There’s a moment in Annie Jones’s career that she calls “the turning point”. She had joined a small, family-run meat merchants in the Derby Road area of Ipswich for milk money at the age of 13, and was finally ready to butcher her first loin. Shop-owner George Debman - the kind of gentle surgeon general you see propping up any typical English meat counter - presented her with a pork steak to carefully bone and carve for the day’s service. Staring down, Annie felt an affinity with the steel work top decorated with bloodied ribs and marbled pig dorsal, realising, she recalls, that this was “finally where I am supposed to be”.
Now 21, Annie is three weeks away from finishing an apprenticeship qualification at an Ipswich meat college when we speak. The course comprises everything from “sausage exams” to knife-skill workshops and on-the-job tutelage. During our conversation, Annie uses the word ‘taboo’ more than once - first to describe the kind of carnivorous career path she is destined on as a member of an increasingly vegan-identifying generation, and then about the kinds of jobs that seem to be sinking into the hypnagogic Horrible Histories sludge across Britain.
“Butchery is like an art, because we all have ways of doing it,” reflects Annie of her eight-year tenure at G Debman’s. It’s an artform, also, that she didn’t have to jump through
