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The Saint Valentine’s Day Brassica
How love conquered all
I come from a long line of butchers. The foliage on my dad’s side of the family tree is spattered with blood from the slaughter and dismemberment of enough animals to fill a dozen arks. There have been butchers in our family for so long it may be that one of my forebears was earwigging in the vicinity of Noah on the announcement that every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you. And, with that green light, the slaughter commenced.
I have to carry the burden that my ancestors have been responsible for the deaths of loads of lambs, piles of pigs, and, forgive me, a fuckload of fowl. With such a bloody family line behind me, it might surprise you that I opted not to don the gory apron and grip the sharpening steel, but I took up a different type of blade, the barber’s scissors. That career choice makes me the square peg, the black sheep, and the fly in the ointment all at once, although I didn’t flip-flop completely; I never entertained the idea of joining those pesky vegans and their abstemious ways. Ruck rat, as Scooby Doo might have put it.
And yet, in an act that epitomises the saying love conquers all, I started dating a vegan.
The cataclysmic shift happened one Saturday morning when half a dozen vegan activists were outside my uncle Len’s butcher shop in the…
