Lost Weekend: The Worst Encounter You Can Imagine When Seeking Solitude

You are in a small hotel in a remote part of Wales. It is Sunday, the pubs are closed, the nearest KFC or Pizza Hut is fifty miles away. There is only one other guest in the place and he looks like the kind of person who would have a freezer full of dead heads in his kitchen. Worse than that, he is wearing those awful Lycra shorts favoured by cyclists and a helmet that makes him look like a penguin that walks backwards. Worse still, on his garish lycra top he sports a “meat is murder” badge.

Your companion is that most feared of all creatures, a bike riding vegan.

As there is only one table set for dinner you have no option but to join him. You experience a sense of impending doom as he asks for the vegetarian menu. The waiter, a rather grubby looking girl in fishnet tights, informs him that he can have an omelet.

“An egg is merely and unborn chicken,” he admonishes her. And so the nightmare begins.

You have your reasons for being here, alone, out of season, of course and they do not include learning about the shortcomings of your lifestyle from a pompous misanthrope with several mineral deficiencies that make his behaviour extremely unpredictable. Of course you are deeply upset by the acrimonious break-up of your relationship but up until now suicide had not even been on the list of options.

Now readers may be thinking the author is a Jeremy Clarkson clone but would be wrong. Some of my best friends are vegetarians and were my left leg up to the task I would be out on a mountain bike somewhere in the Pennines making the most of this great weather. Vegans are fine. Bikes are fun. Bike riding vegans tend to be self righteous prigs because they live their life in a way they consider is friendly to the planet and they think we should all do the same. There’s the rub you see, for the good of the planet. Not for the good of others as people in Buddhist or Christian orders do. For the good of the planet we must all embrace their twisted morality.

“Meat is murder” your companion announces as you order steak. Has he forgotten your offer to drive to Aberystwith where there is a Pizza Hut and the lecture on the evils of the SUV and the evils of drilling for oil in Alaskathat it earned you. You regret not asking what SUVs and Alaska have to do with your Nissan Micra.
The waitress brings your meal, she is preparing to leave and has put on a leather jacket with fur trim.
“Do you know how many mink have to die to make one fur coat?” your companion asks the bemused girl. You ought to ask him how many rabbits, chickens and squirrels were murdered by a fur coat’s worth of mink freed by animal rights protesters but unfortunately you will not think of it for a couple of days.

What must be understood about bike riding vegans is that they are just as much attention seekers as showbiz wannabees or the man who walks up and down between Land’s End and John O’ Groats naked. “Look at me,” their words and actions scream, “I am such a morally superior person that mere mortals must bow down before me. I am right so the rest of you must be wrong.”

While most bike riders, especially on congested city roads, are just suicide jockeys who cut up rednecks in Range Rovers for fun the bike riding vegan is delivering a message “look at me, I care about life on Earth, I am prepared to ride around breathing toxic fumes to save the planet.

The same applies to diet of course. Readers might wonder, as I do, how a vegan finds the energy to pedal a bike, so deficient in vitamins and minerals is their diet. They will tell you they take supplements. It is possible to argue that many supplements are extracted from animal products. Like doorstep evangelists they have the answer ready, their supplements are synthesised. Try asking “synthesised by whom” because the answer is “by the very companies who are poisoning our kids with chicken nuggets and Rola Cola(the cheap imitation cola sold under supermarket’s own brand names – or a potent and highly toxic cocktail consisting of Pepsi or coca cola, kool aid and vodka, much loved by British students.)

Really the only statement a bike riding vegan is making is “I’m a fool,” because if they do not die of malnutrition they will surely get cancer from breathing in the noxious discharges of car exhausts.

OK, so now you do not feel so morally inferior here’s how to fight back. As your companion’s Linda McCartney Lentil Burger arrives strike up a conversation about the food chain. How much of what we eat has been meat at some time, maybe one or two cycles back in the endless sequence of creation, reproduction and corruption. Birds and small mammals eat worms and insects and fertilise the ground as they go. Large mammals eat small mammals, large mammals die and either decompose back to the earth or are eaten as carrion. Where do you draw the line. Is an egg less alive than a lentil? And come to think of it, if you analyse the food chain, everything we eat has been shite at some time, more recently than we care to consider in the case of organic vegetables.

With luck this may make the bike riding vegan rush off to be sick.