Connected Notes on Decadence and Guilt.

I still experience difficulty with the habit some people have of cutting the crusts off bread when making sandwiches. It seems inexcusably decadent to me (but I do try to excuse it because, well… kids today, you know?) Posh food outlets do it as well, which is the second reason – after their inflated prices – why I never go into posh food outlets.

My early days were spent in a working class household with parents who had known what it was to live on the bread line. They had themselves spent a childhood immersed in the standard form of working class poverty, and had also been subjected to the privations of the war years. And so I was instructed by them from the moment of weaning to eat the whole of whatever I was given and be grateful for the fact that it was there at all. 

But they allowed two exceptions. The first was brains on toast. (Yes, actual brains – white, slimy stuff which looked vaguely like albino scrambled egg only shiny. Can you imagine anything more disgusting than that?) The second was grilled conger eel steaks. It seems my parents recognised that the taste of conger eel was too strong for a child’s palate and allowed me an alternative. (I never did find out what conger eel tasted like because the smell alone was enough to turn my stomach.)

 

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And now the tone of this post has to change because any mention of conger eel takes me back to an incident in my childhood.

We were on holiday in Devon, and one evening I was standing on the quayside at Brixham when I witnessed a man trying to bludgeon a conger eel to death with a heavy piece of wood. The poor fish wouldn’t die, but wriggled and struggled for what seemed like an age on the alien concrete as the brute of a man continued to beat the back of its head with the blunt instrument. I think it was my first experience of true brutality, and it horrified me.

Even now, when prompted to recall the memory, I feel an almost choking sense of remorse that I did nothing to save the creature. Exactly what would be hard to imagine since I was only 11, but the recollection is clear and the guilt wriggles and struggles as the fish did.