There’s a new horror down in the countryside on a par with foot and mouth and blue tongued cows and the despair of the fox the badger and the deer. Romanies threaten to set up camp. They’ve bought a field, put three caravans in it and applied to the District Council to bring in more.

Residents of the nearest village – a couple of miles away – are more than agitated. They’ve set up an action group. The presence of Romanies will mean flooding, collisions, children walking along roads, loss of village amenities, travellers in laybys and on unauthorised land, problems with disposal of effluent, water supply contamination, increased traffic. And what of the schools and the local infrastructure. The council should move these travellers on to somewhere suitable that isn’t an area of natural beauty.

I keep quiet. But at night on Late Junction on Radio 3, I was with the Romanies as I heard their poems and music and stories of a dying itinerant community – children of the wind.

From my Barbican flat I count fifteen cranes. The tops of them are in the clouds. Between existing skyscrapers new glass blocks rise up like krakens. ‘200,000 feet of stunning office space’ hoardings to building sites declare. Major, new, and stunning are adjectives that recur. This is the development of the City of London, prime space for those who make money from financial services and live elsewhere.

All night these blocks blaze with electric light. (Strange and unfamiliar down in Devon at night to see a dark sky wild with stars.) The old city is still here somewhere but boxed in and harder than ever to find. No parkland’s on offer in all this major new stunning development, nor are there new dwellings for ordinary mortals. There are though four Pret A Mangers within fifty yards of here.

Pret A Manger is French for refrigerated machine-packed sandwiches filled with le fromage et la tomate and le really wild saumon and principles of sustainability and good business practice and for le bullshit wrap, all of which is best consumed on la bordure de trottoir, on account of the paucity of grass in this rich and stunning much-developed highly lucrative capital space.

My vegan diet is now in its third month. No sense of hardship as long as I mix everything with chilli and garlic. I’ve had lapses in restaurants when there didn’t seem anything, my way, to eat. Not wanting to sit like a spectre, I’ve gone for a bit of fish or mussels with the pasta.

I prefer to eat as I go. My current passion is hummus: a can of chick peas – organic, ça va sans dire – a glob of tahini, garlic – too much, olive oil and lemon juice. Shove it all in the blender and indulge with pitta bread or broccoli florets. Best eaten in the garden, particularly if the weather’s bad. And now I buy the almost very best olive oil and balsamic vinegar – transforming agents for any chomping crop.

I’m not like my hero J.M.Coetzee who says he’s no desire to put dismembered bits of the corpses of creatures in his mouth. (I paraphrase, his words were both more eloquent and startling.) I can still dream of lamb stew with onions and creamy mashed potato. But I’m tired of living with the division between what I think and what I do. I don’t want anything to die or suffer to feed me and I entirely dislike how we treat animals. So that’s why I’m on the bean wagon.

Morning coffee was a difficult adjustment. In another life my fetishistic rite was to heat the milk to precisely the right temperature. Now I drink a tiny cup – thin white porcelain - of black arabica. It’s the size and sight of the cup that makes it ok.

Tip of the day: before your morning cold shower and birch twig flagellation, put a drop or two of rosewater in your porridge made with tap water. Sing ‘We plough the fields and scatter’ as you stir in fruit and nuts and lace with honey. Live for ever and let live, I say.