Every time I’ve wanted to take leave, the company in its wisdom has devised yet another training course, which has resulted in me being stuck in lecture rooms.
The upside is that I’m now in the enviable position of having to take a whole bunch of ‘use it or lose it’ days off before the end of the year, which means work-wise 2013 is almost over.
Thinking ‘check the worry in my eyes’, last week management and I headed off to Mousehole in Cornwall, which has the honour of being the smallest fishing harbour in England.
Described by Dylan Thomas as the UK’s loveliest village, Mousehole is unique with its skinny streets and stone fishermen’s cottages. It’s said to have been the inspiration for Thomas’s classic ‘Under Milk Wood’.
However, such poetic thoughts were not foremost on my mind as we wandered through the cobbled alleys. I just wondered what do people do for a living here in sleepy Cornwall, arguably England’s most beautiful county.
Well, not much. Apart from smuggling cognac from France, Cornwall used to have a thriving tin mining industry. When tin and smuggling collapsed, so did the economy. Now there’s just fishing and tourism and selling off quaint beach cottages to wealthy Londoners as holiday bolt-holes.
But fishing is under huge threat as the European Union rules are so ludicrous that much of what the boats catch they have to dump. For example, if you have a haddock licence and you haul up a shoal of valuable cod, it has to be chucked overboard as trash fish.
It’s like most environmental schemes; good intentions are mugged by reality. The famous Vietnam war quote, ‘In order to save the village, we had to destroy it’ is today a greenie mantra.
Unable to cope with such madness, many Cornish fishermen have hung up their nets or gone broke. But those that remain are a hardy bunch and have banded together with cunning marketing plans that give me hope for both fish sustainability and common sense.
I discovered this when management wanted to buy a chunk of fresh fish to take home after a diet of delicious seafood at harbour-side bars. I was double-parked and so didn’t come into the fishmonger, but did a double take when she emerged with a fisherman carrying a yard-long polystyrene cool box.
Bargain buy
I whispered to her that she was only meant to buy a fillet not the entire shop, but she said that whole box of fish had cost R200.
What? Fish is among the most expensive food in England, so what was going on here?
We got chatting to the fisherman, who said the main challenge facing them was getting Brits to expand their gastronomic tastes. Most fish caught in British waters was frozen and sent to Europe and transport costs ate deeply into profits. But the true irony was that for an island race, few Brits eat seafood, apart from deep-fried cod and greasy chips.
He said one of his mates had a Japanese wife who took fillets of wrasse – considered the ultimate trash fish – to Japan and asked some sushi restaurants to sample it.
One chef pronounced it the ‘finest tuna’ he had tasted. So now they send wrasse, barely hours old, to a famous London restaurant and market it as Cornish sushi. If the diners knew it was wrasse, a cold water parrotfish, they would choke on their soy sauce.
Management also bought a chunk of pollack, which most Brits would only eat if they were in concentration camps. We grilled it in lemon butter. I could barely taste the difference between it and cod.
But the biggest eye opener was when management told me she had bought sole for a R10 a fish. How so, I asked? A sole will set you back R400 in a restaurant.
Ah, but these were Megrim soles, which unlike their cousins Dover and Lemon, are small and ugly. But they taste just the same.
So for the price of a processed supermarket hamburger, management and I have been eating stuff that you would only taste in the finest London restaurants.
That alone paid for our holiday.
