When I was a wee bairn my grandda used to keep saddle back pigs and geese and give us a boiled goose egg for breakfast on Sunday and high holidays. They were delicious and seemed huge in comparison to the usual hens egg. We used to plonk them in a tea cup and smash the tops off with a table spoon before devouring them with freshly baked home made bread. Has anybody else enjoyed such fare - can anybody suggest how long a goose egg should take to boil, as I simply can't remember?

The old fellow also used to slaughter his own pigs, so there was always joints of pork around, black sausages, brawn and trotters etc.

Its got to be said, the pork of today looks so insipid against the home grown kind of fifty years ago. The flesh was surrounded by the whitest of fat,which was a bit of an acquired taste when it was placed cold on your dinner plate, 1/4" to 1/2" thick. We used to smother it with piccalilly relish or boiled cabbage to get it down. Potatoes roasted in pig fat were, however, the very best and the dripping on toast an unforgetable treat, as was the crackling from the skin. The Old fellow smoked like a chimney, made and drank his own cider and lived till he was ninety odd years. He would have thought chloresterol as a new fangled remedy for worming a pig or cleaning his false teeth and I just wonder what a modern day medic would have made of it all.