Fishing will be fun - or not quite so as it turned out.

Fishing off the back of sailing boats seemed all the rage, hence I thought I would give it a go. Nothing nothing nothing using a hook and bait. I called into a shop and bought a couple of lures. It then dawned on me that this was another one of those games like growing tomatoes. The same quantity of homegrown tomatoes that cost you £20 can be bought in the supermarket for £4. £100 of fishing gear to catch £20 worth of fish. I suppose organic pesticide free fruit and fresh fish has a piquancy that is non-obtainable when you buy it.

It only took ten minutes to snare an unfortunate sole, well tuna actually. After pulling it in and placing into a bucket the grim reaper business of smashing its head in begun. Then a bit of knifing, followed by a decapitation. The horror unfolding is awful to say the least. I have no doubt the suffering. no matter how comparatively swift is dreadful.

Just visualise the terror of having a hook in your face and swimming as fast and frantically as you can to stop it going in any further. Then being picked up and suspended by it. Maybe the construct of a fish is not really comparable to a human but can't be pleasant. Some people have been tied to cars and dragged in an equivalent manner.

This has brought me to think once again about the whole aspect of taking someone's body for food. We are not interested in them, their personality their desires or feeling, just their body. I am sure that is an aspect to prostitution to some extent too. Or one-night stand dating. Or ogling over someone's creamy dreamy physical gift of a body. One that has derived from their parents.

There is a lot of obscenities going on in the manufacture of meat. Head after head hacked off of sheep. Each head held in the hand of the human and jaw opened to examine the teeth, before chucked into a bucket alone from the carcass.

Row upon row of tiny chicks whizzing along conveyor belts, yanked up sometimes breaking a leg, examined and pushed down a tube. No care or respect. No worry no fear of recourse. The chick will still taste fine after weeks living with a broken deformed leg.

Milk. Mothers kept in a permanent state of milk production. Calves taken from their mothers after three days and half or more of them eliminated.

One thing that being a vegan will not change is the horror that exists in nature anyway. Lions do not eat grass. Whales eat thousands of fish in one foul swoop. It is a dog eat dog world. 'They know no better' has been said.

The thing I am pondering about the most is how we kill, how we keep and how we invade the space of all the other animals. I am eating more and more vegan food but have yet to make the transition. I am trying to offset some of the guilt by buying even more land to assign as human free.

As for the fish. Well in the oven it went and down the gullet in gratifying chunks. Back it went into the sea the next day via what we call the turtle release valve.

Fishing seems like fun. Catch and eat. But not quite so romantic as I had envisaged.

Horror