That Leona Lewis seems like a nice girl. A passable warbler, she cares about things. Having won an award for being the sexiest vegetarian a few years ago, she knows a lot of interesting facts about creatures of all kinds.
Leona
However, she was tweeting the other days about stuff which I thought was nothing short of nonsense because, if it was true, I would have learned it many moons ago. Our Leona wrote all lobsters are, wait for it, immortal. What? Never in my puff had I heard that. Had you?
Listen, lovely long-legged Leona, if I haven’t heard anything like that about those particular cuddly crustaceans then it is probably not true. That is no idle boast because I was brought up in Great Bernera, otherwise known as Lobster Island, and where the main occupation in years gone by was, yes, lobsters. Lobster this, lobster that. Lobster fishing on lobster boats, lobster selling and, on a regular basis, lobster eating.
Everybody did it. It was what Bernera was known for. There are various lobster ponds still in use around the place, sadly many disused. We did lobsters – and in a big way.
There is no chance the monster lobster that clamped its claws around my thumb on Kirkibost Pier is still scuttling about in Loch Roag. Oh, the agony. I walloped it and tried to poke its eyes out – but they were pretty much out already, if you know what I mean, so that didn’t work.
Flinging it, with my hand still attached, against my car, scraping the paintwork, it still wouldn’t detach. It was scary how strong and determined this lump of shell and raw thermidor actually was.
It was only when a brawny prawn fisher fellow heard my howls and sort of twisted it off my bloodied digit that it finally opened its pliers. Ouch and double ouch.
I’ve still got the marks from the brute’s pincers. I won’t go into colourful detail about what happened next but suffice to say the nasty nephropidae did tumble off the pier to its final resting place. It did shuffle off this mortal coil. It was an ex-lobster with any chance of immortality it had definitely gone.
Oh yes, there is so much I do know about lobsters. They actually have blue blood, they become cannibals if there are too many of them in the same space and they can flip their tails to shoot backwards at up to 11 mph. Gee whizz, that’s faster than my wife driving forward.
Kindly people who stab them between the eyes before boiling them alive are wasting their time as their brains are in separate parts, mostly in the throat. They would have to accurately puncture all the parts to cause a more humane and instant death. Sorry, I hope you’ve had your breakfast but this is nature – blue in tooth and claw.
They are really odd creatures. Everything is in the wrong place. They breathe and listen with their legs and their gustation organs are down in their feet. That means taste buds. Yep, a lobster tastes with its tootsies. I wouldn’t be surprised if lobsters were designed by Western Isles Council.
There are so many myths though. I remember being told on Jersey the dish lobster thermidor was so called because it had to be cooked in hot water and the Greek word for heat is therm. It’s actually named after Thermidor, the name of a certain month in summer on the old French Republic calendar, when it is a treat in the heat. So there.
Even if they manage to avoid the pots belonging to Bernera fishermen, lobsters are not immortal even if some scientists think they have found some big ones which may be up to 100 years old.
In fact, buyers can quite accurately work out the age of a lobster by grading it as new shell, hard shell or old shell. I’ll tell you another funny thing. New shell lobsters are well known for being sweeter and tasting best of all but, because they don’t travel well, are usually sold cheaply to locals. But the ones who are donkeys years old, always fetch a high price and cost a lot in swanky restaurants – even though they can sometimes taste like tough old boots.
So it pays to be nice to your local, smelly fisherman. They work very hard and are very competitive. The boats are always trying to outdo each other and catch more than their neighbours so they can boast about it when they get back in to harbour. It must be very stressful all that pier pressure.
Great guys, fishermen. I love them all. You know, I think this might be the time to take a walk along the quay again.
There is nothing like the local shellfish. There are restaurants in London promoting the fact their scallops, crabs and lobsters come from the cool, clear waters around the Hebrides. Consignments go down in trucks and by rail most nights of the week.
I wonder which London railhead they arrive at? Probably Kings Crustacean.
