Title: The Grunts Go on a Picnic
First published: October 1982
Description: The Grunts are a family of pigs that many of us would recognise as being a lot like us!  There's mum and dad and the three kid pigs and this is the story of their day out in the country.  Like many such days out, the kids don't really want to go; Dad Grunts bores everyone with his snippets of country lore and local history; kids are car sick; wasps, bulls and farmers are angry (but turn out to be OK).  The Grunts are, however, the kind of beings you would be very happy to live next door to - you wouldn't mind whether they were people or pigs!  They exemplify a kind of upper-working-class-lower-middle-class niceness that a lot of us think of as the British at their best.  The Grunts would almost certainly be readers of The Guardian and would be very, very concerned about issues like like animal welfare.  They even drive a nice little Morris Traveller! My kids (now grown up) and my wife and I loved this book.  I'm sorry to see it's no longer in print.