My Name's Grouch, and I was a vegetarian.
The various spats about vegetarianism below have reminded me that once upon a time, I too spurned meat. Not through morals, not through ethics - no. I had a bloody dream.

Ms Grouch of the time was a full-blown veggievangalist. She didn't even like me eating meat in front of her. She was also fond of dragging me to strange, experimental restaurants.

One evening, the cuisine du jour was Nepalese. Nepalese curry to be exact. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I ended up eating a cheese and aubergine curry. Bizarre, but kind of nice. My only mistake was to eat it late at night. Cheese+sleep = hallucinations.

At some point just before waking, I was aware of floating in a big blue pond. It was quite pleasant - sun shiny, light breeze. I floated about for a while, happy as larry.

At which point a dolphin swam up to me. Dolphin was happy. Dolphin smiled!

Then a cow swam up. cow was happy! Cow smiled.

Then my old family dog swam up - the dog that was with us from when we were tiny, and who had died only a couple of years before. He was happy, and smiled too.

And so, floating happily, surrounded by cheerful and much loved animals, my cheese-twisted psyche decided to have my dreaming self pull out a fuck-off great knife and stab each and every one of them in the head.

No kidding - i woke up in a cold sweat, screaming, and with a subconscious disinclination to eat meat. Not a hatred, not a digust at the thought, just a general feeling that I didn't want to eat it. Which lasted a whole year.

So, I guess where I'm going is that sometimes you don't need a physical or philosophical reason to not like a particular food. Sometimes these things just happen.

Next week - how 12 months of protein deficiency and a chronic craving for pork pies brought me back to being an omnivore...
( Grouch would quite like his clients to stop being numptys, Tue 6 Mar 2007, 14:23, Reply)