On Saturday night I went to an early 20th century Japanese themed izakaya here in Ikebukuro which was full of many cheap dishes including some more unusual ones such as frog which I sampled. No problem eating this and it just tasted like chicken but much more bland.

However before that we were a little surprised to see sparrow on the menu as we had no idea that they were even edible. In fact having seen the horrible looking thing on a plate I still think its not edible! If something is prepared so that I can eat it without any picking then I am happy but this looked impossible to eat as so much of it seemed hard and there were lots of thin bones in it too. In the end I just couldn’t bring myself to eat it.

This may be for one of two reasons. Firstly, maybe it’s to do with liking sparrows too much when I was younger.  It may take me a while to get to the point but bare with me for a moment. As bored children my friend Jamie and I started up a decathlon in my back garden which involved the first nine events including throwing a cricket wicket as javelin, using a broom handle to pole vault over an obstacle that was the same as the high jump and the hurdles.

However, we considered the final 1500 metres event to be too taxing so we changed that to sparrow shooting which for eight or nine year olds involved pointing a golf putter up into the skies at the sparrows and then providing our own gunfire noise. We sure knew how to have a good time didn’t we?!!

So surely this juvenile fun(?) with sparrows can be the only reason why I didn’t even dare to take a bite of the poor bird! Either that or I was just a big yellow belly!