The question of whether or not to give up eating meat is one which has bothered me for some time, and I still haven’t come to a conclusion. When I was in my teens, my dad decided that he was giving up red meat, so by and large the rest of the family followed suit. Until I went to university, my dinners were mostly either breadcrumbed fish fillets or Chicken Kiev, with the result that I can’t face either of them today. I used to love going over to my Auntie Joan’s on a Sunday afternoon, because she did a proper roast dinner- a joint of beef, pork or lamb with roasties and gravy made with the meat juices. Dinners at home were poor by comparison.

At university, free to cook what I liked, I specialised in pasta. Not specifically vegetarian, although there was one recipe for an absolutely divine sauce made with double cream and Gorgonzola, and one based on a tin of tomatoes and some herbs, which I freely adapted and renamed after our esteemed editrix. In my third year, though, I was vegetarian for a month or so. It didn’t last, mainly because it was for the wrong reason (to impress a girl) but it did give me a good recipe book which stood me in good stead. Specifically written for vegetarian students, it gave me plenty of ideas for cheap, filling dinners with various kinds of beans, all of which needed boiling for about a fortnight to be halfway edible. It’s been dormant since then- my mum has lapsed back into being a full-blown meat eater and we have either bacon or sausage sandwiches every time I go back to see them. The issue just hasn’t been forced- I had a meat-free month a couple of years ago when I had a liver problem, to see if things improved, but the answer was not enough to justify a permanent change.

The issue didn’t force itself back onto the agenda until about two months ago, when I found myself on the Great Barrier Reef. As part of a trip organised by the tour company, you get taken out onto the reef on a catamaran, to a platform where they have their observatory and catering facilities. Lunch was served up and one of the options was a seafood salad, so I helped myself to a ladle full, in which were a couple of baby octopi- purple, about two inches across and covered in salad dressing. Now this was an issue to me. Apart from the fact that I know octopus is chewy and has quite a strong flavour, I’ve seen the wildlife documentaries and I saw the octopus in the Sydney Aquarium. Octopi are intelligent creatures- they can manipulate objects and do puzzles- at least when David Attenborough’s watching. So I had one of the octopi, cutting the legs off two at a time and eating them with a mouthful of something else. But I didn’t feel good about it. For the rest of the trip, I gave vegetarianism serious thought- partly because I was running out of Australian dollars, I ate mostly fruit during the last week anyway, but I had a steak on another trip and a beef curry in Brisbane airport.