The goal of all the preparation.

It’s quite a good job, being a hog roast caterer. You get to travel to lots of different places, to see the beautiful countryside and shop in different cities. Take today, for example – we were in Rhostyllen, a lovely village in the county, Wales. There’s a village hall and apparently a National Trust house and park (at Erddig) nearby, though we didn’t have the time to stop by. It makes such a nice change from the city, I’ll tell you that for free.

We found the place easily enough, and took the decorations out of the van. We were catering for the anniversary of a local business, and there were plenty of random people outside watching us as we began putting up balloons and traipsing back to the van to get the condiments and bread rolls. Lastly, we brought in the hog roast machine and the hog roast itself, setting it up at the side of a large room in the building. The customers seemed pleased with what we’d done.

Then the guests arrived. The roast smelled great, drizzled with applesauce. We had to wait a little while as someone gave a speech, then it was time for the roast to be carved and served. I always take pride in this, serving, waiting on people and just giving people a really good catering experience. It’s like, the goal of all that preparation of the roast and of decorating the venue. Seeing everybody have a good time, really enjoying their food, maybe even tasting a hog roast for the first time in their lives, makes everything worthwhile.

Afterwards, we cleared up and left the room looking as we had found it. The customers said we’d done a good job and we went away happy, and on to deliver another hog roast machine to a Rhostylln family at the function room of the community centre. They were hiring the machine for a birthday party while providing the hog roast themselves. We dropped the machine off, showed the couple how to operate the machine and then parked and wandered around Rhostylln for a couple of hours. Then it was back to the community centre to pick up the machine. The couple said it had been fun having a hog roast and that the guests were impressed.

Then, we drove off, Rhostylln getting smaller and fading slowly into the distance.