The salmon is delicious

Apologies to the vegetarians! I used to be a vegetarian and I feel like I still should be, but I’ve succumbed to my children’s demands and the fact that they don’t seem to be as enthusiastic about chickpeas and tofu as I am.

But – I am fascinated by my local butcher’s shop. It’s like going back to the 70s, before my mother turned our family vegetarian and we’d pop in for our wiener schnitzels and casserole beef, and the butcher would always give me a saveloy. The butchers know the customers by name, chat away and do meat deliveries to the old people in the neighbourhood. I was listening to poet Vincent O’Sullivan on Kim Hill last year, and he talked of his own butcher romance:

“I used to be fascinated by how [butchers] could both chat up their customers at the same time as doing things with knives and half carcasses and sliced luncheon. The whole business of going to a butcher’s shop as a child and later was always a curious treat that was partly aesthetic and partly it was just a bit of theatre.”

Also, I was struck by this random encounter Gus had. The moment the other boy turned up in the shop, there was something very familiar about him. He was just as bouncing-off-the-walls, talking-too-loudly-in-public-places as Gus was. Recently, I read Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes, and he explained that the reason why there were so many families in Sillicon Valley with autistic kids was because their parents recognised latent autistic traits in each other. I think that Gus and this boy quickly recognised that their brains were both wired in an amped-up way.