Donald Watson: In His Own Words: Part Two

INTERVIEW WITH DONALD WATSON

SUNDAY 15 DECEMBER 2002

Part Two (find Part One here)

Recorded by George D Rodger

GDR: Do you feel that all food production should be grown organically?

DW: Well, ideally, yes. I think in a vegan world, of course, there wouldn’t be any animal manure on the scale that we have it now. I suppose we could always have a few animals, oh it would be a dangerous experiment to use, because we’d have the problem of the surplus males, as all the people who’ve tried goat keeping have found, but they could be allowed to live in a wild state over tracts of land, there’d be plenty of land to house them, of course, if it wasn’t used for growing crops largely for animals, as at present.

Every vegan knows, of course, that the units of nutrition that can be got from any area of fertile land are many times greater if that land is devoted to plant crops than to animals and even in this age when the seas are overfished, I’m told that fish farms are not the answer to the question, because for every ton of fish that comes from them, between one and three tons of fish, smaller fish, according to the kind of fish they’re farming, has to be used to feed the salmon or whatever else. So, this attack on the sea must still be used, in order to feed this terribly unnatural means of creating an unnatural food. And one further point about fish and fishing, which has always been accepted as a very peaceful occupation, one to encourage young children to adopt, because it takes their mind off other nefarious things that young people fall into – these creatures can never be a threat to man, because they’re trapped in their environment. Unlike any other animal pests, they can never over-run the dry land – they’re trapped there, and, when caught, they can never relieve their feelings with a scream, like other animals do. What agony they die in, in their millions, will never be known.

So much for the pacifist’s view of fishing, and fish farms!

GDR: Moving on from fish farms to genetically modified organisms, in fact a lot of farmed fish are genetically modified, what are your views on genetically modified organisms, plants or animals?

DW: Well, it seems to me, as an ordinary, not-very-scientific person, the whole thing seems too good to be true – that we can alter the genetic make-up of any animal or plant by clever working in the laboratory, so that genes taken from fish can produce strawberries that have a longer shelf life. As the old saying has it, if a thing seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true, and I’m sure this is a classic example, quite apart from the irreversible genetic nature of what is our basic food supply in the future. We mustn’t “play God”, to use a religious expression. Science must realise that there must be commonsense bounds to whatever they do, otherwise they may find themselves with irreversible problems, which science can’t solve. When H G Wells, late in life, wrote his book, “The Fate of Homo Sapiens”, which I read recently, towards the end of that book, he said, “There is only one invention that I can think of that didn’t create more problems than the one it sought to solve.” Now that may have been an exaggeration; the example he quoted was chloroform. What seems to be a wonderful innovation makes problems that alter virtually the whole of Man’s life, in every respect. I suppose if he were alive today he would use the motor car as a classic example. We can’t reverse it now. I was thinking the other day of the recent series on television of the hundred greatest Britons who had ever lived, I thought someone ought to say what are our greatest inventions and mine would be the bicycle. I can’t think of a single bad thing about the bicycle which was my main source of transport until I was the age of fifty, when I bought a car, for reasons I needn’t go into now. And it was invented by a blacksmith, who lived just across the Solway Firth.

GDR: What are your views on blood sports? I presume you’re against them! You know, fox hunting, shooting, you’ve already spoken about angling.

DW: I think it’s the bottom of the barrel. However necessary we may feel that, having got into this mess, we have to kill some creatures for their own good; to kill creatures for fun must be the very dregs. And to think that much of the “sport” is led by the so-called aristocracy, I think prompts the idea, who are the aristocracy? Well, I think we choose ourselves whether we’re going to be in the aristocracy. The aristocracy are the people who live by high moral principles, who try to keep themselves healthy, who don’t gossip about other people, by saying things that they wouldn’t say to their face, which constitutes most of what we call gossip. The aristocracy are the people, certainly, who don’t kill for fun, of all things, and the people who refuse to join the long queue to their own extermination and to the gutter.

Someone once said, “The way to Heaven is the first turning to the right and keep straight on.” Well, whatever sort of place Heaven might be, I consider veganism is, as near to that aspiration that we, as fallible humans, can get. Someone also said, “Heaven is a temper, not a place.” and I hope most vegans would believe in that. But, whilst I’m referring to wise things that other people said, may I quote four lines of poetry that have always impressed me, by that very prolific poet, Anon.

Someone ought to write a book of a collection of all the wise things that Anon said, and this one, my word, it’s true. These are the four lines:

We are all blind until we see that, in the human plan,

Nothing is worth the making, that does not make the man.

Why build these cities glorious, if man unbuilded goes?

We build a world in vain, unless the builder also grows.

What wisdom there is there!

At this time, all our cities are under threat, needlessly, because Man has taken a wrong turning, early in his history, and throughout all recorded history, even throughout all his early battles. I read recently about the Battle of Agincourt. At the end of the day, the corpses of horses and men were lying six feet deep. Why should one creature have suffered as the horse has done, in the service of such a fallen creature as we are? And remember, we’re all descended from tens of thousands of generations of these violent people. The miracle is that any of us, at this late stage, could find in our make-up, the wherewithal to have this latent wisdom, to see the folly, and to act upon it and to spread the gospel so that other people may be infected as the same way as people are infected with evil in all its forms.

One thing the first vegans decided upon early in our experiment, shall I call it, is that we should try to avoid what annoys us in propagandists in other fields and we decided that the first person singular, “I”, should not be repeated too often, because it can make a barrier, like a fence, cutting us off from those we would convert. So, in all my early writings, I doubt, if I ever used the first person singular and another thing we thought would be wise, would be not to exaggerate before we had proved our point, because we couldn’t escape the fact that we were taking on the world, unlike any other reformers before – we were in this tremendously responsible position of saying to virtually everyone else, “You are just plain wrong, in so many aspects of the things you are claiming in your life style.”

GDR: What are your views on animal experiments?

DW: I said that cruel sports were the bottom of the barrel. I think I’ve got to move even them one up, and put vivisection at the bottom. It is probably the cruelest of all Man’s attack on the rest of Creation, particularly since it hopes to give benefits. Even if it does, we must ask the question, after millions of lives have been sacrificed, if all this effort had gone into other fields of investigation, like simple reformed living, would not the results far outweigh the benefits of vivisection, whatever they may be. I think one question vegetarians and vegans should always ask when we think that cruelty, these days, is largely delegated to the people who perform it, is the simple question, if these butchers and vivisectors weren’t there, could we perform the acts that they are doing? And, if we couldn’t, we have no right to expect them to do it on our behalf. Full stop! That simply compounds the issue. It means that we’re not just exploiting animals – we’re exploiting human beings. So that, day after day, year after year, they’re doing their job, to think again of Lang’s famous words “in the firm belief that they are doing nothing wrong.”

GDR: OK. What are your views on direct action?

DW: I’ve never become involved in it, except in the general way of being a propagandist, which is the most direct action of all. I respect the people enormously who do it, believing that it’s the most direct and quick way to achieve their ends. If I were an animal in a vivisection cage, I would thank the person who broke in and let me out, but, having said that, we must always remember: is it just possible that our act could, just could, be counter­ productive? I’d rather not say “yes” or “no”, because I don’t know the answer to that.

I’ve respect for all the people who do it, but my own personal feeling is that I wouldn’t do it. To use an analogy, I sometimes see, when on my walks, people climbing up vertical cliffs with their ropes and I sometimes think, there is an alternative way of getting to the top and getting the view, by just going a few hundred yards sideways, and walking up a valley. A rock-climber would, of course, say that idea is nonsense, we don’t do it for the view, we do it for the challenge! But, if people want challenges, there is no shortage of sensible, humane, safe, challenges to get engaged in. I would never take up rock­ climbing, and dangle on the end of a rope, that might be weak in one spot.

The strength of a chain is its weakest link, and so is the strength of a rope, and if that rope breaks, as inevitably, I think it will, sooner or later, I would probably get killed. And then I wouldn’t be able to proceed with whatever peaceful work I’m on earth to do. So, rock-climbing is out, as far as I’m concerned. But, at least, it isn’t hunting innocent animals and I don’t stand on a soapbox to condemn them – it’s their own business, let them get on with it. (As long as they don’t disturb peregrines’ nests on the way up!)

GDR: What are your views on vaccination?

DW: Vaccination? I wasn’t vaccinated as a child. I was always too weak!

GDR: So weak that you’re now 92 years old?!!

DW: Yes. I was a weakling, I suffered from constipation, I’d a weak heart, I’d anemia. For a long period in my schooldays I had to go down to Boots with my weight card, on doctor’s orders, to have my weight registered. So, I wasn’t vaccinated. My brother was, and my sister was, and my sister had a terrible arm, I remember. She was eight years younger than I was, but I wasn’t vaccinated, and I didn’t get smallpox. There is a story, by the way, about vaccination, which tells us how careful we have to be about statistics. It dates from the days of the Raj in India, where a company of recruits went out to serve in the army, and they were lectured by the Medical Officer of Health, warning them that they should be vaccinated. It wasn’t compulsory but the evidence was very strong that they’d be in dire danger if they weren’t. In the last company, who’d gone out the year before, half of those who were not vaccinated had died. But when someone pursued the records, they found that only two were not vaccinated, of whom one never got smallpox, and the other one was killed by a tiger, so his claim that fifty percent of the soldiers who weren’t vaccinated were completely wiped out was absolutely true, but one needs to know all the facts before falling for statistics, especially from those who have something to sell. I like to think that vegans are less naive and gullible than most people and, more often than other people, they comment, when they read an advert, by saying “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

What do I think about vaccination? That was the question. I keep going off the point! Of course, smallpox was a terrible killer and it wasn’t surprising that scientists sought some kind of antidote, to protect the people from it. We shall never know, of course, whether smallpox, like all the other zymotic diseases, came about, not through lack of prophylactics, but through wrong living, which so reduced the natural resistance of Man that he couldn’t meet the attacks of pathogens, which were there all the time, in his environment. And I pin my faith now to building up our natural resistance against disease.

GDR: Of course, the point is that most, if not all, vaccines, are cultured on things like chick embryos, and other animal materials.

DW: Oh, yes! And I may add that most orthodox medicines are also proved, or tested, on animals, and this perhaps is the greatest inconsistency in vegetarians and vegans who may try to conform to the rules of their societies, but take orthodox medicines, hoping that they’ve not been produced as a result of animal tests. And that is one reason I’ve never taken them. And, in my view, that is a more serious inconsistency even than wearing leather or using wool, because these are by-products of industries that are primarily there to provide meat. I know, in a vegan world, these products wouldn’t exist. But we mustn’t fuss about what are obviously the lesser evils of a life in which we’re trying to cope with situations that are brought about by a world designed to cope for people who don’t hold our principles. We must try to find another way round the back, and, hopefully, I think we must do it over the years and perhaps over the decades by bringing back our natural resistance. I sometimes feel we must all accept that, in nature, the law of the fittest prevails – the weakest go to the wall and the strong carry on the story. The strong breed and Man is the only exception where we give precedence to the weak, instead of letting them go to the wall. But I would add, we must also match nature’s system by eliminating the weak by making them strong. That is the ultimate answer. And that can only come about, probably, over generations, by correcting these dreadful mistakes that Man has made throughout the whole of his history.

That is why veganism must come first among all our noble causes we support and nearly all of us, I suppose, subscribe to many of them. I know in my case, my pension, or quite a substantial part of it goes to causes which are tackling the problem in a fragmented way, but I see the point of their limited approach to what is inevitably a much wider and more difficult problem.

GDR: What do you think of the way the Vegan Society has developed since you were running it? You’ve already partly answered that, and you also said you wanted to talk about the magazine. So, perhaps you could develop that now.

DW: Well, better than expected, certainly. One wonders how far it will go, now that we have the machine all set up, at great expense and work on behalf of thousands of people, hundreds of them already earning a living, catering for the vegan idea in one kind or another. The fact is that it is still here, growing stronger, all the time, now spreading to many parts of the world. This 2003 calendar, with my picture on it, is from a vegan society in New South Wales. I think the genie is now out of the bottle, no-one can ever put it back, to the ignorant days before 1944, when this seed was planted by people full of hope, full of aspiration that surely this idea would attract enough followers for it at least to survive.

And now, of course, we have our attractive quarterly magazine. I can’t help comparing it with my humble “Vegan News” which I produced at great labour before the Society was first inaugurated. Normally I spent a whole night assembling the various pages, and stapling them together. I’d limited the number of people, who subscribed their five shillings a year, to five hundred, because I couldn’t cope with a bigger number.

I had my own life to live, which wasn’t easy at that time, and to produce five hundred copies of a twelve-page newsletter meant running six thousand pieces of paper slowly through my Roneo and inspecting each one to see that every line was clear and readable, because there would have been no point in all my work if what I sent out wasn’t readable! Even one word missing from a sentence can make the reader wonder about the whole sense of that sentence.

This brings me to the only criticism I have of our present attractive magazine. I hesitate to make it but it is made constructively in the hope that we will have a yet better magazine. There is a little jingle, you know, that must have been invented long ago, for children, which went “good, better, best, never may I rest, till my good is better, and my better best”. That is not only good advice to children, it’s good advice to all of us, and to those who produce magazines, propagating ideas in the hope that they’ll convert readers, but how can they convert anyone if they leave the reader in doubt of what was written?

And so I come to my only criticism and I’m going to quote the misuse of colour, which can add so much to the attractiveness of any periodical. If the printer uses his art to make anything that’s printed difficult to read then he must be told that this is not desirable and I’m going to quote, however pretty his art might make a periodical appear, an article that appeared in the Summer 2002 “Vegan”. It’s called “Carrots and Cannibals”. It was printed in the usual spidery type, which I feel, for the benefit of those who are growing old, could be one step larger, to make the type easier to read, but it’s printed on a coloured background so that, in my case, I found it so hard going to read that I missed it out and about a fortnight later I went back, with the help of a hand glass, and I read this article, which was one of the best articles I have ever read in “The Vegan”, written by Anne Philbrow. I thought what a pity if other people like me, older people, have not read that article that was so carefully constructed, just because it was simply too difficult to read.

Compare that with this clear printing on the front of the Summer ‘Vegan” – white letters on a dark background, standing out clearly, and yet, in the latest magazine, we get the contents in white letters on a virtually white background – most difficult to read for most people whose eyesight is not as good as it was.

So, I say there’s nothing wrong with colour printing providing it doesn’t obliterate the words or make them more difficult to read, especially for older people who may, for all we know, be the very people who leave legacies to the Society. The legacies don’t come from teenagers or young people who’re struggling, day by day, to live, and pay the basic living expenses, to keep their business, and their educations, going. The legacies come from older people, not rich people, but people with no dependents, very often, who can leave thousands of pounds as a kind of blood transfusion to keep our message still available for those who are drawn to read it. I suppose there may be people who will object to that, or any other, criticism, but I felt, early in my life as a propagandist, in vegetarian societies especially, and, in the early days of the Vegan Society, we were sometimes unfortunate enough to find, on our committees, people who seemed to object to everything, relishing it, at last, because of frustrations elsewhere in their own lives, in their jobs or in their marriages. At last they’d found a platform where other people had to listen.

These people are few and far between, but they mustn’t be allowed to destroy the peaceful atmosphere of people who travel far, and very often at their own expense, to deliver what they see as a fair judgement on the problems that we have to face as a movement. I won’t say that they must be swatted, but they must be told, or made to see, in the nicest possible way, that this isn’t the way to behave in any committee.

I’ve never been at a Vegan Society Council meeting, I don’t know the people on it, it’s no reflection on anyone there, but I’ve seen it happen in my early experience, and I suppose it happens on all committees – people who relieve their frustrations, created by factors elsewhere in life, and glorifying the fact that at long last they have a vote and people have to listen. May such people always be outvoted by the more sensible members of any committees, anywhere, where we try to make the difficult process of democracy work.

Compared with democracy, dictatorship has obvious advantages. I know, from the work I did, in the two years before the Vegan Society was formed, when I’d no-one to consult, I could do everything my own way, I don’t think in those years I could have survived, if I had to write to the few people concerned, and ask for their opinion. I had no telephone, I’d no motor car, I could only hope that they would see my point, until the point arrived, when I had to hand over the work to a committee and to people paid to do the job. All the early work was done by volunteers.

In a way everyone whom the Society has ever paid to do the office work, to answer all the thousands of enquiries, that a growing movement, bursting with contacts, receives, all those people have necessarily been underpaid, so that, when their so-called salaries have been used, to pay their basic expenses, in a way they’ve all been volunteers. Even our Chief Executive is on a wage at the very bottom of anything else that is paid in the commercial sector. Because we can afford nothing more. And we’re enormously grateful to these people, because heaven knows what would happen if they all packed in, and got jobs stacking supermarket shelves or something as menial as that, in order to keep the show on the road.

So, my own opinion must be to say a big “thank you”, you won’t be there forever, you can’t be, by the nature of the job you have. And that job, in my view, is the most important job in the world.

I wrote a letter when our last Chief Executive was appointed, reminding him that he had the most important job in the world, but unfortunately not the highest paid.

So the Vegan Society has always, in that sense, been supported by voluntary labour. May there always be people who apply for vacancies in the office, who are willing to make this sacrifice, even for a brief period in their careers. We’re all indebted to them. Next question……

GDR: In what direction do you think the Vegan Society should go in the future?

DW: I hesitate to suggest anything to a movement which seems to be going well, and spreading worldwide, and silencing critics, still surviving, still around. Speaking from my old age, I sometimes think I’ve outlived my critics, and I can’t remember the last time that I encountered one. The edifice, if that’s the right word, that survived all attacks before we started our work, now is crumbling, because of the inherent weakness of its own structure.

Even farming, which for centuries was our basic industry, employing more people than any other, seems now to be on the way out. Farmers can no longer get insurance against diseases like BSE, foot and mouth disease, all the rest of the afflictions that farmers need to handle, usually at great expense, through the service of vets, and as we saw in the foot and mouth debacle, having their whole animal populations wiped out, destroying not only their own industry, but, certainly in many parts of the country, the tourist industry too. People were no longer willing to come to the Lake District, for instance, if they couldn’t walk on the fells. So, the tourist industry, which was far more valuable than the farming industry, suffered. I won’t say irretrievably, because, even after one year, it is now, slowly, getting back to normal, but if we had a return of the foot and mouth disease, any government in power would have to have a different policy altogether from that applied in the last time. Farmers are diversifying, but there is a limit to the extent that this can go. They need to be ingenious, hard­ working, living on a lower income than they’ve ever had before, and wondering whether their children could carry on their farms, as they have done for centuries before, when the parents were no longer able to run them.

GDR: Do you have any regrets about your life?

DW: Well, after a slow start, I married the right woman, at the ripe old age of 36, and we remained happily married for 47 years, until her death nine years ago. That certainly wasn’t anything I regretted, although we live in different times now, and whether, if I were young today, I would ever dare to commit myself for life, for better or worse, to anyone else, I hesitate, but that’s a hypothetical situation, which fortunately I’ll never have to meet. But the marriage vows, for better or worse, were necessary in centuries past, when, if a man walked out on a woman, she was bereft of an income, and, especially for those who had passed the first flush of attractive youth, they had a very bleak future indeed. I’m not an opponent of marriage, because it worked well for me, but I do think that, when it doesn’t work, it can be a most cruel affliction, especially on the innocent party. That isn’t directly associated with veganism, it can happen to anyone on any diet, of course, or life style. But, because things are changed, we have to take a more tolerant view of those who feel that, when young, they made a mistake, and they deserve to be given a fresh start, either with a new partner, married or not. I mustn’t say more on that subject because it doesn’t, strictly speaking, relate to veganism any more than it does to any other life style.

GDR: It doesn’t have to be related to veganism, Donald. But thank you for that answer.

DW: I’ve been lucky in that I chose the right job, and, as I said in my little speech when I retired at the age of 63, as a woodworker I’d been a square peg in a square hole and that I’d never seriously thought of doing anything else. That indeed is luck which many people, alas, never have. So, I had the right wife, I had the right job, I’ve lived in the right place which I can’t fault, except there aren’t enough vegans in it, but one lesson we have to learn in life is we mustn’t expect too much. We have to say, “So far so good, I’ve been lucky, I appreciate it, and, indeed, what have I done to deserve it?”, when things repeatedly go right, while for so many other people they go wrong. Is that luck? Or is it something that happens inevitably if one pursues a course that one feels is right? And, having made that commitment, day by day, one feels one’s way as one goes along.

GDR: What do you consider your greatest achievement in your life?

DW: My greatest achievement? Well, it’s in succeeding, I think, although I mustn’t be the judge, in my own estimation, in achieving what I set out to do. One can hardly rise higher in one’s opinion of one’s life in general, than to feel I was instrumental in starting a great new movement which could even, not only change the course of things, for Humanity and the rest of Creation, but alter Man’s expectation of surviving for much longer on this planet.

GDR: If you had your life to live over again, what changes would you make, if any?

DW: There is one little thing that I would change. In my early days, before I was married, I had a succession of digs, or lodgings, and, sometimes, when I went away at the weekend, I would ask for a reduction on the weekly rent I paid, because obviously I hadn’t been there, eating the food. I always got it, but I feel now that I niggled about something which a more generous person would have forgotten about. I wouldn’t niggle about money any more, if I had my time again.

GDR: Donald, do you have any message for the many thousands of people who are now vegan?

DW: Yes. I would like them to take the broad view of what veganism stands for. Something beyond finding a new alternative to, shall we say scrambled eggs on toast, or a new recipe for a Christmas cake. I would like them to realise that they’re on to something really big, something that hadn’t been tried until sixty years ago, and something which is meeting every reasonable criticism that anyone can level against it.

And I would say that this doesn’t involve weeks or months of studying diet charts or reading books by so-called experts. It means grasping a few simple facts and applying them, just as the early sailors, who were at sea for months, found they developed scurvy because they were lacking in vitamin C, because they were living on dried meat and biscuits, and when they made port, and had access to fruits like limes, their illnesses vanished. Simple proof, like that, that someone once wrote a book, I think his name was Otto Carque and he called the book “Vital Facts About Food”. That was written a long time ago, and we could add to it today, with many things that have been discovered by trial and error, over the last sixty years. I think all vegans should make themselves familiar with these very simple facts and remember, all the time, what an awful lot of danger they’re avoiding. In the early days our critics used to say, “You don’t know what you’re missing!” We know now! We’re missing an awful lot that they’re having! Conditions so serious that it shortens their life by many decades, gives them pains and illnesses very soon after the first flush of youth has passed, and ties them to that medicated regime for the rest of their lives. That is what vegans are missing, providing, as I say, they obey a few simple, commonsense, rules.

That’s my message to vegans who have not been long in the cause.

GDR: Do you have any message for vegetarians?

DW: To vegetarians, I would say, accept, as, if you’re honest you must, that vegetarianism, whilst being a necessary stepping-stone, between meat eating and veganism, is only a stepping stone. We all use this stepping -stone, I’ve not met a vegan who didn’t approach the movement by that route. There may be vegans I’ve never known, over the last sixty years, who made the change all in one leap, but I’m sure that, being a realist, I accept that vegetarianism is a necessary staging-post in the evolution of humane dietetics. All my early work was in the vegetarian movement. I ran the Leicester Vegetarian Society for many years. I organised their monthly meetings. I met virtually all the speakers at that time, who were anybody in the movement. I got a unique insight into what was then considered as far as anyone might be expected to go towards a plant­ based diet, but, of course, we’ve now moved on from there and vegetarians must realise that, although they might find it inconvenient at times, to go the whole way, that is the path that our experience shows that they must go.

GDR: Do we have your permission to publish an edited extract of this interview in “The Vegan” and a longer version of this interview on the website?

DW: Yes, you have my full permission. I do fear the consequences of publication because it could lead to the kind of correspondence I had in the early years – far too many letters, or perhaps even callers, that I could possibly deal with. That is my only fear. I suppose I could reply by directing them to 7 Battle Road.

GDR: That’s the thing to do. In fact, there’s not likely to be all that many letters nowadays, but there’ll be floods of emails. You can’t receive emails anyway, so that lets you off the hook! And the office can easily deal with emails.

DW: Since all these new methods of communication have led to the virtual extinction of letter-writing, which someone once said was the gentlest art; my letters now are few and far between. I’m always delighted to have them – providing they don’t need replies!

I might say there that when I was producing the “Vegan News”, the hard work really was not producing the newsletter, but the avalanche of correspondence that followed, most of which needed answering, many of which didn’t include a stamped addressed envelope for the reply, which I hardly knew how to deal with, being on two pounds a week, and yet the questions were so sensible and those who wrote them were so sincere, that usually, and I think always, I did reply to them. I can’t think of, ever, not replying to a serious enquiry, but I can’t guarantee that now, in my old age, that would still be possible.

GDR: One last question. Won’t you please come and visit the office in St. Leonards? I’ve asked you before, and you haven’t come! I would be very pleased, in fact I’d be honoured to collect you from here, and drive you down there myself – I suggest not in the wintertime, but maybe in the springtime when the milder weather comes along.

DW: You are rather out on a limb, aren’t you, for anyone living up here in the far north – not as far north as you are, of course, but then you’re, what is it, thirty years younger than I am? Would you do it in thirty years’ time? That’s the point. I’m a sociable person – I seem to have been mixed up with crowds of people all my life and I do like, now, to meet them one at a time. I feel that one of my anathemas in life is what is called “the lively debate”, where so many people all talk together, across each other, so that no-one can tell what anyone says. I think when one person is speaking, the rest should listen, and that, nowadays, is expecting a lot of people when they assemble.

And another thing I’ve noticed, especially in the last few years, people on television seem to be speaking faster and faster all the time, and I feel if only they’d slow down, and think a little bit more before they say it, there’s a saying, if I can remember it, “People who say what they think, should think what they say”, because so often people say what they think, and then they regret it. That is one of the dangers of being a propagandist.

GDR: Well, you know what they say – if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

DW: Yes, that’s very true. And yet, the propagandist has to get the message across somehow. In my early days I accepted that the pen is mightier than the sword, and the pen in my case was a typewriter, which I had to buy second-hand along with my Roneo in order to get started, and I had to learn how to use them.

I sometimes think, well I’m thinking non-stop, all the day, just sitting down with my comfortable body, well fed, and not short of sleep, at long last, I’ve no commitments, I just think, and providing I’m warm, I think of the future as Man has always done, of course, and, sometime, inevitably, I suppose within the next ten years, one morning I won’t wake up. What then? There’ll be a funeral, there’ll be a smattering of people at it, and, as Shaw forecast at his own funeral; there will be all the spirits of all the animals he’d never eaten. In that case, it will be a big funeral!

And I certainly don’t seek fame in any form, except when I’m dead and then, only because the idea I spawned will be progressing, generation after generation, learning how to be healthy, how to avoid all the pitfalls that are bringing other people down, and leaving one satisfied in the sense that one has gone as far as one could with the limited mental and emotional equipment we have. Further than that, I can’t think that mortal Man can travel any further always keeping our ears open for those who have new ideas as we expect our would-be converts to listen what we have to say. Veganism certainly can’t stand still, it must move on, perhaps in the direction of more raw food when we all know the destructive power of heat on food, how its nature is changed and perhaps its value too.

Finally, if this is the last question, I think we should accept that although enormous strides have been made, by our workers over the last sixty years, science hasn’t got the complete answer.

I doubt if anyone really knows how our digestion works. They might think they know, but the whole thing is so wonderful, that food can be converted into flesh and blood, bone and hair, as well as energy, mental processes, and even into spiritual enlightenment, that science has hardly got round to accepting as a possibility. We don’t know the spiritual advancements that long term veganism – I mean not over years or even decades, but over generations, would have on human life. It would be certainly a different civilisation, and the first one in the whole of our history that would truly deserve the title of being a civilisation. Full stop.

GDR: Which, I think, is a very positive note on which to end the interview. Thank you, Donald.

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