Virtually good for you

I’m a virtual vegetarian. That used to be such a simple concept; I almost didn’t eat meat. I understood what it meant, I didn’t like beef, or lamb, or pork, or veal. I was fine with fish, cheerful with chicken, would peck at a partridge or fiddle with a pheasant if it was set before me. I just didn’t eat meat. Except for Doner Kebabs. I don’t know what goes into that strange slug-like thing that goes around in front of the grill, in fact for all I know it is a slug, but I don’t care, it tastes delicious.

I had a quite rational explanation for why I was the way I was. It was reincarnation. I was, many years ago, a Vulture, and one day, blown off course by desert winds, I found myself circling around a small mount by a pond listening to an engaging ruffian talk thousands of people into trying to care more for each other whilst handing out sardine sandwiches. I took his teachings to heart, and resolved to become a vegetarian. It was a fruitless attempt, and I died of malnutrition less than two months afterwards, being eaten almost immediately by the other vultures, all oblivious to my attempts to persuade them that grass was really tasty if you picked the right bits.

Over the next few hundred years I came and went as a vulture hundreds of times, determined that I would somehow find a way to live the perfect non-predatorial existence. Somewhere around the time of the second Ottoman empire I gave in and started eating Doner Kebab scraps from a street market near the ruins of Troy, and was rewarded for this relapse by being granted human status on my subsequent reincarnations.

But, and this is my point, I was happy with the way I was, despite my partial loss of faith in the Nazarene's harmonious path. And then two things happened to me.

The first was that I let a meat-eating lady move in. It was bliss at first, as she re-organized the house to her satisfaction, demanding hot running water in any room that had a cold tap, killing all the spiders that the cats were on first name terms with, banning saucepans and any other cooking utensils from the dishwasher, and installing segregation baskets in the laundry room. Strange boxes of tissue sheets appeared on top of the tumble drier. An extra medicine cabinet was ordered for the bathroom. After I had installed it and left it alone for a week I found it full with boxes of tampons. “Are you having some sort of girly party that I don’t know about?” I asked, and got spat at by way of reply.

Then the meals changed. I found more and more chewy lumps turning up in the meals.
“What’s this?” I enquired once, and was told it was four-legged chicken.
“Could we have some fish tonight?” I asked.
“No, they’re slimy and untrustworthy.”
“What exactly is trustworthy?”
“Anything that has hooves and bleeds when you kill it.”
“Alright, could we have Doner Kebab then, please?”
“That’s not proper meat.”
I dared not mention Quorn.

So we settled down to a grudging acceptance of each other’s tastes and needs, she serving up various poor slaughtered beasts meal by meal, which I would carefully push to one side of my plate and replace with a tin of tuna or sardines. For some reason she persisted in serving me what I plainly refused to eat, as though one day I would suddenly crack and scream “Alright, bring it in alive, I’ll chew, I’ll chew!”

The second thing that happened to me was more gradual, and equally unexpected. The internet arrived. Not in a rush, of course, first came dial-up connections to the larger machines I worked on, from which I could reach out via gateways to the wider world, then dial-up to Compuserve, (I’m sorry, but I had to start somewhere, and I sacked them as soon as they changed the access numbers without giving me prior warning), and finally, after threatening to install a metre-wide satellite dish, half-megabit broadband. With the world now flowing in and out of my screen, I found myself able to exchange views with thousands of unlike-minded people, each of whom had an opinion that was usually better than mine. Sooner or later, I started to discuss with other people what things I liked, and what I didn’t particularly care for.

In a conversation one day, I said to the unseen spirit at the other end of the link “I’m a virtual vegetarian”.
“Oh, that sounds interesting,” they replied, “what’s their URL?”

So I think I’m going back to the Doner Kebabs, I don’t care if they’re Mugwump babies snatched from their grief-stricken mothers and reared in total darkness on a diet of MacDonalds kitchen slops and non-stop Westlife music, it’s meat that doesn’t make me flinch when I eat it. And it never has gristly lumps in it. And it’s not about to get several different strains of flu.