Fatal curiosity

My cousin is home from the War on Terror. I walked into my mum’s and he was sitting on the sofa, drinking tea.

My sister and I berated him for not bringing his gun with him, so we could shoot annoying tourists.

I wanted to ask him if he’d shot anyone, but I didn’t. Well, it’s only in Agatha Christie that one discusses killing over a nice cup of tea.

Woolly hoodies

The lambs have started to gather in great big gangs. They look like children plotting mischief in a break-time playground. I wonder if they have best friends, stories and secrets too?

It can’t be much fun being a lamb, especially if you have the bad luck to be born with balls. A brief idyll, surrounded by sunshine, daisies and mates: then, for the lucky ones, a lifetime of sex, but slaughter for the less fortunate. The more I think about it, the more correlations I can see between lambs and lads. A generation of young male sheep end up at the abattoir every year; in 'less enlightened' times, generations of young men were wiped out on the battlefield, too.

Each time I see a young lamb, I think: “I can’t possibly eat that.” But I still do. I’m not really a very good carnivore because I have contradictory ethics. I had a brief flirtation with vegetarianism as a teenager: I did it for Morrissey but I rapidly relapsed into the ways of the bacon butty. I don’t think he would’ve approved of my foxhunting anyway.

I just don’t like the thought of eating animals when they're still children. Rather than kids in the yard, I’ll try to view them as hoodies gathering at a shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon. If I can persuade myself that they’re actually dull-eyed, attitude-and-acne-ridden thugs, I’ll have less of a problem with it.