Saturday morning and the tree is in. Cora and I bought it last week from Church Farm  late in the afternoon as the sun started to close down and a grey milky light lay on the South side of the Wirral. It spent the week in an orange bucket round the back of the house. I thought it might enjoy the cold and the wet for a few more days before being brought into the dry and hung with baubles. Andrea pointed out it might have enjoyed all that more if it still had its roots.

Last night kids were out either babysitting or partying so I turned on BBC4 to see what music might be on offer going on to the early hours. The second half of The Rolling Stones documentary Crossfire Hurricane was starting so I settled down to watch that. It covered some of the glory years from Mick Taylor joining, Madison Square Gardens, Altamont to Ronnie Wood joining and Some Girls – the constants being Mick Jagger’s appalling clothes, Charlie and Bill’s grim faced determination and the stone eyed Keith stare as his thickening fingers beat down on the metal strings of his guitar.

What was frightening was the empty wild faces of the Hell’s Angels at Altamont, Meredith Hunter’s bright green suit leading up to the hedonism and swirl of the audiences in the mid-seventies full of self-regard and the band edging away from that horror.

After that there was a film of The Rolling Stones playing with Muddy Waters at the Checkerboard Club in Chicago. Mick wearing some kind of horrible bright red plastic jump suit hamming it up, Ronnie & Keith at the back with smiles on their faces, Ian Stewart clambering out onto the stage to get to the piano and Muddy Waters at the front calling out the names of the band, his band playing as they had been doing for so many years.

This evening it is the turn of the B’s.

Birt or Byrt A small turbot (O.E.)

Blonde Lat. Raja brachyura. A large and sluggish ray – it grows to a length of four feet – common near Plymouth.

Boarfish Capros aper. A Mediterranean and N. Atlantic fish allied to the Red Mullet

Brancino A perch – like fish, a native of the Adriatic and the best fish one is likely to eat in Venice. It is usually boiled in a court-boullon and served either hot with a Genoise sauce, or cold with a Mayonnaise.

Breet An obsolete name for Turbot.

Brit, Bret or Burt A small turbot in England; a small herring in the U.S.A.

This evening listening to Sera Cahoone who apparently used to be the drummer in Band of Horses. There is a song that sounds like Dreams to Remember by Otis Redding which was done brilliantly by Okkervil River and would have gone well last night as we were picking both our favourite Christmas song and our favourite cover version. This does it in one.

One of the small joys from doing some of your Christmas shopping in a second hand book shop is coming across the odd book that will do for no one else but you. So today I found A Concise Encylopaedia of Gastronomy Section II Fish complied under the editorial direction of Andre L. Simon and published in 1948.

The first thing that caught my eye was the description of mackerel straight out of the water, they are quite stiff, opalescent, with bright protruding eyes and bright red gills. Beware of the limp mackerel. Which is indigestible always, and maybe poisonous.

Good advice. I then noticed some of the odd names for fish and thought it might form the basis for an occasional series. Here’s starting with A.

Alec An old Latin word of Greek origin (salt fish), which is used to refer to a herring or a pickle of small herrings.

Alewife Lat. Pomolobus pseudoharengus. A member of the herring family very abundant off the Atlantic coasts of North America and of great gastronomic value.

Atherine Lat. Atherina presbyter. Commonly known as Silverside or Sand-smelt. An excelllent little fish which can be dressed in any way suitable for smelt.

Listening to and very much enjoying Frank Ocean.

On the moment I am reading Up In The Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell. It is one of the best books I have read in a while. The book is a collection of the pieces he wrote for The New Yorker bwtween the 1930’s and 50’s. They are long and discursive, dealing with the people, the characters he meets as he walks the streets of New York and its environs. He gives the people time to talk about themselves and what they do. Some of these conversations are almost an aside to the meaning that he was able to find for their lives and their place in the city.

One of the joys of the book is the time that he spends to describe the waters around New York and along the coast up to Connecticut and the lives of the fishermen and the other boatmen who spend their time, and make their living on the sea.

One of those men is an Ellery Franklin Thompson, a Dragger Captain, a dragger is a small trawler. Mitchell describes him as about as self-sufficient as a man can be. He has no wife, no politics and no religion. Amongst other things he notices his trousers leathery with fish blood and slime…

Later this month I should be receiving the latest copy of Fire & Knives which should contain an article I have written about lobsters and fishing for them with Tommy Arundel. As a sort of celebration of that here is a description of how Ellery Thompson cooks and eats his lobster.

He is a matchless lobster chef. He boils and he broils and he makes lobster chowder, but most often he boils. He puts a tub of fresh sea water on the little coal stove in the cabin and heats it until it spits. He wraps his lobsters in seaweed and drops them in, half a dozen in a batch, and times them with a rusty alarm clock that hangs from a cop hook on the underside of a shelf above the stove; after exactley fifteen minutes, he dips them out. He lets them cool slowly, so the meat won’t shrink and become flavorless and rubbery, the common condition of cold boiled lobsters in restaurants, and then he heaps them on cracked ice in the ice bin in the forward fish hold. He and his crew – Frank, the mate, and Charlie, the third man – reach in and get a lobster any time they feel like it. They eat them standing on deck. They smack them against the rail to crack the shells, pluck out the tail and claw meat, and chuck the rest overboard. One fall day, out of the Hell Hole, the three of them ate fourteen in between meals.