Part One: Lunchtime

It's a badge of honour from my time as a young person; a crowning glory among the great achievements of my glittering career in academia.

I never - not once - sat down to a school dinner during my entire time in 'education'.

School dinners don't really happen these days, from what I can see. Lunch involves thirteen-year-olds trooping off to Tesco to buy crisps and doughnuts with the money their parents have given them, then wandering around the park with their pals while filling their belly with this guaranteed nutrition-free concoction.

In 1966, by contrast, school dinners were de rigueur for us thirteen-year-olds. Most pupils would scoff down the canteen fayre before lurching off with a stomach full of mashed potato to play football in the playground. The only exceptions would be the kids who lived close enough to school to be able to go home for lunch. Enter me....

I had a horror of school dinners. Literally. It was partly the prospect of having to eat whatever was put in front of me from an anonymous source. Who knows what was going to turn up on your plate? Where did it come from? Who cooked it anyway? Big vats of meat and gravy, soggy vegetables, overboiled spuds. Out of my control: not for me. 

More than anything, though, the idea of spending seven hours straight within the confines of the school and the social environment it entailed was emotionally unacceptable. It was simply not possible. I loved - needed - the break, the interlude, the 'alone time'. It was a matter of personal mental health. Without it, I would probably have had a breakdown.

Our house was located about one mile from school. Twenty minutes walking, fifteen if I ran. I would bolt out of school, tear along the pavements, spend twenty minutes at home knocking back my lunch, home-made by mum, before trotting back briskly for another tedious afternoon of physics and English lit. 

And then to university. Meals were 'taken in Hall', as the brochures put it. 'Hall' was a large, dark-panelled and high-ceilinged space up a small flight of cold, stone stairs, where undergraduates who lived in college ate their food. Apart from me, that is.

'Hall' constituted an integral part of the social fabric of the college; it was a place where you met other students, said your hellos, became familiar with all the faces. This was great, except that I had no wish to be part of that social fabric. Or, more accurately, it was not possible for me to become part of it, aside from in the most superficial of ways. A way out was provided for me; er, on a plate.

By now I was vegetarian, or full vegan, I can't recall which (things came and went a bit). Shortly before I started at college, the authorities informed me that they were unable (or couldn't be bothered) to provide the diet I required. I would need to look after my own food needs. Success!

I had a little two-bar electric fire in my college room. I devised a series of strings dangling from the shelf above the fire, on which I would hang small potatoes and cook them. They didn't take long, and were quite delicious. I have no memory of what else I ate during that year, but it appears that I survived. 

I would occasionally bump into my few friends in the early evening as they exited Hall and their mysterious evening meals. From there we would go to one or other of their rooms and listen to Roxy Music, followed on occasion by adjournment to the college bar. Socialising in the bar, in contrast to Hall, provided no problems, although my capacity for alcohol was modest. The bar was located in a dank, dark basement, and even the glasses the beer arrived in were clammy to the touch. The beer on sale there was very strong and very cheap. I didn't go there all that often.

And thus ends the story of the school dinners.

Part Two: Ahimsa

I loved pork pies, liver, and kidney. And then things started to change.

One summer a group of us from school spent a week at a Camphill School in Gloucestershire. Here lived a community of what were then termed mentally-handicapped people, and they led a life that was close to the land, tailor-made for their emotional well-being. It was all based on the ideas of Rudolph Steiner.

Here I was introduced to muesli for breakfast instead of eggs and bacon, and I rather took to it. My body felt lighter, happier, and my mind as well. I continued with muesli on returning home, and it all took off from there.

One day I decided to go vegan. It may be pure fantasy, but an image remains etched in my mind of looking deep into the eyes of a cow, and the cow reciprocating the look. We made a pact, a deal: I won't harm you, and you won't harm me.

Being vegan was a less straightforward business in 1970. It was no way fashionable, and the prospective plant-muncher had to dig deep for information. I read up on nutrition as I swapped eggs, bacon, and pork pies for rice, rye bread, and curly kale overnight.

As I drastically changed what I put into my body, I simultaneously started to carefully ration the amount of food it received. I've always been one of the skinnier versions of human walking the face of the planet, buzzing at high metabolic rate. Now I began to resemble an animated long-haired skeleton jangling into the record shops and libraries of Oxford. "Oh, you are so thin!" exclaimed French teacher Madame Rees to me one morning, attempting to drum a little sense into my increasingly bony skull. No way: I was, as the therapists would have it, in denial.

I began to manifest real signs of undernourishment, lacking physical stamina, sexual vitality. One day I was taking a bath when I looked at my ankles and saw that they were swollen, oedemic. A few weeks down the line, one evening my father burst into my 'experience-the-living-dead' bedroom. "Your mother's downstairs crying with worry about you." He sat opposite me with an 'I'm not leaving here until you snap out of it' attitude about him. I snapped out of it.

The doctor said I was suffering from lack of B vitamins, and recommended a pint of stout every evening - which I didn't follow up, since those Guinness-style drinks always tasted awful to me. I simply started eating properly.

I am eternally sorry for the anxiety and miscellaneous other sufferings I put my parents through at various junctures of this life on planet Earth. And I came to more fully understand the 'starving vegan' late teenager that I temporarily was.

By age seventeen, I could clearly see - and feel - that the 'normal world' was anything but. It was driven largely by viciousness, brutality, endless consumeristic greed, destruction, and I wanted none of it. Instead, I engaged in compensatory behaviour. I attempted to form myself in the shape of harmlessness, ahimsa, as the Jains and Hindus call it. Hurt not a fly; be frugal, not taking a grain of rice more than you need to sustain yourself; cultivate a total inner purity.

It was a type of anorexic mentality, and I maintain an understanding of what makes some anorexics, at least, tick. I learnt in the way of painful experience that the world cannot be healed by compensating personally for its many ills. The compensatory urge, however, burdening myself for others' perceived shortcomings, remained a pattern which repeated itself again, a few years down the line....

Part Three: Grow Your Own

I yo-yoed between veganism and being a run-of-the-mill vegetarian for a number of years. The food thing remained strong. Leave the system, the Establishment, the dark lords of corruption, behind: it was crystal-clear that this was the only solution. And self-sufficiency was key.

I took on an allotment. It was on the edge of the village, on a north-facing slope, where the sun would set early, and a vicious wind would whistle in cruelly from somewhere east of Birmingham.

I became an instant curiosity. All the other allotmenteers were fifty-something family men, compelled by harsh economics to grow as many potatoes as possible for their substantial families. And then I turned up: long, long hippie hair, eighteen years old, and growing weird things to boot. 

It was hard work; to begin with, very hard work, as I had to dig out a subterranean jungle of couch grass before being able to sow a single vegetable seed. The 'weird thing' which came to be the crown of the crop was kohlrabi. While carrots got the fly, lettuce ran to seed, the kohlrabi just grew and grew. Purple and green ones, both varieties, viewed circumspectly by the other gardeners, as if they were extra-terrestrial vegetable visitors.

I undertook a grand experiment. If self-sufficiency was to be a realistic proposition, vegetables needed to be available all-year round. Could it be done? In central England. On that north-facing slope. Only one way to find out.....

I excluded potatoes from the experiment. But for the rest: twelve months later, I emerged alive and (fairly) well, having avoided purchasing a single vegetable for an entire 365 days. During the winter and early spring months, it was not exactly gourmet cuisine. In fact, it was tiny carrots that had miraculously overwintered, and curly kale, another hardy plant. A moment arrives when carrots, kale, and millet no longer excites the appetite. I also supplemented with wild plants, which I gathered with the help of a couple of 'food for free' books. This included the worst meal I ever tried to eat, a large bowl of old, stringy nettle leaves, boiled then served plain.

Nevertheless, the experiment did its job, and it was proven: self-sufficiency in vegetables was a possibility, even in our damp and chilly climes. Now all I needed was a few buddies who would be happy to share this new way of living. Then I would be on my way.....