Daddy Cool: ‘Since when did the RNLI’s remit extend to sea monsters?’

THE Easter holidays saw our family decamp to a secret East Lothian beachside bolthole, intending to bask our lithe bodies in UV rays while washing down barbecued sausages and shrimps with chilled sauvignon blanc as sunkissed kiddies frolicked happily among the sands.

Sadly unseasonable weather (OK, maybe not that unseasonable for Scotland in April) put paid to that. Instead, freezing gales and horizontal sleet storms kept the five of us largely indoors for seven long days of tense, hostile and often downright violent games of Ludo, Flounders and Animal Snap.

But we Hoyles are nothing if not resourceful – and when news reached us early one morning of a beached whale a couple of miles along the coast, we were dressed, breakfasted and in the car sharpening our flensing knives before you could say: “Call me Ishmael”.

Unfortunately, in the short time that it took us to arrive at the scene, a bunch of namby-pamby blubber-huggers had erected a security cordon around the stranded leviathan, thus preventing me from hacking away at the manky minke’s vital organs and ‘blooding’ the children as a holiday treat.

Bafflingly, among those attempting to ‘rescue’ the doomed beast were volunteer members of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Now, I bow to no one in my respect for the brave men and women of the RNLI who have selflessly given their all to save the lives of more than 139,000 people since 1824. But since when did their remit extend to saving sea monsters as well as seafarers? Besides, minkes are far from endangered – indeed my nautical Norwegian chums memorably and accurately describe them as “rats of the sea” – so why all the fuss? Would the same mawkish hysteria accompany the discovery of, say, a beached haddock, and if not why not?

What kind of message this grotesque pantomime sends to my nine-year-old son, his seven-year-old brother and their five-year-old sister, I dread to think. Surely if we wish the younger generation to foster any kind of honest relationship with the global ecosystem, the whale should simply have been harvested on the spot, with thanks offered to mother nature for her generous bounty of oil, meat and baleen?

Instead, that night we had fish suppers from the North Berwick Fry. They were delicious. n