Surrey’s vegan wars

One of the village vegans gave the bacon sandwich resting on top of the recycling bin outside my house an accusing look.

I had placed it there, on a plate, for the builder boyfriend who was underneath my jacked-up Volvo which had been making an alarming high-pitched wheeze.

I always bring him a coffee and a snack when he’s fixing something, and as it was late morning, and he had missed breakfast in order to drive us to the horses in his truck because my car was emitting a wheeze from the undercarriage, I brought him a bacon sarnie.

And so it sat perched on the green bin that stands just inside my gateway bordering the village green, as the builder b lay under the front left hand side of the old Volvo, parked on the track, the dog walkers of Surrey parading by.

The next thing I heard, he was talking to one of them. Oh, dear Lord, I thought. What’s happened? It turned out that a lady’s dog had run away from her to come inside our front garden and stand beneath the bacon sandwich, whimpering and drooling.

This lady, we happened to know, was of the non-meat-eating fraternity of the village, which is a large and growing contingent, perhaps because we are so near to London.

As a matter of fact, I should clarify that I believe her to be vegetarian rather than full-blown vegan, because we once overheard her husband talking with another villager, who is a vegan, and he remarked that while he and his wife would like to go all the way, they could not quite manage the switch to plant-based living and were, he regretted, continuing to eat some animal products such as eggs and dairy.

This went down like a lead balloon with the full-blown vegan, who was wearing plant-based shoes and a hemp jumper, as you can imagine.