The Three Rich Little Pigs

The Three Rich Little Pigs

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ou recall a clever little pig named Practical, who built a house of bricks and outfoxed a wolf, do you not? This story begins with him, Practical Pigg. With the passing of the years he became a captain of industry, a very rich little swine indeed, with his own construction company, Styscrapers, specialising in red brick houses. Not only that - at the pinnacle of his career he was also the director of a large firm whose business it was to repossess the houses of poor little piggies who couldn’t keep up with the repayments. His wealth attracted him a beautiful sow, and they got married in the traditional way and had three sons. These he sent to the best and most expensive school in the land, and when they grew up, they too, to no one’s great surprise, obtained influential positions in society and became rich and powerful in their own rights.

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hen their father, who by now was known as Sir Practical, eventually died, they inherited so much money it was hard for them to know what to do with it. The eldest pig, Oscar, who was the biggest and perhaps the pinkest of the litter, decided without much ado that he would live the high life, squandering as much as possible, as quickly as possible, of his vast wealth. “You only live once,” he explained to his brothers in his usual abrupt fashion, before dashing off home from the solicitor’s office. In the period that followed his father’s death, he had foie gras and caviar every day for breakfast, washing it down with gallons of champagne. He would then chain-smoke Cuban cigars until lunchtime. In the evenings he drank and gambled away as much money as he could, but he never bought anything lasting, only things he could consume, or things that decayed or expired. He decorated his house with extravagant ice statues, which melted, and sped around in a vintage convertible through the countryside, bestrewing the woods and meadows with pieces of carburettor, exhaust pipe and fender as the car disintegrated around him. Eventually it was nothing more than a skeletal wreck, left to rot in the grounds of his mansion, which was itself soon a state of grave disrepair. You may be incensed at this wanton waste of resources and lack of respect for one’s own possessions and worldly frame. Certainly the mutterings about town suggested that this is what the general public felt, and Oscar’s younger brother Percival once even stormed over to the crumbling mansion to talk some sense into him, but only ended up screaming at him in a fit of rage and storming right back home again.

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ercival was the next oldest, the middle piglet, and he had similarly expensive tastes, though he was of a much colder and more calculating nature. Percy adored gold, mahogany, precious stones and marble statues, and over the years he accumulated an array of valuable antiques and jewellery. He also patronised the arts, commissioning portraits from the great artists of the day, as well as some promising younger painters, as yet unknown to the world at large. When he wasn’t consumed with worry for his older brother, he was quite content to marvel at his hoard of delightful antiquities and most tasteful modern artefacts, although wider society was unconvinced of his happiness, as evidenced by the suspicions aired in the press about 'hidden misery'. It is plausible that the behaviour of brother Oscar did indeed taint Percy’s contentment, and it is not hard to imagine other reasons why his bliss might have been incomplete. It is, as so often in such cases, a matter of sheer speculation.

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he third and youngest pig, who was named after his father, opened a bank account, which he filled with all his money. He then bought shares in the biggest corporations on the planet, the ones with the most gleaming, soaring, confidently-glazed headquarters. Practical Jr was a pig who invested heavily in the financial markets, but little in life. His was an ascetic existence; his modest house was spartanly furnished; the fashion he wore conservative and restrained; his mealtimes, never exceeding three a day, routine affairs which at times bordered on the frugal. His largest yearly private expense was his gym subscription. He visited both his brothers regularly, and could be persuaded by Oscar to partake of port and cheese once a month, and seemed genuinely to delight at the sight of dear brother Percival’s magnificent collections and exhibits. Junior, as they called him, was refreshingly non-judgemental, and his visits offered respite to his brothers from the haranguing they often received from the media, the general public and even from their close friends. They too therefore, without fail, sensitively avoided asking him the questions which rose to the surface of their minds whenever they thought of little Junior, for fear of offending him. Why didn’t he use his birthright to live in comfort, if not in luxury? This question, never asked, was never answered. Junior spurned the advances of the press.

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his was the state of affairs for the pigs for many stable years, right up until one day there arrived at the doors of the three pigs a big, bad recession (caused, at this particular juncture, by sky-rocketing oil prices, although it could just as well have been something else.) The first pig it comes to is the youngest, namely Practical Jr, the thrifty stocks-and-shares enthusiast. It must be noted at this juncture that recessions are not nearly as polite as wolves: They do not stop to knock on the doors of little pigs, and do not make known their destructive intentions before they begin to exhale. So, without so much as a ‘how do you do’, the big bad recession huffs and he puffs and blows the stock market into the middle of next month (October, I believe) bringing the corporations to their knees and causing some of the smaller businesses to close down permanently. There is a terrible hoo-hah and panic, and inflation soars out of control, wiping out the value of all our little bacon-flavoured friend’s savings and investments and leaving him with absolutely nothing to show for all his hard work and, he bitterly reflects, his dead father’s labours. The little pig goes for a walk along the riverbank, silently contemplating the famous bridges of the capital city with his eyes like two grey pebbles.

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he land descends into turmoil, approaching the brink of anarchy. Looters appear, gangs of the newly impoverished, unable to pay the inflated price of food. They start off at the grocer’s, then they arrive at the supermarket, then they hit the electronics store, they spend quite a while making a tour of the city’s banks, and finally they arrive at the opulent house of Percival Pigg,  the member of the Pigg clan, if you’ll remember, with the marble statues and the rare Eastern tapestries with gold woven into the pattern, and stained glass stretching up in a splintered tangle of brilliant colours, which on first sight never failed to inspire awe and sometimes a pious tear. The hooligans (they’ve seen it before) smash the stained glass and steal stunning pictures of people and exotic places, seize the antique furniture and even the unique grand piano, carved out of a whole, huge crystal. But the poor little pig has little time to take in the enormity of his material loss; during the chaotic ransacking, he is bludgeoned with a spanner and dies at the scene of the crime in a puddle of sticky crimson.

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hen the big bad recession comes to Oscar, the Pigg who has spent all his money on frivolous parties and frivolous women, he finds him rather the worse for wear. This little pig is bed-ridden, riddled with tumours, his liver little more than a shrivelled-up, pickled walnut, his heart barely able to squeeze his tainted blood through his obscene, swine body. The fat little pig dies in this situation, all alone in the end. For the recession, with his razor-sharp teeth and voracious appetite, there was no fun to be had with this penniless, foolish pig.

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ut let us return now, calmly, once the dust has settled, to the pig we left at the side of the river, his eyes stonily staring at the grandiose bridges. He was the only one left, and as he reflected on his life and on the lives of his brothers, he turned away from the river and went home. There was nothing awaiting him there, but nearby was a wood. With nothing better to do, he went amidst the trunks and boughs and leaves for a wander, and continued with his reflections. For his part, he regretted not having enjoyed his wealth while he had had it, as his fat little brother had done. Then, thinking about how his other brother had spent his money, he remembered fondly the sparkle which had come to his eye whenever he walked amidst his beautiful possessions, shimmering in the light of the chandeliers. That brother, too, had enjoyed his wealth before it was too late. Then he stopped walking and looked around him at the trees and flowers of the forest. “Well,” he thought to himself, “at least I still have this.” And from that day forth he never renewed his gym subscription, and took instead a walk in the woods every day.

Photo: Flickr/** Maurice **