Well, good evening, my dearios. Strip my willow, wozzle my thrussocks and stand by with the Kleenex; we may need them later.

Excuse this rustic mood. I am hot foot from the social event of the year at one of our local country pubs.

Officially it is known as the annual fruit and veg charity auction. Unofficially it is the Fleecing of the TICs. A TIC (Townie in the Countryside) is someone like me who lives on what planners call the urban fringe.

One foot in the city and the other in manure, torn between micro-chips and mangelwurzels. We TICs are easily spotted because we tend to dress as we imagine real countryfolk do.

All tweeds and moleskin, Guernseys, brogues, green wellies, Barbours and so on. Ambridge made flesh. We stand out like sore thumbs at events like the Fleecing because real countryfolk (who prefer Brookside to The Archers) actually wear jeans, Crimplene frocks and Polyester suits with curly lapels.

They also know the value of things. There was a chorus of rustic hysteria early in the sale when a wide-eyed TIC paid £11 for a big jar of pickled onions.

Knowing the perils of the Fleecing, I observed things from a stall where a chap was selling beer for charity at 50p a pint. My sort of charity, this.

Over at the auction, real rurals were soon snapping up the fresh hares at knockdown prices. Rustics know how to skin, gut and dress hares.

We TICs, confronted by anything dead and furry, tend to get weepy and bury it.

Real country folk are less sentimental. Less mannered, too, which is why they always get served first at the bar and elbow their way into the bowling-for-a-pig queue.

TICs enter the pig-bowling at their peril. They get over-excited and hearty, hurling the bowls, as if everything depended on brute force until the lawn for yards around is littered with knackered young professionals in corduroy trousers.

Real countryfolk, in contrast, examine the bowls closely, test the wind, study the cloud over old Tom's barn and gently demolish the pins with barely a flick of the wrist.

It is an unwritten rule of the Fleecing that a local always wins the pig. The pig, on display in a horse box, knew this as well as anyone else and barely gave proceedings a second glance.

No point, he knew, of musing about being won by some soft-hearted, liberal TIC. No sense in dreaming of being saved from the bacon knife to be installed in some bijou sty on the urban fringe. Not a hope of becoming a family pet, a trendy conversation piece to go with the Shih-Tzu and the Siamese.

For a real country person always wins. And real countryfolk turn farm animals into pies, not pets. Last year's winner was complaining loudly (and insensitively, I thought) about the toughness and arthriticky back leg of the '84 porker.

The star prize of '85 heard all but took it stoically as the nine pins decided its fate. Such is show-biz. One brief moment in the limelight, then zap! and all the pigs play harps.

At 50p a pint I found it all rather emotional. A tissue if you please, my deario. I heard later that the Fleecing made £900 for charity. Also that the pig had escaped and fled towards the urban fringe. It was a brave, brief protest.

They found it in the next farm where, having failed to find a single Siamese, Shih-Tzu or TIC, it put up its trotters and went along quietly.