POOR George Clooney, I thought yesterday. Poor George, facing an empty space at his Christmas table where Max should be. That poignant plate of turkey - sensitively minus the pork sausages - will have lain uneaten; the crackers unpulled. For 18 years, longer than a lot of marriages, Max, the beloved pot-bellied pig, had shared the actor's life.

Not everyone will understand, but George and I have a pig in common; or rather, we have in common the fact we no longer have a pig. It's an ex-pig relationship, you see, mine and George's.

Now, I suspect Max was always better looking than Piglet. It wouldn't have been hard. Max was Hollywood, after all. He was the real thing: a pure black 21-stone Vietnamese pot-bellied boy.

Piglet, on the other hand, was Stirlingshire crossbreed: part miniature Vietnamese pot-bellied - which meant he had the belly and a few huge black spots - the rest of him ordinary pink pig.

The miniature bit carried one big advantage, which was that Piglet weighed 10 rather than 21 stone. But it did have one major disadvantage: it meant he was astoundingly ugly. So ugly, in fact, that we could justifiably claim he was the most revolting creature any of us had ever seen.

He was given to us by a farmer friend with a warped sense of humour, who in turn had got him as a luck penny, presumably from some other farmer with a malign streak. From the word go, Piglet's trademark was insouciance. He was tame and friendly, but very much his own pig.

In terms of human relationships, you could say he was a bit like a dog. But less dumb. And much less pretty. Although a young animal, his stomach dragged unseductively on the ground. His legs were about two inches long. His patches shimmered grubbily, dirty black in the middle, grey round the edges, crusted in long, coarse hair.

He looked at us with a knowing eye beneath a grotesque crest, chortling and snuffling.

George Clooney once joked that if he could have got Max into a wedding dress, he would have made a respectable pig of him. As it was, his pet had the run of the house and drove away many a girlfriend. He even woke Clooney up three minutes before a big earthquake, allowing him to escape safely from the house.

Piglet was bright, too. He soon realised the house was more comfortable than the stable. He became perhaps the only pig ever to play the bagpipes: at least, if there are others, I've not heard of them. My husband was alone in the house one day when he heard his bagpipes squawking in another room. He found that Piglet had climbed on to the sofa, where the pipes had been lying, and in reclining on them had emptied the air in the bag, to a tune that resembled Scotland the Brave (and no, I don't believe that bit either). When David came in the room, Piglet lifted a languid eyelid and grunted.

He definitely had a sense of humour. Another day, when we were sitting in the house, we saw an empty white plastic garden chair moving, as if by magic, past the window. David, who feared he had the DTs, pretended to ignore it. Moments later, of its own volition, the chair passed back in the opposite direction.

When we looked outside, there was Piglet, the chair jammed on his back, watching for a reaction with that sharp, amused eye. He just wanted his back scratched, that was all.

It got worse. He didn't like sleeping in the stable, and took to wandering when we weren't there to keep him amused. Then one day, he disappeared. Silently, nastily, I hoped he was gone for good. I should have known better.

We came home from work to a phone message from the local PC. You could almost hear the rest of the shift sniggering in the background. "Are you the owners of a tame pig with black spots? If so, said pig is at a house in the forest and it is incumbent on you, as legal owners of said animal, to remove him from the locus under section two, sub-section four of the Straying (Pot-Bellied) Pigs Act 1992."

Early the next morning, we drove miles along tracks into the forest. Piglet was rooting up a bank, with that same amused look on his face. I reached up and grabbed him by the hind leg and for the first time, he started squealing. Now, if you've never been within a few inches of a squealing pig - and I hadn't - you will have no idea what it sounds like, but if I said he squealed like 50 small children being murdered, in the most savage way, and at the same time amplified through a Rolling Stones sound system, you might begin to understand. It is noise as an offensive weapon, superbly designed to make you put down any pig you might be holding.

Nick Clooney, George's father, once described Max's vocal prowess. "When Max is hungry, " he wrote, "he lumbers over the front door and lies down lengthwise over the welcome mat, completely blocking the entrance. He then squeals until someone brings him breakfast. George has not required an alarm clock for 17 years."

We understood. Oh, we understood. Bent-kneed by the brutal assault of the noise, we nevertheless manhandled Piglet into the back of our old estate car and set off for home. He fell quiet and seemed to be enjoying the view. Near home, David glanced in the mirror. "He's quite happy now, " he said. "Look, he's curling up his tail."

I'll spare you the details of the next bit, except to say that Piglet was definitely smiling when he did it. The sudden smell of his excrement in a confined space was suffice to make my husband vomit as he drove. We managed to get home and we hosed the car down, and sold it soon afterwards. With its windows open.

Piglet, it emerged, was a confirmed Houdini. Eventually, in desperation, we gave him to my cousin in Helensburgh, a vet, who cared for him until his wanderlust, combined with his ability to break through fences, become a safety issue.

And so the ugliest little pot-bellied pig went peacefully to heaven. But like George Clooney, the joke remained on us.