Offal

One of the quirky aspects about living where we now live is that the alleyway access to our flat is shared by the halal butcher shop three doors down. All day and night, its staff off-load shopping trolleys full of raw meat from a lorry on the street and trundle them along the footpath to the back door of their shop. They’re incredibly friendly people, and, despite being a card-carrying vegetarian, I’ve never been hugely squeamish about seeing meat. Or so I thought...

As I left the flat today, the meat people were just outside our gate with a trolley heaped high with pink flesh. Don’t ask me what it was. All meat looks the same to me. My instinct was to duck back into my garden, but they stopped pushing and kindly signalled for me to pass, which actually meant I had to physically squeeze my way through. Some ungodly rib was hanging off the edge of the trolley and I had to flatten myself against the wall to prevent it scraping against my T-shirt. I might as well have been in one of the Alien films! It turns out that raw meat has a smell to it which I find particularly unpleasant.

I was instantly taken back to my childhood in East Northamptonshire, and the days when the offal trucks used to pass through the town. The area I grew up in was the centre of the boot and shoe industry and, as a result, a great many other businesses existed to deal with the bi-products of using the skins of animals to make shoes. There were glue factories, companies who specialised in bizarre off-cuts of meat. And so it went on, with every factory having its own associated smell.

The offal truck smelt rank. And it was a smell which would linger for minutes after the truck had passed through our town. It was the sort of smell which hit the back of your throat and instantly made you gag. The smell of putrescence. I’m quite convinced that it wouldn’t be allowed to happen any more. That stuff was rancid, and, periodically, some awful bit of meat would fall off the back of the lorry and lie there, decomposing on the road, stinking the place out with the sweet smell of death, until enough cars had run over it to render it part of the tarmac.

I leave you all with a completely unrelated quote, which my rabbi very sagely said in synagogue on Saturday, “The polarisation of society, the “you’re either with us or you’re not” mentality, destroys complexity, nuance and ultimately the truth.”

We should all spend more time searching for the truth.