It can be the devil of a job to keep a pigtape sated. The standard pigtape has three basic behaviours: grunting interminably until it is fed, eating the food it is given, and, mercifully, taking post-prandial naps. One learns to treasure those naps, for they are the only respite one gets from the pigtape. Even then, it tends to grunt and snuffle and wheeze in its sleep, so it still makes a noise, though not as horrible a noise as its incessant grunting for food when awake or the absolutely disgusting chomping and slobbering noises it makes when it is eating. It is fortunate that the pigtape is such a tiny being, and the volume of its noises commensurate with its size, otherwise one would be deafened by it, and not merely deafened but driven from polite society, banished to a wilderness. Most pigtapes are audible only to their hosts, which is a bad enough state of affairs.

The correct term is “little pigtape” and it is similar to a tapeworm, except that the pigtape dwells within the soul. This does not mean that the pigtape grunts for spiritual sustenance, such as the reading of books by Deepak Chopra. The food for which it grunts is all too solid – cream crackers and cockles and mussels and lemon meringue pie and bloaters and choc ices and cous cous and pastry and vinegar and a spit-roasted half of an ox and aubergines and dumplings and suet pudding, to name but a baker’s dozen of its cravings. Before at last it is replete and takes a noisy nap, the little pigtape somehow sucks all the food out of your stomach through internal piping to its cranny in your soul.

Because it is so tiny, and dwells within so inaccessible a spot, ridding oneself of a pigtape is well nigh impossible. Maybe not even well nigh, but just impossible, full stop. Certainly there are no recorded cases in the literature of anything resembling a little pigtape being extracted from a body, either during a surgical procedure upon the living or an autopsy upon the dead. Nor is it at all clear how one acquires a pigtape in the first place. We all have our sacred souls, but not all souls provide a home to these minuscule grunting greedy monsters. It is not true, despite what you may have had drummed into you by priests or parents, that the presence or absence of a pigtape is dependent in some way upon one’s moral unbesmudgement. Of course, it is advisable not to eat too much contaminated pork, but for a host of other reasons, such as indigestion or death.