Bloody vegetarian!

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

That is, John Oswald, Scottish poet, soldier, vegetarian activist, angry Jacobin, who died on 14th September 1793 fighting counter-revolution in the Vendée. He's sadly little known, except by vegetarians (like me!), but I'm going to root out some more stuff on him and, I dunno, write a radio play or something. I mean, hell, his life is a damn sight more interesting than some bloody 'Duchess' played by Keira Knightley, but...no, I feel a rant developing so...

Tom Paine allegedly commented: "Oswald, you have lived so long without tasting flesh you now have a most voracious appetite for blood!". My links seem to be playing up, but googling 'The Cry of Nature' may bring you some joy if you're interested. This may or may not work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Oswald_(activist) !

On a not unrelated note, the English aristocracy still call the foxes they tear to pieces with dogs (it's illegal now, but that hasn't stopped them!) 'Charlie' or 'Charles James', after Pitt's opponent Charles James Fox, Revolution sympathiser; in Tory cartoons of the 1790's Fox was called 'Robespierre' and shown guillotining Tories (if only!) - thus, 200 years on, the act of ripping a small ginger mammal apart with a pack of dogs is the English Tory's way of symbolically destroying the revolution of 1789-94! (Ho hum, when it was banned, a French town applied for an EU grant to expand their airport so English aristocrats could fly into France and carry on killing foxes there!)