Fish

Friday

Phil Rhys Thomas

Admit it: no one really likes eating fish

As I sit under the sole tree on a Spanish beach, watching my fellow Brits shudder at the writhing horror show contained in the restaurant’s seafood display, it strikes me the middle classes don’t actually much like the dead-eyed edibles under the waves – we’re just conditioned to pretend to because eating them is supposedly chic. Sure, we extol fish as a sustainable and sophisticated source of high-quality protein, vitamin D and what sounds like K-pop’s next girlband, omega-3. It’s the well-informed, thinking man’s dinner, akin to choosing a Tesla before Elon Musk’s meltdown phase. But let’s be honest: the glassy stare (I’m still talking about the fish), the slimy

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The war on normality

Exciting news. To ‘showcase the vibrant diversity of both marine life and the LGBTQ+ community’, the visionary Bristol Aquarium has just announced a one-off tour of non-binary fish. On 28 June, its Sunset Seas exhibit will ‘celebrate love, life and the beauty of being yourself’ by illuminating with brightly coloured lights a collection of creatures that ‘defy the binary, change sex and mirror the spectrum of identities found in the human world’. Adults-only tickets are a mere £18.50, so rush to reserve your place now. We’re presumably to conclude from this racy reveal that because some fish can change sex and hermaphroditic undersea organisms are commonplace, for humans sex is

Thursday

Olivia Potts

Sole meunière: simple one-pan sophistication 

Picture the scene. The year is 2004. The setting, a British field or maybe a beach. There is a small open fire burning with a single cast-iron pan perched on it. A male TV chef – dressed in a striped shirt, open at the neck, chinos, possibly red, leather shoes – is standing over it, reverently holding a fish. ‘This is a beautiful piece of fish,’ he says, ‘and we’re not going to do anything fancy here. It doesn’t need it! We’re going to keep it simple.’ There must have been a clause in the contract of any TV cookery show in the early 2000s to say that a beautiful

Tuesday

Caspar Henderson

The song of the bearded seal and other marvels

In his satirical Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defined the ocean as ‘a body of water occupying about two thirds of a world made for man – who has no gills’. Bierce may have been right to poke fun at human arrogance, but he underestimated the importance of the seas. Averaging almost 3,700 metres (12,000ft) deep, the ocean constitutes around nine tenths of the habitable space on our planet. It plays a commensurate role in the Earth system, not least as an engine – a ‘blue machine’ in the phrase that also titles an excellent book by the physicist and science presenter Helen Czerski – that moves heat around the planet.

Thursday

Olivia Potts

Fish and chips: the fast food that made me

The last meal my parents had before I graced the world with my presence was fish and chips, so I like to think it forms part of my origin story. Growing up on the coast, fish and chips featured in all its forms: bags of chips clutched on windy beach walks; takeaway fish suppers brought home by Dad, steam escaping from cardboard boxes; and the ultimate luxury, a sit-in experience at Colmans, the South Shields king of fish and chip restaurants, accompanied by a slice of bread and butter and a cup of tea. I was built on fish and chips; salt and vinegar course through my blood. Battered fried

Friday

Josh Barrie

Forget cod – there are plenty more fish in the sea

When it comes to seafood, Britain is a curious place: surrounded by water, in which you can find some of the best fish and shellfish money can buy, and yet so often we are averse to eating it.   There have been numerous campaigns promoting British fish led by just about every chef on television. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is one. It seems almost every month that the River Cottage fellow is trumpeting the virtues of our fish stocks. Rick Stein is another; a little more successfully, from his empire in Cornwall. When was the last time you spotted a John Dory in Tesco or a fresh megrim sole on ice in Sainsbury’s?

Thursday

Stuart Kelly

Close to extinction: Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman, reviewed

Ned Beauman’s novels are like strange attractors for words with the letter ‘Z’. They zip, zing, fizz, dazzle and sizzle. They are a bizarre bazaar of pizzazz. Some readers no doubt might find his form of literary hyperactivity exhausting. Personally, I find it exhilarating. In part this is because the novels do not just have propulsive plotting but the ideas are high-octane as well. Venomous Lumpsucker does not pause for breath, yet simultaneously induces a weary, melancholy exhalation. The venomous lumpsucker in question throws together two very different characters and works as an effective McGuffin for the novel. Mark Halyard is the environmental impact coordinator (Northern Europe) for the Brahmasamudram

Thursday

Alex Clark

A playful version of the universe: Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti, reviewed

Readers familiar with Sheila Heti’s work, most notably How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood, in which she examines both the possibility and implications of choosing one’s life and dealing with the consequences, will be familiar with her apparent capriciousness. Her prose — freewheeling, elliptical, a tangle of jokiness and jeopardy — seems to capture the puzzle of proportionality: how seriously should we take this one life we have, and how can we hope to balance our opposing urges towards levity and gravity? In Pure Colour, we appear to be in similar territory, immediately introduced to a playful version of the universe in which humans are the critics of God’s

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

The real ‘scallop’ war: how do you pronounce it?

‘You say scallops and I say scallops,’ sang my husband in his best Ginger Rogers accents. Since we both pronounce the bivalve to rhyme with dollop, there was a certain lack of contrast. There has been a scallop war with France in past days. Though both French and English enjoy them on the plate, it is the French in the 15th century who provided us with the name, escalope. We just knocked the beginning off the word. Our cockle too, from at least a century earlier, is from the French word that gives them coquilles St Jacques. (Mussel is from Latin musculus, ‘muscle’, which also gave the word mus, ‘mouse’,

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Winning a knife fight with a fish: Newlyn Fresh Fish reviewed

It’s a good day to stab something and tear out its heart. Elaine Lorys is the only female master fishmonger in Britain. She stands in an apron in the Stevenson fish shop in Newlyn amid the brightness of the autumn sun and signage offering mussels, oysters and clams; bass, bream and red mullet; crab and scallops; fish cakes and fish pies. Much of the fish is caught by Stevenson boats and landed at Newlyn, and is available for delivery across the UK during lockdown. The harbour is across the road, looking fine and functional, apart from the mossy medieval pier that the Mayflower may have sailed from: a local tale

Thursday

Charles Clover

How to stop trawling from trashing the North Sea

Recently Greenpeace dropped a boatload of granite boulders on to Dogger Bank, a permanent threat to any boat that attempts to drag a trawl net across the sandy sea-bottom. One of the biggest boulders had my name painted on it, because Greenpeace asked and I said yes. And in saying yes, I crossed a line that I have never crossed before in 40 years of writing about the environment. I joined the activists, in I hope a measured way, because it’s so very important to give the North Sea a chance to revive itself. Dogger Bank is the ecological heart of the North Sea and it played a large part

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: the NHS shutdown is hurting patients and costing lives

Poor treatment Sir: My recent experience supports Dr Max Pemberton’s view that the NHS is letting down thousands of patients (‘Nothing to applaud’, 30 May). I am a 71-year-old living alone, with no symptoms of coronavirus. For several weeks I have, however, been experiencing severe pain in my left hip. A consultation with my GP diagnosed that I needed a shot of cortisone to reduce the inflammation, but I was told that the NHS was unable to offer clinical consultations due to a focus on the crisis. I was unable to cope with the pain any longer, so my daughter arranged a private consultation and an injection at a cost

Thursday

Andrew Watts

Britain’s strange aversion to seafood

Last week’s Brexit negotiations, conducted by video conference, failed to come to an agreement on fisheries. Michel Barnier, the EU negotiator (and former French fisheries minister), insisted that continued European access to British territorial waters was a prerequisite of any deal, and David Frost, his British counterpart, replied that this was ‘incompatible with our status as an independent coastal state’. If there is going to be no deal as a result of fishing, as seems increasingly probable, we are going to have a lot more fish to eat, but we’re also going to have to eat a lot more fish. For an island surrounded by fish, Britain has never really