Now you see it, now you don't

Happy Easter!  I think for many these days this means Happy Spring! This weekend in the UK, weatherwise, we have most certainly changed seasons though yesterday with the temperature at 27 degrees it was as if we had leapt right into high summer. Many of us, even in Scotland, were at the beach yesterday. 

I have some Holi powder which I hope we will use with our visiting friends before they leave. I know it is past the official day of Holi but after a cold April, it is, at last, the kind of weather in which one wants to celebrate both a new season and old friendships.

Recently I saw one of Tesco's takeaway recipes: "Helen's Homecoming Lamb", the recipe hung around a human name and a photo and a story to make us buy more.  We don't eat lamb any more because of my youngest. He stopped is because he is tender-hearted. During homeschooling, around this time last year, we went to see lambs being born on at Arnprior farm near Stirling. It was a ticketed affair, about £50 for four, all in, for an hour. Considering that you can pay that for a family day out at many attractions I thought, beforehand, it was a bit steep. In fact it was more like an hour and a half and very interesting. We had a tour, saw at least two lambs born, learnt a lot about sheep farming and we each held lambs only a couple of days old. Swathed in high viz, a plastic apron and wearing plastic gloves (apparently as much to protect the lamb as the child) my younger son remarked, with, I felt, clear-sighted justification: What's the point, if we can't really feel the lamb? Besides, his lamb was active and soon escaped. 

Yet the experience marked him for since then he never has wanted to eat that meat. Recently, though, in a moment of madness, I used lamb for the first time in a year.  It was a large batch of shepherd's pie.  I made it thinking, perhaps we would eat it without him but we always do eat together and the pies lingered in the freezer.

Leaving the supermarket, I was reminded of my son's conversion and of the vegan butcher story recently in the news. "Before I just looked at it as a piece of meat going on a dinner plate but then you see it as an animal and not just a steak."   That's how it is for some of those who don't like to eat meat.  From there the leap to "And what right do we have to use animals at all?" is shorter, while the arguments around health and land use pile in too.  

So what about the shepherds' pies? I wondered if I should just say it was cottage pie but dismissed that as like giving a Muslim a bacon sandwich. Three out of four of us ate it.  It was an unusual recipe, spiced with apricot and cumin and tasty but I wished I hadn't made it.  Because it is as the butcher says.  With lamb we don't even disguise the name and at this time of the year, the real things are being bottle-fed by children in petting farms or gambolling in the fields all around with all the joy of new life.  

A few days later we were petting 'X factor', the sheep (2017 when he was born was year 'X' apparently), and Harmonica the Highland coo and her friends at Scone Palace. I asked the lady feeding them:

-  Do you still eat meat?  

- Oh yes.  

- It doesn't bother you? 

-  No, you just have to separate the two things.

But some, like my son can't avoid seeing the one as the other. 

There are other things like that.  I learned about Magic Eye decades after the phenomena came out. It was a few years ago in Edinburgh's Camera Obscura and world of illusions, a great place for a rainy afternoon, having as much history as pure fun. The magic eye pictures there are good quality and, after a few moments meditation, I saw the second picture and was hooked. Now you see it, now you don't. 

It is the same concept as Aut sensum, aut non. Some see that dance class is a business strategy and not the way to learn to dance socially. Some don't. Some see that dance class is exploitative and "thinking dance" is harmful to dancing. Some don't. Some get that dancing tango can be a meaningful, wordless connection between two compatible people, even between strangers and, watching them, some seem to feel dance as a largely mechanical movement around the floor. 

About this, I feel like my son feels about lamb: no way.  Perish the thought of being "led" while I merely "follow" like some grotesque artificial creation with the body of a human but the heart and head of a sheep. I would rather sit and listen to the music all night than be, even for a tanda, a song, a minute, even for a few seconds, part of some cog-like contraption lurching about the floor. 

Yet so many men will inveigle women with smiles and chat, social pressure or [shudder] proffered hand into just such a cage. Imagine, sentient yet trapped inside a moving machine, unable to get out or to get off, as in some dystopian sci-fi movie. Thank goodness for those two words in a tanda which mean escape and freedom: "Thank you!" And yet many women hesitate.  Oh, no, it would be rude! I reply:  But what was he, pressuring you into a dance you didn't want? Or:  Do you think a guy who liked you enough to embrace you in dance would want you to be in a dance you weren't enjoying?  And they agree.  But then they forget, or brush this inconvenient truth under their mental carpet.  No wonder so many pretend there is any such thing as a real dance. Not to do so would be to think too much, to question, to ask things like: Why do I accept dances I don't really enjoy?  What do I really enjoy?  Isn't it weird to do things you don't actually enjoy?  And, If I don't enjoy them, what am I doing here? Or, Can things change?