Tales of the City: You must be barking, m'lud

It had to happen - one of the Home Office's "antisocial behaviour orders", or Asbos, has been served on an animal. The miscreant was an unnamed pig owned by a farmer called Brian Hagan, of Briston, Norfolk, and no, the cops didn't actually thrust the order paper between the pig's subversive trotters, they gave it to the farmer on his behalf.

We're not told the nature of the pig's crime beyond its escaping under a fence and "causing a nuisance since May", but we can guess the details. The rendezvous with other escaped pigs, probably wearing hoodies and costume jewellery; the stolen Vauxhall Astra; the credit-card mugging; the ritzy nightclub; the DJ's refusal to play "Twist and Snout" one more time; the bloody fight; the night in the cells.

Presumably Mr Hagan will now have a to pay a fine, as he would if his son broke someone's window. But might it not be in character with its current draconian profile for the Home Office to restore the ancient practice of putting animals on trial and condemning them to death? Porkers were regularly strung up in the Middle Ages for rambunctious behaviour, often after elaborate trials in which they stood ("impassively" I expect) in a dock; they had the same legal rights as people and were entitled to legal representation.

In 1494, a pig was put on trial for having "entered a house and disfigured a child's face, whereupon the child departed this life". The pig was never going to get away with it. The judge ruled that "the said porker... shall be by the master of high works hanged and strangled on a gibbet of wood near and adjoinant to the place of execution."

I can foresee a number of interesting court cases featuring sullen cats, nervous-eyed spaniels, delinquent urban foxes, ne'er-do-well rabbits and vicious tearaway guinea pigs; I can imagine their tragic parents telling the magistrate that they come from broken homes, and are good animals deep down. But think of what the fines could contribute to David Blunkett's departmental piggy-bank.

Don't, by the way, make the mistake of thinking that the animals always got the rough end of the legal loo-brush. In 15th-century Toulouse, a man was charged with having sex with a donkey. The man was hanged - but the donkey got off after pleas from its defence counsel that she had been taken advantage of. I expect she made a fortune selling her story to the Daily Mule.

Stun gun - perfect gift for Christmas

One thing Christmas does to the rapidly-ageing parent is fill him with false-memory syndrome. You convince yourself that you got only hazelnuts and chocolate coins in your stocking, that you were content to play quietly on Christmas morning with your hobby-horse (the kind with a wheel at the end) until your bewhiskered uncles and red-faced aunties came round for sherry and carols in the parlour at noon, followed by goose and the Queen.

It can't really have been like that in the Sixties. Perhaps this faux-nostalgia is brought on by inspecting the range of Christmas gifts at the Gadget Shop in London. Fans of the police force's Taser (which disables felons by slamming 20,000 volts through them) will want to buy their child a Shocking Gun for £35; it hurls rather fewer electric charges at other kids, and is obviously a must for those contemplating a future torturing inmates in Iraqi prisons.

The Drip Tormentor is a laugh-a-minute device that turns on in the dark and sounds like a dripping tap. When your distraught wife/flatmate gets up to investigate and switches on the light, the noise stops, then starts again when she switches it off. Hilarious. And surely only a very solemn kid could not appreciate Bad Taste Bears? There's Hunchback Bear with a distended spine, Zombie Bear with mad, sightless eyes, Arnold Bear with a Terminator half-skull and Pamela Bear with pink toenails and inflatable breasts... Where do they get their inspiration? Viz?

Groan alone

Was Tom Wolfe really at the Bad Sex Awards on Monday night? No, of course not, but for a few seconds we thought he might be. Alexander Waugh, son of the late Auberon under whose genial scorn the event first appeared 15 years ago, told a packed crowd at the In and Out Club in St James's Square that the author of Bonfire of the Vanities was among them, that he'd been bantering with guests ("You can easily recognise him by the white suit") and that he would now come and claim his prize. Three hundred gullible idiots, including me, craned their necks expectantly before Waugh, with a fine display of consternation, pretended that Wolfe had stormed out in a fury at being dissed by his peers...

The Bad Sex Awards is a jolly event in the autumn media calendar, holding up to ridicule the most off-putting descriptions of sexual hanky-panky in the year's novels. We've become accustomed over the years to writings that have converted human organs into cucumbers, mushrooms, sundial prongs, dolphin blowholes, Brillo pads. crushed silk and the North Pole - but it's getting ideas above its station. Some novelists probably regard winning it as a positive thing, because they will appear to be good sports in the gladiatorial Coliseum of the literary world.

But do many readers share Mr Waugh's fastidious distaste for erotic writing? "The trouble is," he explained, "when you start reading about someone else's groin, before very long you start thinking about the author's groin, and then the publisher's groin and probably the agent's groin as well, and it's very hard to concentrate on the plot". Is this a common response, or Mr Waugh's own psychopathological problem? Call me perverse, but I can read Humbert Humbert's ecstatic descriptions of making love with Lolita without ever once imagining Vladimir Nabokov in his boxer shorts, let alone his publisher, Lord Weidenfeld, provocatively sprawled on a rug.