Your Flexible Friend

My Dear Fellows & Dear Princess Normal,

Back in 2013 I decided to give vegetarianism a go. At the time I was having a lot of migraines - like one a fortnight - and I thought it might help.

I asked Lisa. Lisa had been a vegetarian for about ten years before she flat-shared with a couple of Irish guys, whose morning bacon had proven her downfall. 

Still. Ten years. That's a long time.

"I knew it was just a phase," her dad said when she told him she was back on meat.

So Lisa offered a bit of advice and I gave it a decent go. I did however, have loopholes:

1. If I'm at a restaurant, and all the veggie options are shit, bring on the steak.

2. If I'm at someone's house and they make a meat meal, I'll totally get stuck in.

3. All barbecues, ever.

So I considered myself a "flexatarian" as opposed to a full-on vegetarian. And veganism was out. My problem is that I don't actually care for vegetables all that much. I love meat. So if you take eggs and cheese away from me as well, I'm totally scuppered. 

"Eggs!" my sister said, horrified. "Do you KNOW how they make eggs?"

I kind of thought I did. See, when a man chicken and a lady chicken love each other very much...

"No!" she insisted in a very Yorkshire accent. "I went to see Morrissey in concert and he showed a film about chickens!"

Ah. Morrissey. 

I promised myself to never be a Morrissey Vegetarian. Anyway, one visit to a Morrissey concert and he had convinced Tups and Lovely Niece Number 1 to become vegans*.

I am digressing. Despite Lisa's mockery of my loopholes, I kept it up for about two years before I realised that:

a) I was now getting migraines weekly and
b) I was missing out on Xmas dinner

So I chucked it in for Xmas 2015. However, it did prove to me that I could do it for a sustained period of time. And now here we are at a point where Caro's eating habits are about to be changed permanently. Not only that, but bizarrely, I'm not getting headaches in New Zealand. I do not know why. They've kind of stopped. I bloody love it.

So maybe I should give this flexitarian thing another crack. I don't think I'll ever give up meat completely, but at least I can cut back from eating a herd of sheep a year to like, quarter of a sheep. That other three-quarters of a sheep can happily graze on upland pastures without me trying to put it in a sandwich.

So I stopped eating meat as of Tuesday. That's four days. I'm feeling more virtuous already.

S.

* Fortunately, he was unable to convince them to become huge f***ing @rsehole racist d1ckheads.