My downfall started last year, with a duck. To be precise, with a Hong Kong duck. As soon as the waiter began to carve slices of gorgeous-looking meat, ready for rolling, dipping in sauce and consuming, I knew I had to have it. Something snapped. After ten years as a vegetarian-allowing fish on to the menu mostly on convenience grounds -I devoured half a bird on the spot.
For a while the collapse was partial. Ducks were added to fish as exceptions to my vegetarianism. "Well, they're aquatic aren't they?" I would protest to mocking friends. "They might have been caught while they were bobbing under the water..."
It was hopeless. Six months ago I ate my first bacon sandwich since 1988. It was wonderful. Delicious. Sublime. Since then, there's been no stopping me. No opportunity to eat meat is passed over: pizza, hot dogs, chicken, battered sausage, burgers, steak. The elation of being able to order anything-anything at all-from the menu has made me giddy. Liver, foie gras, pheasant, kangaroo, frog. If it moves, either I've already eaten it or I'm about to.
Such is the enthusiasm of my consumption that I calculate that I will have wiped out the effects of a decade of vegetarianism before the millennium is up. The animal kingdom will wish that I had never bothered with vegetarianism in the first place.
Since conversion, I have met others-the silent ones who have returned to carnivorous status. One colleague of mine was vegetarian for 15 years and then, suddenly, needed meat. "Not just any meat-red meat," she says.
I wonder if we are part of a trend which has yet to be picked up by the food fad-watchers. There has been lots of attention paid to people becoming vegetarian, very little to those renouncing it. It may be that vegetarianism has a powerful hold on 20-somethings but then fades, like socialism, with age.
With my elation, though, comes a shadow of shame. For years I perceived my refusal to eat meat as a rare relic of a radical past. I wish now that, after all, I had tattooed a hammer and sickle somewhere. (Although I suppose that I would now be expensively removing that in a private clinic.)
I became vegetarian in my second year at university. I was living with a deep green friend-a friend of the recycling, non-driving kind. I even remember a short-lived experiment with veganism but the experience of tasting disgusting soya milk soon put paid to that.
I had read a book in the university library which described both the treatment of animals bred for food and the waste of resources represented by meat. A cow can feed ten selfish westerners, but only by eating enough grain to feed a thousand starving people in the developing world. Or something like that. I noisily renounced all flesh.
The fact that I liked meat simply made the gesture more important, more profound. It is easy for those people who don't really like meat to become vegetarians. It really meant something for me to do it. But deep down, I didn't really mean it.
In any case, whenever I travel to a poorer country-which is not that often as I tend to see a minibar as one of my basic needs-I have been considered stark raving bonkers for giving up meat. People in poorer countries are all desperate for more of the stuff.
It puts me in mind of the westerners who oohed and aahed over the non-materialistic societies of the former communist countries of eastern Europe, while the citizens themselves plotted ways of getting democracy and the jeans, the Nike trainers and the burgers that come with it.
On a personal level, the pressures and sacrifices required in a household with two full-time workers and a demanding child are plenty to be going on with. A certain selfishness is required in order to survive and keep smiling. As Americans say: enough already.
Of course I don't think we should be beastly to animals. But I am not persuaded that animals have rights, either. A clever friend of mine, tucking into a rare steak in a Brittany restaurant, explained to me that "animal rights" was an oxymoron, because rights are by definition a human concept which cannot be imposed on anything else. That was the drift of his argument, I think, and it took another chip out of my crumbling resolve.
In a way, it is surprising that I lasted a full ten years as a vegetarian. Although I was intellectually convinced of the arguments at the time, I never felt very passionate about the rights of animals. Anti-vivisectionists have always left me cold and I have never marched for better travelling arrangements for calves. I find hunting offensive but only on old-fashioned class grounds.
I remember a Latin American priest, an activist for democracy and reform, who long ago counselled me not to feel guilty for not supporting every single good cause around. "Some things get your blood racing with anger and passion," he said. "Do something about those things, and trust others to fight the other battles." I now realise that while I am passionate about poverty and inequality, I am not really interested in animals. If others think there is a battle then let them fight it.
A couple of weeks ago I ate a wood pigeon. The chef would only prepare it rare. As my fork pressed the meat, a little blood oozed from underneath. I swiftly smeared it on some bread and swallowed it in one gulp.
