Wednesday 28 January 2009

Ox Tail Soup

Distinctly I can remember the day in Kindergarten that I learned that wool products did not equivocally mean the torturous slaughter of sheep and lambs. The rest of my class regarded me strangely during this barn-yard lesson. I suppose, without the aid of ever growing up on a farm, urged not to name the livestock, or a fishing-trip with Granddad, I concluded that all works of man would requite some sort of bloody sacrifice. I can also recall being about to recite numbers no more than thirty-nine, though I knew that counts went higher. I was quite realized to learn that in fact sheep like to be sheared, cows like (need, due to the hormone injections) to be milked, and that the predator populations like to be kept under control. Maybe the belief was grounded in a few provactive, infantile snap-shots, bare, on a sheepskin rug, on which I would later see my sister posed... Incidentally, it's just as strange to me to recall a photograph that one cannot summon up electronically as it is to know a favorite image that one cannot hold in his hands.