I am not obsessed with fish.
I started not being obsessed in 2000, when I read that a tuna had sold in Tokyo for $50,000. My friends enjoyed the anecdote even though they secretly didn’t believe me. A few months later, another Japanese bluefin broke the $100,000 barrier. They believed me then, and I could weave their previous incredulity into future versions of the anecdote, which made it longer, which means the same as better.
But it’s not fish I love, it’s telling people interesting things.
For instance, do you know about the taimen, largest of the salmonids? It hangs around in the mighty river systems of central Eurasia. (The Lena is twelve miles wide in the middle of Siberia, a thousand miles from the Arctic ocean). It’s a proper, fast-swimming trout that leaps from the water and tailwalks, and all the good stuff. The big ones are six feet long and 200lbs.
They catch ducks and squirrels.
Even better, if you can imagine such a thing, are fish stories which feature humans. Bass fishing is one of those huge American sports, like Nascar, that we never hear about in Europe. There is an associated fantasy league. Fans sit in front of computers feverishly speculating about which real angler will catch the heaviest fish, and the biggest prize in fantasy bass fishing – a derivatives market in angling results – is more than $1m.
One of the great things about spending a lot of time flicking through Google, and reviewing non-fiction, and thinking of ways to avoid working in the British Library, is that when I find something interesting, I can follow it up and pretend it is research, even when it is unrelated to fish.
Monkey glands: they were all the rage in the 1920s. Serge Voronoff, a Russian-French doctor worked out, using logic rather than science, that if you transplanted nice young testicles into older animals, you would rejuvenate the latter.
He had a few goes at transplanting the testicles of executed criminals into millionaires, but demand outstripped supply, so he started transplanting bits of monkey testicle into humans instead. Voronoff said eyesight improved, the donee would be able to work longer, and sex drive might be enhanced.
Those of us acquainted with science, rather than logic, know that this literally cannot have been true.
“Monkey-Doodle-Doo”, a song written by Irving Berlin which featured in the Marx Brothers film “The Coconuts” contains the line: “If you’re too old for dancing/ Get your yourself a monkey gland”. In the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the plot revolves around a professor who injects himself with monkey glands. In France, you could buy ashtrays which had monkeys holding their nuts and saying, “No, Voronoff, you won’t get me!” Also, the whole shebang inspired a cocktail containing gin, orange juice, grenadine and absinthe, which was called, The Monkey Gland. It sounds perky.
Trees: did you know the giant South American Alerce was Latin-named Fitzroya cupressoides after the captain of Darwin’s Beagle, who got depressed about accidentally abetting evolutionary theory and founded the Met Office? It can live for at least 3,622 years.
Time obituaries of British peers who died in WWII: ‘Lord David Douglas-Hamilton, 32, son of the 13th Duke of Hamilton, Scotland’s No. 1 peer. A boxer who captained Oxford, he married Prunella Stack (Britain’s “Perfect Girl”), with whom he toured Britain preaching physical fitness. Their son, born in July 1940, was a “perfect boy.” Last August, Squadron Leader Douglas-Hamilton was shot down, killed.’
And: ‘The Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire, 35, 20th of his line, who succeeded to the title as a child after his father’s death in World War I. A man of many parts (Australian sheep rancher, sailor before the mast, rare-books collector, scientist), he became one of Britain’s leading bomb-disposal experts, was blown to pieces (with seven of his staff) by a bomb three years ago.’ (A friend I showed this to pointed out the unfortunateness of the expression ‘man of many parts’ in this context.)
American football: did you know there was a kick returner for the LA Rams called Vitamin T Smith? Or that double Super Bowl winning kicker Jason Elam writes Christian technothrillers set in the NFL? They are, by all accounts, terrible.
Dogs: the golden retriever was invented by a man called Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks. If you ask me, some credit should go to the cobbler from whom he bought a golden dog of indeterminate type whose puppies were the first official golden retrievers.
See, it’s not just fish.
But I cannot tell a lie. I do periodically return to the creatures of the deep. Partly it’s because people think I’m fish guy and so they send me quirky fish facts. (Michael Fish once hosted a dinner for everyone he could find whose surname was a type of fish, and served all the guests with their name-fish). And it’s partly something else. Fishing stories have a special quality, and I never really put my finger on it until I interviewed the angling writer Fred Buller a couple of years ago.
Fred’s the real fish guy. He has a file labelled ‘Minnows’. I asked what was in it. He looked at me as if I was an idiot and said, ‘When I learn anything interesting about minnows, I put it in the minnow file.’ His great works, The Domesday Book of Mammoth Pike and the The Domesday Book of Giant Salmon, are poems to big fish and the quintessence of the hunt. Man is a storytelling animal, and his primal tales were hunting fables that taught the younglings about their surroundings and how to catch the wily food. These are part of the storytelling’s ancient DNA, something encoded as deeply into it as the weird bits of fish anatomy we have left over from evolution are encoded into us. (Did you know that one of your ear’s three bones is the same bone which allows fish to do that weird thing where they protrude their mouths?)
My first book contained as many stories as I could pack into it.
My next book, as it happens, is about fish.
Robert Hudson
Robert Hudson is an author, a journalist and writes musicals. HIs first book, Kilburn Social Club, is a story of love, idealism and identity in something like modern, multicultural Britain. His musical Damsel in Distress, written with Jeremy Sams and based on a Wodehouse novel and Gershwin songs, is due to be produced in Chichester early next year. He writes comedy with Marie Phillips, has appeared in various guises on Radio 4, and runs a monthly evening of sketches, stories and songs in Kilburn.
He is a 14/4 literary dinner guest author on the 22nd of October 2010
more from Robert can be found on his Kilburn Social Club blogspot
“Kilburn Social Club” is available in all good bookshops and on Amazon
You can follow him on Twitter: RobertHudson
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