Perry slaps the bloodstained butcher’s block in front of him. “Go on,” he shouts, “Get your arms straight.” I’m trying my best. But the enormous pig carcass I’m holding aloft is threatening to send my biceps into spasm. “One, two, three, four . . . ” count the other men around the table, as sweat trickles down my temples. “Come on,” Perry roars. “You’ve only got to do it for ten seconds.”

No, I’m not being inducted into a gang in backwoods Tennessee. I’m at the renowned Marylebone butcher the Ginger Pig. Fêted by the top British chefs and food writers for its free-range meat, the company has been running butchery classes for a year or so, instructing anyone with a carnivorous bent on how to slice, saw, carve and cleave.

But just because the likes of Jay Rayner go all gooey over its sausages doesn’t mean that the Ginger Pig is some airy-fairy North London deli by another name. Perry, one of the two instructors, looks as though he can grind snooker balls to dust with his fists — and the environment in the class is one of unbridled machismo. There’s no way I can afford to drop the pig. To do so would be akin to waltzing into the shop in a lamé shirt and asking for anything veggie. It’s male-dominated here, but Perry’s accomplice Borut — who has already guaranteed the respect of the group by dismembering a pig in 40 seconds flat — assures us they get plenty of women on the courses, too.

Perry slaps down a pig carcass and talks us through the cuts. Nothing goes to waste. Legs are used for sausages, hocks, hams and gammon; trotters are boiled down to provide jelly for pork pies; and everything from the hind quarters up to the neck holds its own on the Sunday dinner table.

Even the head has its uses. Obviously keen to sort the men from the boys swiftly, Perry begins by taking a head down from a meat hook and splitting it with his cleaver. “Pick out the brains, would you?” he says, turning to me. I insert my fingers into the skull cavity, a sensation that feels like groping for jellyfish in a bucket of wallpaper paste, and pass the dripping organ round the table for everyone to feel.

We all take our turns with the knives. My job is to turn the pig’s rib section into pork chops. I step forward, slice down through the flesh and then hack at the bone like a drunken executioner, ending up with a chop that looks as if I’ve found it in a pitbull’s basket. “Look at that,” Perry laughs, holding up the ragged piece of meat. “Ah, give him a clap anyway.”

With everyone getting their chance at the butcher’s block, the four pigs that were swinging from the ceiling when we first arrived are soon reduced to a pink, glistening pile in the corner. Everyone is handed a shoulder section, and we’re left to apply our new-found skills to the meat in front of us. Despite my earlier ham- fisted attempts at chopping, I’m surprised to find that I’m actually quite good at trimming, de-boning and rolling the meat — though my skin-seasoning is too fey for Perry. “You want to get great big handfuls of salt,” he tells me, picking up more of the stuff in one fist than I’ve got in my entire house.

He’s right, of course. The joint I bring home, and serve up to my partner and parents a couple of nights later, is perfect — the meat is melt-in-the-mouth tender, the fat spongy and suitably porky, and the crisp, salty crackling the best I’ve tasted. Even my dad, the undisputed king of the roast dinner, has to acknowledge I’ve served up a particularly fine swine. For the first time I sense a shift in the family dynamic. Now it’s my turn to bring home the bacon.

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