The Fall of Pigglington or The Chronicles of the Great Dejecta - Chapter 1

Chapter 1 - Forming

 

As Pigglington sat in the armchair, sipping cheap supermarket brand blended whisky, he pondered, as he had become in the habit of doing, which egregious circumstance had bought him to this point, and more importantly who was to blame!

 

What had gone so terribly wrong?  He was undoubtedly a successful man, perhaps the most successful man he had ever known, certainly the most successful man he cared about.  A life fully lived, achievements celebrated, foes vanquished.  And he so young!  Of course when asked to name the actual achievements he was celebrated for, he struggled.  Achievements, things actually done?  His greatest achievement, it seemed to him, was him.  He ran things, naturally, was in charge of stuff, a figure of authority and responsibility.  OK, responsibility not so much but definitely in charge of stuff. People respected him, or at least the people he worried about respecting him, respected him.  The others could go to hell. But now, this … this ignominy, sitting in the dark, drinking blended whisky!!   

 

The more he thought about it, the more he drank, the more he drank the more he understood. It was obvious to him that his greatest achievement was he himself! He was clearly the best person he knew, the greatest human alive, king of the world, a superman.  His greatness was not measurable his success was not in what he had done, it just emanated from his very existence.  To paraphrase Descartes, He was, therefore he was Great! 

 

The truth of this was just self evident to Pigglington. How else could you explain his life, despite all the barriers thrown in his way.  

 

It started at school, when he first realised how he could attract devotion from loyal followers.  He attended one of the great public schools, who were clearly extraordinarily grateful to have him, when so many other boys of his age were not allowed to go.  They had obviously seen the enormous burgeoning greatness in the boy, and all it had taken was for his father to pay them some cash.

 

At school, Alexander Terence DeCourcy Pigglington, was soon by general acclamation installed as the class leader amongst the other boys.  “You lot can call me Terry” he said to his loyal acolytes “the rest of you plebs can call me Alexander or Pigglington Major!” The boys he considered his loyal gang, turned their backs on him and started talking about something else.  One particularly lad, sniffed in his direction and said in his uncouth manner, “what you talking about you fat oik.  Hey that’s a good name for you, turd for brains, we’ll call you Oinks, piggy!” All the boys burst out laughing and pointed at Pigglington and started chanting Oinks Oinks Oinks! Pigglington stared at these ungrateful louts and generously put their stupid response to him down to the fact that they just did not realise the importance of having someone as impressive as Pigglington in their midst.  Actually more likely, if they did they were just jealous of his innate greatness. After a while he realised that Oinks was actually a term of endearment, and started to refer to himself as Oinks Pigglington, king of the world.  At this point most of the boys just called him piggy or more simply “fatso”!

 

 

By the time he had reached the 6th form, he had managed to gather around him some friends, or more accurately subordinates.  If he was the alpha, then these were definitely the delta’s.  One of these was his younger brother, the very definition of a girly swot. Barry, or more accurately Barold Harcourt Pigglington, was 2 years younger than Piggy, but was already better than him at every thing.  Far from making Piggy jealous, he took this to be a valuable asset.  I mean what’s the use of being the best person in the school at everything if you actually had to do any work. He would  just demand Barry complete his essays, or tell him the likely answers to the questions on the exams, and hey presto, Piggy was top of the class again.  Barry, apart from being younger, was also much fitter and the star scrum half for his years rugby team. Piggy liked the idea of playing sport, or at least the after match japes that the team seemed to get up to.  He fancied trying Rugby, so he demanded to play in one of his brothers practice games.  He grabbed the ball from some little pipsqueak, targeted one of the smallest boys he could see, and set off towards him with as much pace as he could muster. Resembling an overweight blancmange he trundled towards the boy in question, tripped over his own feet and dropped the ball and landed with a hefty crash on top of the poor kid.  Piggy got up, grinning happily, raised his arms in a celebratory manner, yelped wildly and trooped off to the showers.  Although he never actually played rugby again, from that point on he declared himself to be a star of the school rugby team.  Anyway, when it came to the A-Levels, Piggy realised that he had no chance of getting the results he wanted if he had to sit the exams himself.  He had done no work, and frankly couldn’t understand why he would have to.  He hatched a brilliant plan to get Barry to sit them on his behalf.  Now, because his stature was so different to his brothers, he dressed Barry up in 6 jumpers and one of Piggy’s old blazers and sent him in the exam room, whilst Piggy and few of his underlings skulked around behind the cricket pavilion, smoking cigarettes and drinking rum which one of the day boys had been bullied into stealing from their parents.  Things did not work out quite as planned, as during the first exam, Barry had sweated so much that he could not actually see the questions, and during the second one he had actually fainted after completing only half the exam.  Piggy himself had to sit the final exam, economics, which needless to say he failed miserably.  Barry had managed to complete enough of the other two for Piggy to be awarded C’s in both RE and English. Still it didn’t make any difference, as Piggy Pigglington was accepted at one of the worlds leading universities to read Classics. The university admissions board obviously saw the burgeoning greatness, the universal essence of leadership eking out of his very pores, helped along by a small contribution from his father.

 

At university he discovered that he could attract all sorts of people to his little menagerie, mainly by acting as a complete idiot and being prepared to do the sort of things that most people would not.  The sort of things that would have had anyone else sent down.  Of course he could do these things because he knew that they would never expel someone so obviously talented, popular and generally headed for superstardom, plus his fathers influence helped.  He threw himself into his University life, joined a number of drinking and dinner clubs, the most notorious of which, The Rillington Club, involved getting someone particularly stupid, and particularly rich (not hard to find in Oxford at that time) to buy a pub or restaurant, sack all the staff, then bring in someone else to prepare a special meal for the exclusive club members.  After the meal, the members get to trash the venue so thoroughly, that the entire establishment has to be demolished.  For the new owner, the insurance company pays up and no-one is any worse off, except of course the original chef, owner, bar and serving staff and anyone living in and around the venue, and who really cares about any of them? 

 

Actually the Rillington Club was started by Piggy when he was kicked out of the Bullingdon club for being too abusive and violent for their restaurant trashing activities. Basically, Piggy felt that burning £20 notes in front of the homeless, and breaking a few plates didn’t really satisfy his need for privileged destruction, so he at one particularly unpleasant outing took things a little farther than was expected and the police were called.  Luckily the chief constable was a relative of one of the members and the whole thing was hushed up, the restaurant owner compensated and the unlucky waitress despatched to a private clinic in Northumberland.  Still, for Piggy, the worst thing about being in the Bullingdon club wasn’t so much the constraints on his fun, it was that the rest of the members did not pay him the respect he felt he deserved.  They all felt that they were the top dog, or at least they did not recognise that Piggy was the most important there.  One member in particular was his nemesis from schooldays, a man with more money and more connections than even Piggy’s father.  David “Call Me Mac” Montmerency Macdonald, the man who had christened Piggy Oinks when they were at school. Mac showed no respect for Piggy, and in fact had set up an alternative group of more seriously minded acolytes.  Mac had joined the mainstream Young Conservative Association, and had actually read Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman.  Piggy thought that was trying too hard, “Girly Swot” he called Mac whenever they met, “Oinks” Mac had whispered back, smiling.  Whilst Mac and his friends earnestly discussed the progression of Capitalism, and how the free market might respond to socialised healthcare, Piggy found that he could just make up stuff that came into his head, do a rough translation into Latin and claim it was a direct quote from Winston Churchill.  By the time anyone had bothered to check whether it was, he could move onto the next mis- or made up quote.  “As Winston was fond of saying” he would expand to whoever was in ear shot “Totum Corn Flakes semper ascendit ad summitatem - which we all know means those with means will always succeed” He also discovered that when he was challenged by anyone, he could get away with just about anything if he accompanied it with a smirk and a quick glance and wink to an imaginary crowd.  That way, if he was found out to have lied, he could suggest it had been a sophisticated joke all along and the person he was talking to was either an idiot or hopelessly serious and boring for not realising it.  He had of course joined all the clubs and societies he thought would help him, so on top of the Bullingdon Club, he had also joined the Debating Society, the Ramblers club and the Philosophers Imbibing and Social Society. Naturally the Conservative Association was the hub of his social activities, both to make contacts and because it was there that he found so many young men, slightly damaged by their public school upbringing, that were willing to be taken into Piggy’s orbit.  He became a key player in all the various off-shoots and associated right wing groupings that circled the CA.  Apart from the Young Conservatives and the Tory Youth Cabal, there were also the Sons of Franco, the Continuity  Falangists, and the Tea and Crumpet Defence League.  He assiduously attended all the meetings of these various groups, except when he was busy doing something else, which to be fair was most of the time.  Whenever he did attend, he made sure the members saw him as the centre of things, always joking at his political opponents expense (mainly Mac and his friends) and making suggestions for direct action that he would never actually get involved in.  “We should deface the Womens Group posters, something pithy in Latin, I know - what about ut de tits tuo ad lads!”.  He also joined, under an assumed name, the Socialist Workers Party, mainly because he was certain that he would be irresistible to women in dungarees. “Phwor, red hot trotty!” as he liked to joke.

 

It was about this time that Piggy started to glimpse his future. Obviously he would be successful, a great man, universally recognised as such, a global superstar. But how would that happen?  He knew he could excite people, well people who were a bit like him, and he could turn a flowery phrase or two, so clearly he would be a great writer. He pondered writing the great English Novel, realised that there would probably be a lot of hard work involved, and put that thought aside.  “Journalism” he shouted at one of his friends whose name he couldn’t remember “that’s where all great English Men of Letters started their careers.  Churchill to name but one” he continued warming to his theme “Orwell and H G Wells as well, mind you they were both leftie trots.  Also Becket, although I’m not sure he was a Journalist, and he was Irish or course.” Never mind that, he thought, how hard can journalism be?  He immediately went to see the editor of the Oxford Shrill Examiner, a lesser known University rag, a man Piggy vaguely knew from various parties and gatherings.  Oiky Slipsmith, was someone who always looked slightly disapprovingly at Piggy, as if Piggy’s behaviour somehow displeased him. Mind you he looked that way all the time anyway.  He exuded a sort of oleaginous charm, that when experienced close up made you feel like you had bathed in sump oil. Oiky explained that he was only interested in experienced writers, and those people who had some interest in serious journalism as a career.  He asked Piggy what he was interested in investigating and to provide some examples of his work.  Piggy considered this, and remembering something his brother Barry had written which had won some prize or other, girly swot. Now what was it called, oh yes.  “What about an in depth study of the Randism Capitalist free marketism as inferred in Beowulf?” he said.  Oiky blinked at him a few times.  “Or”  Piggy went on “what about Top Tottyometer? Every week me and my crack team of paparazzi, surreptitiously take snaps of the gorgeous fillies of Oxford, we print them in the paper and get the hot blooded stallions of your readership to mark them out of 10.  Each week the winner gets to take me out for a meal and .. you know.  I then write a review of the the meal for the next weeks paper and” he winked at Oiky “whatever else!” Oiky considered this for a while, “Hmm, interesting idea” he mused “ the Totty one of course, not the other thing.  The trouble is that most of my readership aren’t really that sort of student, the Rugger Buggers, and we may run into some resistance from the Femininazi’s of course!”  Piggy stared at him blankly “Who?” “ you know, the hairy armpitted right on sisters”. Piggy continued to look uncomprehendingly at him “the Womens group” he added.  “ Oh” said Piggy realising who he meant “you mean the boiler suited red trottesses!  Don’t worry about them, I know a few of them and they all realise that there is no greater advocate of feminism than myself” He added “ I just lerve the ladies fwar!”.  Oiky considered some more, and decided that being associated with this sort of thing would probably not be in his best interests.  “Sorry old chap, can’t do that. I hope one day be a serious journalist on a major national newspaper and this sort of thing could come back and bite me.  However I do like the way you think though” he added “a bit of controversy never goes amiss.”  Piggy’s face dropped “Does that mean I would have to do some real work to get something on the paper?” he asked plaintively. Oiky had a sudden brainwave  “Not necessarily. How about you make up some outrageous nonsense and write it up in such a way that stirs up a bit of a row on campus.  We can then cover the inevitable arguments and hopefully provoke some direct action, maybe even some violence”  Oiky started seeing Student Pulitzer Prize awards flying his way “yes, that’s the ticket, a bit of student unrest never goes amiss”  

 

So Piggy started on his first great career stage - journalism.