As I swam up and down the pool tonight, I thought about what to have for dinner. This is a bit like patting my head and rubbing my abdomen; if I get too wrapped in thought I end up not counting my lengths and then I don't know where I am. Whatever I was to decide upon having to eat would have to be bought at the supermarket on my way home. What was my stomach telling me it wanted: chicken, pork, lamb...?
It was at this point that I realised that I hadn't eaten meat for about three weeks. Not since I returned from Istanbul, really; the last meat dish being a Turkish lamb dish at a restaurant in Sultanahmet. No, I haven't turned vegetarian - I just haven't eaten meat. It's not a conscious decision at all, it just seems to have happened.
I've never been, what my Gran would have called, "a big meat eater". As a child I was more than content with the vegetables and if I did eat meat it tended to be a few slices of chicken. I became a full time vegetarian in 1983. But then, as a student in the early 1980s, it was quite fashionable to be a vegetarian (compulsory, some would argue). This lasted for the best part of the next 5 years until one drunken night I wolfed down a pork pie - always my Achilles heel.
As I thrashed my way up and down the pool, I thought about this and pondered whether I was getting all the nutrients my body needed. I wondered if I was getting enough protein, given the exercise I was doing. What was the point in swimming up and down this pool if I wasn't taking in enough protein to build any muscle? I resolved to buy some meat at the supermarket before I was laid low by some condition related to malnutrition.
I have just finished the biggest, freshest, tastiest salad I've had in a long time. I ate it with some warm crusty bread and it was delicious. But I thought you'd resolved to buy some meat to feed your malnourished body? Mmmmm! When I saw the packets of etiolated flesh laid out in the supermarket, I somehow went off the idea.
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