So last night at about 11.30 I go off to bed after having finished writing a bit about mackerel and obliquely mentioning how on a good day you can haul out a few hundred over a couple of hours in Dunmannus Bay and I wake up this morning to hear on the news we have all been catching too many of them and we were not to eat them again.

Having woken up and listened more carefully and then read down the article on the BBC webpage it was not quite that bad. There are still plenty of mackerel left but if we (and that is a very big we) carry on hoovering them out of the water as some are doing on the moment then all of a sudden we could find ourselves with considerably less mackerel in the sea.

It was only a few days ago I was…