Free Bridesmaids by Jane Costello Page A

March
    ‘So, when was it that your pig first started to speak French?’ I ask, my notebook and pen poised.
    ‘Ooh, it were a while ago,’ says the farmer, who looks as if it’s been a while since he washed. ‘We ’ad a farmhand from over there, see. We tried to tell ’im to speak proper, but he insisted on talking foreign. Well, Lizzie ’ere just seemed to pick it up.’
    ‘Right,’ I say, nodding in an attempt to hide the fact that I think this story is the biggest load of swill I’ve heard all year. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a chance he–sorry, she –could let us hear a few words?’
    He sucks his teeth. ‘She don’t just do it on demand, love,’ he says.
    I feel like saying that, given that a photographer and I have come all the way over here to interview the bugger, surely a little ‘ Oui ’ isn’t too much to ask.
    ‘Well,’ I say instead, ‘do you think we could do anything to help persuade her?’
    ‘A bit of cash might not go amiss,’ he says.
    Great. So the pig will only speak French if I pay him. She’s obviously more skilled than I realised.
    ‘Sorry, but we don’t pay,’ I say. ‘We’re a local paper–we don’t have the budget.’ Which isn’t strictly true, but I can’t believe we’d pay anything for this story, short of the pig launching into a perfect version of Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus ’.
    This really isn’t my week, and quite frankly, this story is just about the last straw. I’ve been a reporter with the Daily Echo now for almost eight months, and was starting to feel pretty optimistic about the way my career was progressing. Okay, so at first I was writing little more than two-paragraph ‘nibs’–that’s news in briefs (which is nothing to do with underwear)–about school fetes and car boot sales. None of which, in case you haven’t guessed, was threatening the shortlist for any major journalistic prizes.
    But, gradually, the news desk started to trust me a bit more, and the two-para nibs became single columns, then the single columns became page leads, and somehow, I started to find my name on the front page every so often, covering everything from court cases to human interest stories.
    This week, however, it all went wrong. Horribly wrong. Because this week was when our News Editor Christine–who described me as being ‘overflowing with enthusiasm and potential’ in my first company appraisal–went on maternity leave.
    Her replacement is the terminally sleazy Simon, who can’t see my potential because he’s too busy looking at my arse. He has bombarded me with school fete nibs and picture stories for what he smirkingly refers to as his ‘soft news slots’. In fact, the stories have been so ridiculous, you’d have to be soft in the head to call them news.
    Hence the reason for my being here in a farm ‘over the water’ at the far end of Wirral–and barely even on the Daily Echo ’s patch–praying that Lizzie the Gloucester Old Spot will ask someone for a croissant. New York Times here I come!
    Okay, so it’s not just this. It’s the fact that I have spent the last five days attempting to find out what happened when Valentina went round to Jack’s house–and failing miserably. Grace is away on honeymoon, so she’s out of the game as far as gossip is concerned. I’ve attempted to grill Charlotte about it but, bizarrely, Valentina doesn’t appear to have told her anything. And I’m certainly not going to ask Valentina herself about it.
    So why am I so desperate to know?
    God knows .
    I’ve spent the last five days asking myself that, in between hammering out pieces about bilingual pigs and dogs with eating disorders.
    ‘What a pile o’ shite this is,’ whispers Mickey, the photographer. Mickey isn’t known for his excessive amounts of patience, but in this case he’s undoubtedly right.
    ‘Listen,’ I tell him. ‘We both know this animal can’t speak French, any more than I can speak Mandarin. But the