Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest a little boy and his bear will always be playing
I blame my grandmother. For everything. If only she'd been better at knitting.
See, my teddy bear has just died. Munched through by moths in a cupboard high in my parents' spare room, where he and his friend Mouse spent the last couple of decades of their nearly 50-year lives, forgotten, abandoned, unloved. My mum mentioned this in passing when they came to dinner last week, giving it the significance of a nephew's birthday or an old acquaintance chanced upon in the street. She threw them out, she said, omitting the details of the glistening eyes pleading from their ravaged faces as the wheely bin darkness closed over their heads. I probably should have been there - a short eulogy would have been appropriate, perhaps - but to be honest I hadn't given Porker a second thought in nigh on thirty years.
It was my father who named my teddy bear Porker. Grandma's clicking sticks, bless them, aimed for bear but landed on pig. It was many, many years of close companionship before I realised how my bear got his name, but once I saw it - the snub nose, the cross-stich trotters - it was obvious. I had a Teddy Pig.
Did I love him less for his porcineness? Hell, yes. Maybe I was rash, but he was rasher. You might say I've been pig-headed but, well, he started it. Now he's gone to the sty in the sky. I've changed my photo in his honour.
That picture is so League Of Gentleman, it's frightening. Was Porker bought in a "local" shop?
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