It turns out it’s quite tricky finding something to write about every day that isn’t just an embellished list of things that have happened over 24 hours. I wonder if things would be easier if I was bigoted or had a severe chip on my shoulder about something. There’s a horrible woman who regularly writes into the local newspaper about a limited number of topics – apparent slights against the Christian faith, and ‘snowflake liberals’. Her letters can roughly be divided two camps: angry letters things that upset her and her principles, and declarations that ‘snowflakes’ are getting their knickers in a twist about a particular that don’t concern them. It would be an amusing juxtaposition to have a letter from each camp printed next to one another in one edition so people could see someone apparently complaining about an attitude they’re displaying in an adjacent letter, but unfortunately they always appear on separate days. But she has I’d say, at least two letters printed a week, which might not even be the full extent of her output. They should probably just give her a column to herself – just call it ‘GRRRR… CHANGE!!!’ or something.

I’m jealous of her righteous indignation in a way, because it clearly produces words on a page. I have to take isolated, aggravating moments – that would be potentially imperceptible to anyone else other than me – as a starting point, and they don’t arrive with the regularity that a racist, homophobic, stridently Christian attitude does.

It does make me think about my own values and beliefs and wonder if there’s something lacking in me that means I can’t sit and produce page after page outlining what I think again and again in different contexts. Maybe three years of politics and philosophy essays at uni has left me with an aversion to writing anything strident, because my instinct to hunt for things like evidence and then entertain opposing points-of-view before tying it all up neatly in a conclusion is too strong, and I haven’t enough energy or time to do that time and again. Tabloid columnists and their ilk can reliably fall back on an established opinion every time a new story crops up and regurgitate the same shit in a slightly different form. In some ways, being taught to weigh arguments up and be faithful to the evidence presented is a hefty weight around the neck of someone who just wants to assert something and get on with their day.

In other news, Waitrose have dedicated a whole aisle to vegetarian and vegan food now and it’s beautiful. I haven’t seen such a selection in a supermarket before and I struggled today to not just lift one of everything to try. It maybe says something about me, that the better and easier it gets to be a vegetarian or vegan, the more I anticipate the eventual backlash and fightback from meat and dairy industries. There are hints of panic already (adverts for ‘pork’ for one – not for a brand, just for the food item in general), but I do wonder what marketing ploy will be used soon by butchers en masse to protect their livelihoods (“Come on cunts! Sometimes it’s just cool to kill and eat something! GROW UP!”)

It still feels largely frustrating to discuss vegetarianism etc with people who haven’t entertained the idea, and from my perspective there’s little that can be done to convince someone whose key argument is something like ‘Yeah, but…bacon.’ But I feel that there’s a gradual shift towards these diets that doesn’t seem to require these fatiguing conversations to even occur. Which is great, because as I’ve already touched upon, I’m not about to sit here and start dedicating pages of polemic to the cause. I’m already bored with my opinions on it.