Yeah: Oxford’s pretty veggie-friendly. We have at least a couple of completely-vegetarian eateries as well as a good number of others that are very vegetarian-friendly, but it’s still been a bit of a surprise to me to see, over the last year, quite how little choice is provided at some establishments.

The other day, I ate at a pub where a lot of the IT support staff from around Oxford University gather for their Friday lunches. The menu was very short on meat-free foods, and always seems to be getting shorter: the options were soup (as a starter), a vegetable tart, and vegetable sausage and mash. I ordered the sausage and mash, only to be told, a little later on, that their order hadn’t come through. Now this could happen to anybody, with any meal, but in my case it cut my main-course options down by a shocking 50% (whereas has the guy ordering the fish and chips been told that it wasn’t available, his options would have only been reduced by about 3%). The mind boggles.

Boggle, it goes.

It’s certainly been a learning experience.