Grazing

You know what ?

Living here in the country I am surrounded by birds. Note: birds. Not starlings and throstles and buzzards (though I can recognise them), and finches, and robins. Birds.

And the garden is full of flowers. Don't ask me what. I haven't a clue.

And why is this ? Well, maybe because when I was a kid, we didn't have a garden and nobody cared too much about birds, so they were more or less an amorphous grey and inconsequential mass.

And my mum cooked meat. Meat. Nobody enquired what kind of meat. Maybe nobody knew there were different kinds. Though my rabbit did disappear in suspicious circumstances about the time that a large pie was being created. But it was always meat. Meat pie. Meat and potatoes. Meat sandwiches.

So a foodie I was never going to be. Unable to differentiate one meat from another, I became a vegetarian at 20 having worked in a potted meat factory as a student every holiday for three years. Can't say I have missed it.

Meals in our house - actually an open-all-hours shop - were taken on the hoof at odd times, and always interrupted by the shop bell. As a consequence, the whole family grazed uneasily, like wildebeest who suspect a lion is lurking. Mealtimes where everyone sat around a table were reserved for days when over-perfumed aunties turned up bearing plastic boxes of salad, or, on good days, cake.

Now it's hard to remember when the last meal here was. The grazing habit is hard to break, and I tend to see food pretty much as fuel, a chore you have to get through smartly to allow you to get on with something interesting.

Do we only differentiate what we care about ?