There are various things I don’t really do if I can help it, in terms of feeling certain emotions.

One is regret. I don’t see the point of it, unless we learn from it and then put it away. You can’t go back and change things. Yes, it might be nice if life had taken one turn instead of another but, real crises apart, accident, illness and death, if there’s nothing we can do about it I try to be positive and move on.

Blame. That’s another thing I don’t do if I can avoid it. There’s too much of it about and a lot of it’s superficial. So somebody dropped a plate, forgot to buy the coffee, arrived late, missed a penalty. So what?

Hatred. No, I try not to do that.

Shame? I think it’s a very destructive and negative emotion. I’ve seen children shamed by adults over silly things, made to feel ‘not good enough’. We’re all good enough. Let’s not do shame.

Or embarrassment. But here’s a funny story about how I could have been embarrassed, but in the end, I wasn’t.

In our little hamlet, we put our bins out on a Wednesday night. The collection is on Thursday morning. I go for a long walk about seven o’clock every day so on Thursdays, I see all my neighbours’ rubbish beautifully displayed in the right colour bins. I don’t look deliberately, but if I did, I know I’d see lots of wine bottles and beer cans, Greek Yogurt pots, gourmet sauces. The odd takeaway container.

I suppose our rubbish tells people a lot about us. Social class. Eating habits. Tendencies. Lifestyle. Depending on how they’d judge, of course – there’s the rub. I don’t do superficial judgement either, if I can avoid it. It can be subjective and often biased.

Of course, our bin men are busy people. They chuck the refuse in the van and sail away. Often, some boxes and wrappers fall out and float on the breeze and finally end up in the hedge. As they did last Thursday.

So imagine how I felt when I went out for my walk on Friday morning and saw the two items in my gateway. Like arrows pointing.

LOOK WHO LIVES HERE.

An empty tofu box. An empty packet of loose-leaf green tea.

It was like a label. A green-tea-drinking-tofu-eating vegan lives here. That means a weirdo to many people.

I picked the rubbish up and recycled it again. Then I had a good laugh. I couldn’t think of two items that could have defined me better. Or worse.

I’ve been vegan for over 30 years. Vegetarian before that. It’s just my way of life. People accept that I’m that way – some people are impressed, most don’t care, some think it’s a bit odd. Attitudes tell me more about them than me. I invite people round for food a lot. We eat things like jackfruit and chestnuts and quinoa and jaggery and ackee. And normal things – curry and rice and pie and mash and porridge.

But there are people who would laugh a bit at the litter flag flying outside my gate – tofu and green tea! Does that make me an anomaly? I looked up ‘vegan stereotypes’ and discovered that people think vegans:

• Preach
• Think they’re better than everyone else
• Eat kale all the time
• Are hippies
• Secretly eat meat
• Can’t take a joke
• Are activists
• Are skinny and weak
• Lack protein/iron/calcium

I don’t think my friends would describe me as too many of the above. Of course there’s the kale thing. So I went online to find a more realistic image and researched ‘facts about people who are vegan.’

This is what I came up with, on the first page.

• Women prefer meat-eating men and perceive them as more attractive than men following plant-based diets (Timeo & Suitner, 2018).
•  A recent study by health food chain Holland & Barrett shows that 35 per cent of Londoners on a vegan diet have seen an increased libido.
• Vegans tend to be younger than the general population, with the majority of vegans between 18 and 34 years old.
• Income: Lower-income groups are over-represented among vegans in the UK
• In 2024, Finder.com estimates that there are around 2.5 million vegans in the UK, representing 4.7% of the adult population. YouGov tracker data over the last two and a half years puts the size of the vegan population at about 2-3% and the vegetarian population at about 5-7%.
• Eating a vegan diet can reduce your carbon footprint by 73%
• Miley Cyrus told podcaster Joe Rogan that she is no longer vegan, but pescetarian. She explained that her brain wasn’t functioning properly and she needed fish.

Well, I hope you found all that interesting. It didn’t really tell me anything new or ground breaking.

Perhaps the empty green tea and tofu packets in my hedge define me as a little bit alternative and leftfield.

Or perhaps I’m just Judy, and that’s perfectly alright.