IT was the lamb that did it. No, I'm not going to spin you a yarn about killer sheep, and anyway the lamb in question was very dead itself and, it must be said, very tasty.

But the lamb was responsible for the direction the conversation took at a rather splendid dinner party I was invited to last week.

There it sat, centre plate, tender and sweet and surrounded by petit pois and creamy potatoes.

Not unnaturally, the conversation turned to the subject of food, meat in particular. There were no vegetarians at the dinner table, which was fortunate, considering what happened next.

"The best meat of all is the meat from an animal - elk, moose, caribou - something you've just killed yourself," said the man on my right.

Ireally ought to tell you at this point, that I wasn't attending a butchers' convention but a dinner party held in honour of a group of visiting North American businessmen and women.

Unfortunately, the chap on my left had just been telling me about his work as a wildlife conservationist. This obviously didn't preclude him from eating animals - but hunting them? Oh dear, I thought, the fur is definitely going to fly now.

Astonishingly, it didn't. Instead the conservationist not only agreed with the hunter but went into raptures over the special taste of wild duck brought to earth with your own well-aimed shot and roaste over an outdoors campfire.

I, having lived for the past 25 years in Brighton, have never felt the urge to hunt and kill for the pot. Well, with a fish and chip shop or Indian takeaway on every street corner there's not the necessity, is there?

Then I remembered the lobster. It was a rather battered (as in combat rather than coated in) but live specimen, bought whilst on holiday in a small northern fishing village when my son was still a small boy.

He thought his father and I had purchased it as a pet, not realising that once he was in bed, said lobster was intended for a romantic dinner a deux.

"Goodnight lobster," he said, as he toddled upstairs to bed. "See you in the morning."

His father and I shuffled around uneasily knowing that all that would be around next morning when he awoke would be a few bits of shell safely hidden away in a refuse bag. Anyway, we told each other, he'd never remember the lobster. It wasn't as if you could stroke or cuddle it, was it?

So we cooked it, as humanely as we knew how by putting it into a saucepan of cold water and then gently heating the water till the lobster passed out. Before it actually lapsed into unconsciousness, however, it did try to climb out of the saucepan, knocking the pan lid onto the floor.

It was all a bit traumatic (especially for the lobster), so much so I've erased the actual eating of it from my memory.

The next morning our son was up early - looking for his new 'pet'. How do you tell a child who obviously sees last night's supper as some sort of armoured kitten, that you've eaten it?

"It ran off," we said, "off into the hills and back to the sea, to its brothers and sisters.... " Even now I don't know if he ever believed us.

But from that day I always knew I didn't possess the killer instinct - however hungry.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.