Vegetarians, you may come out of the closet.

But no trumpets, no self-congratulatory smiles. Just go quickly and quietly to a place of safety and await further instructions. Recently I’ve read several newspaper articles about the ecological sin of meat-eating, about how you can feed thirty-nine and a half people on the grain needed to rear one cow. I’ve no idea if that’s accurate.  But I dare to say that environmentalism is here to stay. And now I’m finding more articles about the cruelty involved in meat-eating. Mm. I read The Times and The Spectator, not because I’m right-wing …I hover in a no-man’s land of doubt and confusion, changing my mind a dozen times a day …but because the prose is slightly less annoying. But aren’t these organs usually ( I’m not asserting an opinion here) read by middle-brow, opera-going, Latin-to-be-taught-in-schools supporters , whereas vegetarianism is commonly associated with  wacky, hairy, rough-brown-pottery-using lefties who educate their children at home on Ginsberg and Gurdjieff. I’m detecting a bit of slippage. For many years to be a vegetarian has been to annoy all sensible, practical people who’ve got a life and who know perfectly well that man is a carnivore and that Nature is red in tooth and claw and if we didn’t eat meat the cows and sheep we enjoy looking at in fields wouldn’t exist. Let’s face it vegetarians are a  pain. No, really. They insist on taking a sentimental anthropomorphic view of animals that wouldn’t hesitate to murder their own offspring if  food stockswere low. And vegetarians are a downright nuisance to the restaurant owner and the hostess/cook . What’s even more annoying is that even though they’re a bit of a joke with their hummous and rice cakes and butternut squashes, they’re laying claim to some kind of delusive moral superiority. When I meet someone who announces with a sanctimonious smirk that they are vegetarian I take a hard look to see if they’re chippy, censorious, drum-beating, flag-waving individuals, who are going to quote poetry at me (their own), try to convert me to an obscure religion or lecture me about what a bad mother I am. Which is odd because for thirty years I’ve been a vegetarian myself.

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