When you tuck into a nice bit of haddock and chips with extra salt and vinegar, and green peas with tartare sauce – or maybe mayo if it is near the weekend, do you wonder about the sustainability of the fish stocks in the Atlantic and the North Sea?
Me neither, except maybe at those rare times in the deep mid-winter when some fish are in short supply and you have to have a sausage or black pudding supper instead. No great hardship but fish and chips is the great comfort food of our time which subconsciously tells us all is well with the world.
While we are fretting about the number of calories in a haddock and what is happening in our oceans, the Chinese are going doolally over them. A Yorkshire chippy is now opening a branch in Chengdu in Sichuan province. It’s only a sub-provincial city in Chinese terms with a mere 14.5 million people, but hey ho. They reckon the chippy’s popularity in China is down to Chinese President Xi Jinping eating fish and chips, washed down with a pint of very-English warm beer, with ex-PM David Cameron in 2015. Yuck.
Having been laid up with the grandmama of all colds for the past two or three weeks, Mrs X and I are now playing catch-up with TV shows we missed while spluttering and proving how useless cough mixtures always were, are, and probably always will be. Pouring something that smells of cinnamon, liquorice or lemon with a vaguely medicinal taste down your gullet does not mean it will cure coughs. I am convinced cough medicine is the biggest and most costly scam perpetrated on this gullible nation since the tooth fairy. District nurses misled us about the limp linctus as do today’s better-informed doctors and chemists.
We’ve just caught up with Trawlermen: Celebs At Sea. It had ex-rugby player Ben Cohen, ex-TV chef Antony Worrall Thompson and ex-Boyzone star Shane Lynch working on the Macduff trawler Genesis for 10 days. How could namby-pamby celebs survive on a pitching, yawing storm-tossed trawler? Actually, they did alright considering the up, down, up, down. And that was just their dinners. Shane and Ben had muscles to operate stuff and endlessly gut fish but Antony, at 67, was despatched to the galley to turn out gourmet meals from what seemed like a piece of scrag end and a couple of spuds.
What the two-part series again showed was what fishermen go through to get the cod and haddock on our tables. It’s hell on board. If mechanical problems and raging gales were not enough, the uncertainty over prices and the chance there would be no surplus left to pay the crew after all the expenses makes it a life that I would not thank you for. Fishermen have my respect, always have had, always will – because I love whitefish with spuds, chipped and fried or boiled with a glass of milk and trifle to follow. It’s just my thing, right?
And we finally caught up with Fair Isle. I know it was on a few years ago but it popped up on BBC Scotland’s imaginatively-titled new channel, BBC Scotland. Fair Isle is a community of 50-odd souls eking out a living on a rock. The usual money-spinner is turning out patterned woolly jumpers, obviously. You also need to be ferry crew, a twitcher, a coastguard, a firefighter and an artist. People have come to live there from all over the world. And, if the puddle-jumper is not flying because of the weather, the only other way to reach civilisation on Shetland is in a converted trawler. Aargh.
Maybe no one’s watching BBC Scotland because no one knows it’s there. Why is the name the same as the entire Scottish service? Come on, Pacific Quay. Self-evident numptiness is bad for the Beeb, strengthens the hand of its detractors and short-changes viewers. It’s bad for Scotland where institutional numptiness is, er, not improving. Diabolical viewing figures may yet force their hand. Meanwhile, get rid of the alleged comedy which is also embarrassingly dire and fund the channel properly. Two Doors Down deserves to be six feet down. I would rather have a whole series about life on a trawler or even shellfish prices.
How about a programme about the crab fisherman who went into a Stornoway bar with a crab in his pocket? He set the crab on the bar and it walked perfectly straight ahead, instead of scuttling from side to side like crabs usually do. The barman was gobsmacked. Sensing he could make a few bob, he offered the fisherman £50 for his crab and took it home. The next day he takes the crab out of its bucket, but it begins scuttling from side to side. “What’s up with you?” the barman asks. “Why aren’t you walking straight?” The crab looked him straight in the eye and says: “Come on, gie’s a break. Even I can’t get that drunk every day.”
