I think it was dear Stephen Morrissey who claimed that ‘meat is murder’,
as I recall he dressed like a hillbilly and carried flowers in his pockets.
Perhaps the flowers were a snack. How we used to laugh together as, when the
holiday season came, we checked out cottages for rent. Vegetarianism is an
ugly word, and one can’t help but notice that those people who practice
it are often rather odd individuals; the men as pasty-faced as a chip-eating
working-class ASBO child. Although the ladies are for some reason, once shaved,
rather attractive.
After a period in which meat rather went off the menu; BSE and Foot and Mouth made many people wary, although personally I found the taste much improved, it is now the opposite and people are eating very many parts of animals that are normally reserved for the hounds. What’s more they are paying high prices for it. Liver, of course, has never been hard to swallow. Full of iron and remarkably cheap, it has made many a British lad upstanding and strong. Calf’s liver remains expensive and some people object to the way the calves are treated, although those little wooden boxes seem perfectly roomy to me and the dear creatures must enjoy the view as they trundle through Europe. I never enjoyed kidneys, though, the smell of frying urine I found strangely off-putting, but our butler always laid them out in the breakfast warming dishes all the same.
My own parents, victims as they were of post war rationing, used to each enjoy a stuffed sheep’s heart for dinner. They never thought they were being particularly fashionable, it was simply cheap, nutritious and most of all easily available to buy. The fillet steaks,that later we were all to enjoy for breakfast, simply didn’t exist in those days. More likely,perhaps, they were reserved for members of the Labour government, as were similar luxuries as dictated by Marxist precedent. It was why dear Kim Philby defected you know, he just wanted a decent meal, poor man.
So now when I read that some new chef is serving up cow udders en brioche, pancreas en croute or gonads a la maison, I simply sigh. It is perhaps a macho litmus paper; who will be man enough to order the most potentially revolting thing on the menu? It can be no coincidence that most of these restaurants are in, or near, the City, the home of testosterone fuelled bankers. For them, talking balls as they do most of the day, it’s the most normal thing to eat them for supper. I fear for their ladies, though, how many of the dear creatures are forced to pretend to enjoy the taste of testicles late of an evening? Too many, I suspect. Too many.
