My father lives in Alderney because he hates the labour government. He has a violent crush on Margaret Thatcher and likes to bring her up on a daily basis. Anthony, who is from Nottingham, has written a sympathetic account of the miners strike and used to be a skinhead. I took Anthony to meet him in May, on a tiny plane from the 70's with more weight in duty-free gin than passengers.
My father is now retired to some extent but can’t quite leave the property business alone and can still regularly be seen wielding a sledgehammer round a house at age sixty-five. He takes us down to the harbour one morning, to see if David the fisherman has come in with any spare lobsters.
I have never agreed to eating lobsters; they mate for life, love sardines and can live for a century, it's like eating a grandparent. Dad believes compassion for animals is the direct cause of vitamin deficiency and Guardian reading.
The harbour wall in Alderney stretches a mile out to sea, it has two old, iron rail tracks running down the length of it, bleeding rust into the stone walkway. On stormy days the waves hitting the wall can soar into the air two hundred feet, crossing the entire harbour in a ceiling of spray and standing on the inner wall is like looking through a vast skylight under heavy rainfall, until it hits you in the face.
David’s small trawler is tied up at the furthest end of the inner harbour wall, gently pulling at its rope on the low tide as if eager to go out again. His rusting, gold Mercedes is parked on the wall above, it’s weathered, molting surfaces make it seem as if it is at a transitional stage of becoming a permanent element of the harbour’s structure.
“Ahoy” Dad calls down. What I thought was an old, yellow tarpaulin in the bottom of the boat slowly transfigures into a stooping man in waterproof overalls. He looks up at us from the depths. His skin is salt battered to a citrus peel texture and every feature seems eroded into the face.
“Ahoy there! Is that your new wife?”
“Ha! It’s my daughter.”
“Hello!” I call down.
“And this is her boyfriend, Anthony.”
“Hello!” He says to Anthony
“Hello! He replies
“Was it a good day?” Dad shouts
There is a pause while the question filters down to the boat through its own echoes.
“Lovely day, calm as anything!”
A pause.
“And the catch?”
“Bad. Barely got enough lobster for The Braye. There’s a plague of these crabs.”
David kicks a bucket of red, seething legs, which spills a tangle of foot-long spidery limbs and spiny tank-like bodies onto the bottom of the boat. Some crabs untangle themselves and walk drunkenly about whilst others flail their pale undersides lazily as if doing Pilates. There are at least a dozen more buckets of the monstrous things on the deck, orange, spiky and kicking.
“Can you eat them?”
“Aye, but there’s not much on ‘em and they’re hard work to get into. Take some and 'ave a go.”
David grabs several of the wandering oddities and puts them in a bucket backwards so that their legs hinge in to fit. He throws Dad the end of the rope tied to the bucket and Dad pulls them up. We stare at them for a couple of moments, unwittingly giving David time to fill another bucket and throw up that line too. Anthony starts to pull them out of the bucket, they are nearly two foot across, though their bodies are only four inches and they wave their spindly pincers angrily at him.
“Have you got a carrier bag?”
“No!”
“I’ll send you up a couple”
We return the first bucket empty, Anthony and I hold a crab in each hand at arms length, two dozen legs flapping as if trying to flutter back to the sea, as Dad pulls up the second bucket of crabs with a couple of carrier bags thrown in.
Dad first tries to get a plastic bag over the waving legs, with the result of it getting caught on the spines and snatched from his grasp. The crab is now waving the bag like a surrender flag, as Dad tries to snatch it back. Second attempt and one crab goes in the bag backwards, creating some tears on its way in and when finally lying in the bottom it pokes all its legs through the sides. The other crabs follow suit until we have two bags with numerous sharp, flailing legs protruding, forcing Anthony to carry them at arms length to avoid injury.
“Weather looks set to turn day after tomorrow!” David calls
“Thank you very much!”
Dad is already able to visualise the crab sandwiches beyond the carrier bags and lacerations.

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