There will be blood

Dinnertime. The fire roars, the Spode gleams and the guests sparkle. Yet there is nowhere I would less like to be. I'm about to eat meat for the first time in 27 years. As I gaze at my plate, tunnel-visioned, the room takes on the unreal nature of a dream. Instead of feeling self-conscious with the entire table spectating, all I can think about is what is on the end of my fork. My allies toast my first slice of flesh.

The taste is as nothing to the texture, which has three different elements: the meat, a thin layer of fat and an outer area of slipperier flesh. There is a disconcerting crunch in the chew, a need for teeth. At my first swallow, my fellows erupt into applause, slapping me benevolently on the back. To do the experience justice, I resolve to ingest the whole thing.

Let me make myself clear: I relish food, am nothing if not greedy and have never been on a diet. Yet I maintain one very feminine food fad: I have not - had not - eaten meat for almost 30 years (women vegetarians outnumber men two to one). I am pro-hunting, wear fur, am entirely unevangelical and gave up for 'macro-economic' reasons (read bolshie teen) rather than daffiness over animals. It was more efficient, so my argument circa 1984 went, to feed people with plants rather than feed plants to animals to feed people. Meat was a Western indulgence in a famine-stricken world. Moreover, the meat itself was vile: cheap, factory farmed in an age of BSE and prelapsarian McDonald's. Back in the day, mine was a pleasingly idiosyncratic form of radicalism. Three decades on, eco-warriors everywhere spout such arguments.

I have never wavered, nor missed it. Despite its reputation as the great vegetarian-slayer, bacon is safe in my presence; sausage goes unlusted after. I eat voraciously and well - aubergine parmigiana, spinach soufflés, truffled pasta, dahls and dosas - routinely laying down not five, but twelve a day. I delight in the food I consume - verdant, varied and seasonal as it is - albeit that, where others lust after steak, I go weak for samphire.

That said, I am anaemic and have been forced to eat fish for health reasons (I had pneumonia twice in my early thirties, following which protein was deemed vital for recovery). And, increasingly, my vegetarianism is a putting-hosts-to-too-much-trouble social embarrassment. The refusal that remains most mortifying was when I declined meat from a Holocaust survivor I was interviewing as she described starving in Belsen; an occasion I cannot recall without self-disgust.

Meanwhile, meat has changed over the past couple of decades. Now it is all about breeds, quality, connoisseurship. Its status was canonised when, in a huge feature, the November issue of Vogue declared it to be more fashionable than fashion.
Women, formerly vegetarianism's stalwarts, are increasingly celebrating the pleasures of the flesh, founding meat-based dining societies and embracing butchery. Adele, Kate Moss, Lily Cooper and Keira Knightley are said to be enthusiasts. And Dr Dukan has perpetuated the Atkins diet's fixation with flesh.

Happy as I am in my vegetarianism, a recent bout of dizzying, lip-lacerating, sleeping-for-48-hours-at-a-time anaemia set me wondering. Am I allowing a pubescent prejudice to mar my adult life? If other people are returning to the fleshly fold, perhaps my vegetarianism has become more of a neurosis than a credo. If meat has moved on, should I?

Knightsbridge institution the Brompton Bar & Grill is one of my favourite restaurants. Back in the days when I still had truck with chops, it was Brasserie St Quentin, run by Hugh O'Neill, aka Lord Rathcavan. O'Neill's son, the dashing François, supplies the BBG from Cleggan, the family estate in Northern Ireland, which boasts the finest game in the country. Meat is so key to the BBG's success that Frankie has launched a hugely popular Grill Club, demonstrating butchery and other meat-related subjects, in the ritzy downstairs bar.

There could be no finer host with whom to put my dining habits to the test. Given that if one is to eat an animal one should be prepared to confront the realities of killing, butchering and cooking it, François invites me to join a Cleggan shoot, after which the BBG head chef Gary Durrant will steer me through the business/kitchen end of matters.

In the days prior, I endure nightmares where I'm choking on chicken flesh: my mouth over-stuffed, struggling for air, fingers desperately clawing the meat from my mouth. My subconscious is clearly not ready to play ball. The night before the shoot, I buoy myself with Dutch courage over roasted vegetables and fine French cheese, while my comrades tuck into a roast.

The morning is cold, a bitter wind lashing the Antrim Hills. Where everyone else is in moss-coloured tweed, I resemble a member of the IRA. The partridge shoot at Cleggan runs from September to November, featuring five drives for up to ten guns. The average bag is more than 300 birds. Forty beaters, pickers up and guns give us the potential to be one very efficient killing machine.

Until, of course, I take up a weapon on the final drive. Former gamekeeper Raymond Carr does his best to school me, recommending a short stance, flat trajectory, aim between ten and 12 o'clock, leaning into the gun and not dropping my head. Alas, fingers and brain are numb. Moreover, I am concerned that - if today is to be the day on which I eat meat for the first time in three decades - it should not be human. 'Beaters take a lot of cooking,' notes my mentor, sagely.

Collectively we bag 124 partridge, bashing the skulls of those not yet dead. They are warm to the touch, some still quivering. Partridges are not among the gamier varieties of game, but I find their feral tang overpowering. Still more so in the game larder with Durrant, where we set about plucking a hung bird (decomposed flesh being more toothsome). I have plucked before and am fairly nonchalant, but the skin feels gory and is hideously prone to tearing.

Far more repellent is the butchering. Wielding a worryingly sharp knife, I first have to decapitate my prey. I pull the crop (the balled evidence of its last feed) away, only to have seed spill out in a ghastly - albeit vegetarian - spewing. Wings and clawed legs follow. So far, still standing.

The gutting is appalling. 'You're ribbing the vegetarian, right?' I shudder on learning that I must slice an aperture in the bird's anus, insert two fingers and tease out its stringy guts. The stench is staggering, the feel disturbingly vaginal. The gesture must be repeated to ensure that 'the cavity is clean'. Out comes the heart. A vegetarian Lady Macbeth, I scrub my hands in an obsessive-compulsive frenzy. Still they feel soiled.

The moment finally arrives. Frankie brings me a (blessedly) diminutive bird to eat. The celeriac and chanterelles are delectable - nuanced, velvety, refined - the gravy satisfyingly rich. However, the flesh feels shockingly wrong. No one bar me can smell the meat (which I am assured is outstanding), but my nose recoils every time I raise my fork. I had been told I may experience a 'meat high', or at the very least, a 'meat sweat'. In fact, I am red-faced, dazed, drunk on it in a manner that is clumsy and confused rather than elated. On my lurch home, I am dozy but unsettled, feeling vaguely sick. My nose has taken on an unsightly shine. Back in London I - literally - break out in hives, my cheeks and chin transforming from florid to lumpen and inflamed.

That night, desperate to supplant my meat memory, I order a delivery of tofu, the foodstuff that carnivores most despise. Nothing has ever tasted better. Meat may have evolved, but I am yet to. ES
(bromptonbarandgrill.com; clegganshoot.com) Hannah Betts flew to Belfast with British Midland (flybmi.com)