Her favourite upright position was leaning against my legs under the kitchen table. When she had done this for long enough, she would emerge and chuck a few chairs around, using her head as a battering ram and catapult. Like many pigs, she had a boisterous, hooligan side to her nature, and a great relish for effect Slamming doors was another satisfying pastime. Her extraordinarily acute sense of smell led her to go through handbags to extract an apple, to identify cartons containing fruit juice and on one occasion to steal a rustic wine-box containing some fine Bulgarian vintage. She was furtive with the wine-box, scuttling up the kitchen with it clamped in her jaws.

Beneath the window she paused and set it on the floor; resting one trotter firmly on top she gashed the box with a single snap of those lethal incisors. A ruby fountain sprang towards the ceiling, falling back gracefully to rise again and play about the pig. Noisily she drank, catching the liquid as it leapt, catching the joy as it flies. Through the window the sun shone from the bright blue heaven; the pig stood ankle deep in her alcoholic lagoon and still the fountain played.

Her fondness for wines does not extend to beer, a draught popular with many pigs of lesser sensibility, but on the evening when she had consumed a bowl of whisky trifle, a silent and balletic pig pranced beside me through the dusk towards the barn. Her tastes in food are demanding; not for her the bucket of pig slops, potato peel and vegetable trimmings. Salad is acceptable only if dressed with olive oil, carrots are too dull to contemplate, and you can keep your brassicas. But ratatouille and pumpkin pie provoke cries of ecstasy which I can liken only to sex noises on television.While she is not an asset in the garden she is not destructive; she learnt quickly that she should not lie in flowerbeds, and she does not normally go rooting She is addicted to geraniums, one tiny vice. In hot weather she will lie in the shade or wallow in a paddling pool or dig a shallow grave to serve as a dust bath. In all these activities she reveals a nature which is profoundly sensuous, mirroring the voluptuous curves of her swaying roseate belly and belying the staccato elegance of her small black feet. Certain members of my original Scottish Presbyterian family cannot bear to look at her Not so the local Labour candidate, however.

I spied him with his red rosette, coming up the garden, and shrank behind the curtains The pig lay slumbering on the lawn. The candidate peered round and, feeling unobserved, bent down and kissed the sleeping beauty. She jerked into consciousness, saw the red rosette, saw the man and fled, doing her Jack the Ripper shrieking Red as his rosette, the candidate knocked on the door. Neither he nor I mentioned the incident.This hatred of men is a big nuisance when things go wrong. Portia’s medical attendants have to be wooed from far-flung outlying areas where they have women vets. I had to try three different practices before I could find a vet (female) who was willing to cut her toenails – it is impossible for me to do this because she goes into Jack the Ripper mode immediately.

Pigs die from stress, and they die from shock in anaesthesia They are a nightmare to treat. I had tried unsuccessfully to obtain some anti-stress homeopathic pills to proof her against the toenail ordeal, and was startled when the homeopathic doctor advised me to have a police surgeon standing by since it seemed there might be an element of violence. After this disappointment I did find a female vet who refused to come because she had trimmed three of another man-hating pig’s feet, carefully doing each foot on a different Wednesday, and after the third visit the pig had lain down and died. At last an intrepid young woman arrived, accompanied by a nurse, and sedated the pig with a blow dart in the manner of David Attenborough and the white rhino. Even this modest tranquilliser, she warned, was potentially lethal It didn’t seem to work, and a second dart was blown. The pig shrieked piteously, her whole being concentrated in one gaping set of jaws. The nurse and I cornered the pig with an old trampoline; the vet hung upside down from the barn wall, there being no space left in the improvised corner; the toenails were cut from the upside down position; and the screaming went on.