A long time ago I was staying with friends in Cumberland and we were asked out to dinner. Our host and hostess’s home from the outside was more like a manoir than a Cumbrian farmhouse.
Inside it had monastic simplicity. We went into a stone-flagged hall for champagne, then to a dining room with candles flickering around the walls in sconces. It was completely unreal, so it hardly came as a surprise that dinner comprised only lobsters – a whole freshly boiled lobster, no doubt extracted from the warm waters around Sellafield, – per diner. The accompanying grog continued to be champagne. To be truthful I wasn’t too sure how to approach a lobster that had not been prepped in the kitchen. Unlike an old friend, faced with her first prawn cocktail, I watched and copied. She left the prawns until last and then crunched one whole in its shell. One can have too much of a good thing and I was sorry there wasn’t any white Burgundy on offer. As it happens my opinion of lobster is that it is a tasteless, rubbery crustacean best left to its own devices on the seabed. The house has changed hands and my host may have changed wives. If you are having a madeleine moment longing for lobster, Lockdown Lobster delivers in London whole alive-alive oh lobsters from Wales. Not for me, thanks.
As it was the weekend I didn’t overdo it except to spray the box hedge against the dreaded moth that kills box. (See Cydalima perspectalis and Robin Lane Box.) The jasmine is coming into flower but the agapanthus are looking rather seedy – just as well as they could poison Bertie if they burst into bloom. On Sunday morning, sinfully, I filled out my tax return; a task that brought me no joy but I suppose the exchequer needs my contribution more than ever this year.
If restaurants ever open again, of course they will, I will be at Seabird when there is an “r” in the month. My guest may have a lobster but I won’t. Until then I’m gonna lap up summer wine.
Surely the lobsters served by the austere host in Cumbria had at least been boiled, even if you had the bother of extracting them from their shells? I notice that there are no dressed lobsters from Canada in M&S at the moment, so that’s one element in the food chain which has succumbed to the crisis.
The reply from a Canadian newspaper report (the Halifax Chronicle Herald): ‘“The season was going so well at the start. Finally the prices were reflecting the market. But when COVID started, and as the price started to drop, you could see it in the fishermen’s faces,” he said. “The drive was gone. This fleet didn’t haul like we normally do all spring. It’s not that we didn’t want to go, we didn’t know if we should go.”
There was speculation prices would drop further and fishermen, who have high operational expenses, had to ask themselves: Is it worth our while?
The highest the shore price went during the season was around $10 a pound in January, at a time when fishing activity had slowed. While the price would have normally stayed at that level and/or climbed over the winter months, after about a week it dropped and kept dropping when the Chinese market evaporated because of the pandemic. Other markets slowed as well. Cargo flights overseas were suspended.’