I HAD been a vegetarian for almost seven years.

Not a gammon steak, not even a ham slice had passed my lips.

That was until just over a week ago.

It was never an ethical sort of vegetarianism - I wasn’t doing it for the fluffy ducks or the cuddly cows. I just wanted to see how the other half lived. Specifically, my other half, my former boyfriend.

He hadn’t eaten meat since he was a kid, so when I fell for him I fell for his pure eating habits too. And when faced with a £5 choice between a roast ham or a bottle of chianti, we both agreed.

Other people did tend to put me off. My family, ambassadors of the meat-and-three-veg formula, thought vegetarian living was suspicious.

My dad thought I would die - or rather that he would die. He likes his steak and kidney pies.

There were also two fascist vegetarians in my university year who were so self-righteous I wanted to smear offal in their hair and leave cow tongue in their text books.

Despite this, I slowly slipped into a world of casseroles, bakes and risottos. My shopping bill was less expensive and, because it’s pretty boring to eat vegetable curry every day, I learnt to cook.

When I broke up with the vegetarian, over a year ago, I carried on.

Until finally, last week, I realised I couldn’t remember what meat tasted like.

What if it was brilliant? Or what if it poisoned me? Maybe, after all these years of purity, beef slices would boomerang and bacon would bounce.

I succumbed to curiosity.

I had to try it out. No sanitised wafer thin slices - I bought a hot chicken breast, bones and ligaments and skin and all.

Sitting outside in the sunshine, with my parents at work and the world looking the other way, I took this thing apart.

How can I describe what it tasted like? Chicken is the fabric of the universe - the meat that all other meats in someway resemble. It wasn’t an epiphany, my life didn’t change, I wasn’t poisoned, it was vaguely nice. At best I can say it tasted like chicken.

Three days later, someone offered me beef jerky. “Yeah, alright.”

At the weekend, there was a barbeque...

I’ll never be the butchers’ best friend. Once you’ve been vegetarian for so long, full time ‘meating’ seems like wanton, unnecessary murder.

But I have declared this month a veggie holiday in order to understand how the other half live - and to remember how the other, other half live too.