Grand National tips.

[Des]

I deleted it. I can't be mad at you for long.

[Adam Blake]

I'd have more openness to 'animal rights' views if they sometimes didn't envisage the killing of human beings with such drooling relish.

Don't lie, Andy. It would take more than that to soften your views. What intrigues me is that you say you were a vegetarian for some years. What was it that caused you to fall so spectacularly "off the wagon"? (Please don't say it was the smell of bacon!)

[AndyM]

I wasn't lying when I made that comment, actually, but as you've asked, I returned to eating meat because a number of circumstances changed. My years of veggie-dom were prompted by two things above all: love and money (they are , after all what makes the world go round!).

I was in a relationship with a veggie, so domestic harmony was easier if I ditched meat too. And I was in and out of short-term jobs and periods on the dole, and cheap meat (which was all I could comfortably afford) not only tastes bad but is invariably produced in grim circumstances - living near the Bernard Matthews factory at the time, and knowing people who worked there, made that hard to ignore.

But becoming single and getting a decent job took away the main 'planks' underpinning my meatlessness. I can afford to eat meat that has been more ethically produced. And as somebody who puts a lot of store by aesthetics, what can be done with it can verge on the sublime.

And as Peter Cook once put it, when did you last see a whale on 'Top of the Pops' ?

[Adam Blake]

Thanks for that. Makes sense. Your veggie-dom was purely pragmatic. Fair enough. I'm a pesky pesce - purely because I can't entirely give up fish'n'chips (eaten out of the paper about three or four times a year).