As it's just about possible that our coastal waters might warm by nearly 2 degrees (C) in the next half century - if, that is, this particular projection from the Met Office's so far spectacularly wide-of-the-mark portfolio of warming predictions turns out to be right - it really is high time, is it not, that we started thinking about what fish we might be obliged to eat with our chips in 50 years' time. It could be that some less familiar members of the finny tribe will extend their range northward if those projections are right, and some of them might do well in our waters. And others not. Either way, it's surely worth a story on the BBC News website (drawing on a piece in the journal Nature Climate Change - the clue's in the title), and it's always nice to see a picture of a plate of fish and chips. Is it really haddock though? That's what I want to know. Who's to say it's not cod? Or, come to that, reconstituted John Dory? These things matter.
(By the way, I love that phrase 'according to modelling work' - if that's what the fish are looking for, I don't think the John Dory's going to get much.)
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In Anthony Burgess’s long-forgotten 1985, a novel set in an England run by the TUC and re-named Tucland, a group of hoodies, who have studied a shortened version of The Carpetbaggers for O Level, adopt the ageing hero Bev because he “knows stuff.” The following exchange gives a flavour:
ReplyDelete“An underground university. Paid for by robbery, which has to mean violence. Teaching useless things. Latin, Greek, history. We got lousy education, right?”
“Right.”
“Lousy because it’s Labour. Lousy because it levels. No clever boys wanted. There’s certain things it won’t allow, because it says they’re no good for workers. Now it follows that the things they won’t allow must be the only things worth knowing. You get that?”
“There’s a sort of logic in it.”
“We go to school, we lot, till we’re sixteen. That’s the law. Okay we go and we don’t listen to the crap they call sociology and Worker’s English. We sit at the back and read Latin.”
“Who teaches you Latin?”
“There are these antistate teachers about. You a teacher?”
“History. Very useless.”
“Okay there are these thrown out of school for not wanting to teach the crap they’re supposed to, right? They wander, like you’re wandering. We give them the odd wad, like we’re doing to you. They give us a bit of education in return. Real education, not State school crap.”
Tristram Hunt, take note
"The flat fish are really in trouble," Perhaps we should form a flounder and dab collective to give them succour or seek means of inflating flatfish in some manner. What do you think Nige? We certainly can't stand by and watch!
ReplyDeleteQuite so Guy - every time I see a flatfish I feel a pang. it is time to act. Maybe we could blanket the North Sea with good old-fashioned industrial smog - perhaps imported from China? That would keep the sun off it a treat...
ReplyDeleteThat's a very telling quotation, Ingoldsby!
Whoops! I attached my reply to the wrong article. (It should have gone with the churchyard one.) Sorry!
ReplyDeleteThey are all one, Ingoldsby, never fear,
ReplyDelete