairy. In their later years my parents’ food pyramid has dramatically shifted to be laden with meat, dairy, white bread and fried foods, and is breathtakingly light in grains, legumes, leafy green vegetables and fruit. Why had not one of Mum’s health practitioners bothered to ask her what she ate, and talk to her of the dangers of certain foods, and their link to cancer? And as I looked into my sleeping piglet’s tiny face, could I seriously, with clear conscience, hoe into strips of greasy bacon or munch on a pork fillet ever again?

  I preached to my parents about their diet and lack of exercise but deep down knew they considered themselves too old and set in their ways to make any significant changes. I would tell anyone who’d lend me five seconds of their time just how much I loved animals and I couldn’t stand to watch the singer Morrissey’s film about animal cruelty, and yet every night I was still feasting on flesh. When our neighbours Natalie and Andrew had us over to dinner I insisted I could not eat goat or pork on the bone, yet it was hard to deny just how delicious Andrew’s slow-cooked pork belly was and I’d invariably help myself to seconds. I may have been a walking goat and pig joke, but I’d also become a walking contradiction on animal welfare. I’d killed one chicken and swore never to do it again, and I’d go to the ends of the earth (and the pits of our bank account) to make sure all our animals were healthy, but in Coles I’d stack half a trolley full of nicely packaged body parts. Could I love my animals as intensely as I did and still happily munch on their distant relatives?

  Caring for Winston, Wesley and Helga also gave me a sense that I was honouring them more profoundly. They aren’t just pets, but a reminder each and every day of the horrors that animals face in the meat industry. Road kill now seems even more senseless; a greater loss. And any suffering I see in animals (like when Wesley’s hooves grew too long and he found it hard to walk – who knew you had to trim their nails?) affects me more deeply.

  On top of all of this, Jeff and I live on a property at the mercy of drought and rainfall. We see firsthand the effects of global warming: even within the six
years we’ve been here our grape-growing season grows shorter and shorter and we find ourselves harvesting weeks earlier every year. By mid-2017 we’d had so little rain that our main dam almost dried up completely and even the water we’d had pumped in via the PID did little to help us. In drought, the kangaroos had desperately turned to grape leaves and their hunger robbed us of our entire Shiraz crop, whose leaves had hung at the perfect angle for roo grazing. We harvested eight tonnes in February 2017 but just six hundred kilograms in 2018.

  We know the statistics: it takes over nine thousand litres of water to produce four hundred and fifty grams of meat – one meal! – and over eighty million hectares of rainforest have been destroyed to raise livestock or grow plants for their consumption. While we might not have been showering very often, because we simply didn’t own a shower, the grim reality is that even stopping showering altogether would have practically zero impact on the environment, whereas foregoing one Quarter Pounder is the equivalent of skipping about one hundred showers. We are farmers and water is our precious fuel for production and therefore our livelihood. Checking the weather app is not about assessing the need for an umbrella, it’s about checking to see if we’ll survive.

  All these were contributing factors but I can say with absolute certainty that the bond I share with Helga was what prompted me most to turn to veganism. (That word ‘veganism’ sounds like I started a daily ritual of smoking crystal meth. I will be a social outcast forever!)

  My decision can be illustrated by two very distinct scenarios: if Australian supermarkets packaged dog meat for sale, would we consume it? No, because many of us have bonded with dogs (and cats, exotic birds – the list goes on). Our culture regards these animals as domestic companions so the thought of eating them revolts us. But as I’ve developed equally strong bonds with goats and pigs, the thought of eating neat little polystyrene and cling-wrapped packs of their bodies was unconscionable. Secondly, if I asked any omnivore to go out and slaughter their own animal then slice it up for consumption, no one I know has the stomach for it. Because an animal’s death, terror, pain and suffering in the meat trade are not visible to us, most of us manage to compartmentalise its existence.