Free Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes by Rosie Boycott

the pub reduced the sum by half and the dog came home. Closer
     to us, a statue of two Labradors cast in bronze and commissioned as a fiftieth birthday present was stolen from some friends'
     locked barn the night it was delivered from London. There had clearly been some inside tip-off. The police had suspicions
     but no definite leads. Then a message was received outlining details of a reward for the return of the gambolling dogs. The
     ransom was paid and the dogs are now firmly fixed in a concrete base on our friends' lawn.
    But would anyone want to kidnap the pigs? They're not fully grown, but they stand two feet high, they're heavy and they wriggle
     like mad if you pick them up. Would someone really want to keep seven noisy little pigs hostage, hoping to cash in a ransom
     demand? It must have been straight theft with a view to fattening them up for sale or eating. Right now, they'd probably fetch
     about £90 a pig. There's not much we can do to make the pig pens safe from thieves. The fence posts have been sunk in concrete
     and extra padlocks put on the gates, but if a thief is really determined, then I guess the pigs are history. Geese might be
     a good alarm system, but in the middle of the night who is going to hear?

    I like Monty Don's idea about healing through nature. Without a doubt it's what helped me through the bleak months after my
     car accident in May 2003. My right leg took the force of the collision, shattering the lower inches of my tibia into shards.
     My surgeon later said that it was as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to the bottom of my heel. My leg was pinned together
     in a metal fixator, known as an X-fix. Two months after the accident, I was back in hospital having a bone graft. They took
     the bone out of my left hip, mixed it with red jelly-like cells extracted from my blood and squished it around the broken
     bones. The scar went septic and three weeks later I was back in hospital, hooked up to antibiotic drips. The summer of 2003
     was mercilessly hot and I fretted from a chair in the garden. Inthe autumn, my surgeon at Salisbury Hospital said that the bone graft wasn't working and I was sent home with an electric
     gadget that I wrapped round my leg at night, so that pulses might be delivered to the fracture site to encourage growth. To
     make it work, I had to leave it on for eight-hour stretches. I slept like that every night until just before Christmas, when
     I returned to Salisbury for another x-ray. The doctor was gloomy. It wasn't healing. He wrote me a letter of referral to a
     surgeon at St Peter's Hospital, Chertsey, and wished me good luck. I was seriously frightened that I was going to lose my
     right leg.
    My new doctor wasn't optimistic. Intime, I got to realise that he never was. He always erred on the side of caution. Bob Simonis is something of a genius. His
     surgery is the last resort for a generation of young men who've piled their motorbikes into walls, suffering fractures which,
     only a decade or two ago, would have resulted in amputation. Like me, their primary doctors had despaired and referred them
     to Simonis to see if he could succeed where they had failed. Inthe late 1980s, Bob started working with Ilizerof frames, a complex, Meccano-like system of wires, rings, nuts and bolts invented
     by a Russian doctor of the same name. Dr Ilizerof founded a huge institution in Russia, which, until the fall of Communism,
     no Western doctors were allowed to visit. Bob went out there in the early 1990's, his visit recorded by a BBC crew. Until that
     moment, he'd been fitting the frames using his own skills and the information contained in a textbook.
    As I sat in the waiting room at our first meeting, I couldn't take my eyes off my fellow patients. The frames were simply
     terrible. Mediaeval torture instruments, heavy, clumsy, with wires going straight through the skin and bone and twisted tightly
     in place into heavy circular rings. The skin round the entry