Fish

It’s impossible to write about fish without a feeling of foreboding. Fish stocks are dwindling everywhere, with catastrophic speed in the case of cod and wild salmon. Governments around the world sit on their hands to avoid losing the fishing vote, blithely ignoring the depredations of high-tech trawlers with five-mile nets hoovering the sea bare and snapping the food chain with a dogged self-interest that defies belief. Having already seen the herring virtually disappear from the North Sea twenty years ago, we now face the prospect that some of our most familiar fish will soon vanish, to be replaced, until they prove to be uneconomic, by deep-sea fish familiar to us only through photos in National Geographic.