tuna for thought

The strangest thing about the world of work is the widespread expectation that our work should make us happy. For thousands of years, work was viewed as something to be done with as rapidly as possible and escaped in the imagination through alcohol or religion.

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i've just started reading the pleasures and sorrows of work. take a moment to be reminded of how far removed we are from the sources of our food and belongings.


For hours we wander the sea without hope. Then shortly after eleven in the morning - dawn in the warehouse in the middle of England - a school of yellowfin tuna approach from the east, swimming in a V-shape, the older, more confident fish on the outside, the younger ones inside. They are moving at fifty kilometres an hour, on their way to Somalia from Indonesia. Because they lack a swim-bladder, the cursed creatures have no option but to advance relentlessly; they cannot pause and rest on the current, like the sedate grouper, or they would fall to the bottom of the ocean and die, only growing more attractive to man by their continual exertions, for it is through the life-long flexing of their tails that their flesh grows muscular and hence uniquely flavoursome. A cry goes up on deck. One of the school, by all indications a heavier, older specimen, a veteran of five years of unmolested navigation, has taken a bite at a bait of mackerel. Fifteen minutes later, he announces himself on the starboard side, panicked and enraged, his tail hammering against the boat. Fifty kilos in weight, he is attempting to prise himself free of the cable tearing apart his palate, but he does not count on two men, above him at either end, reaching into the water with steel hooks and flipping him onto the deck with a victorious cry. Panemonium follows. 
The tuna has never been this far out of the water, has never seen light this bright, but he knows instinctively that he will drown in so much air. The fishermen need him to stop flooding his arteries with blood in panic, or he will darken, and therefore ruin, the appearance of his flesh against a dinner plate. So the captain's brother swiftly wrestles him between his rubber boots and raises aloft a large, blunt mallet, resembling the archetypal club of a prehistoric man, carved from the trunk of a coconut tree. He brings it down heavily. The tuna's eyes jerk out of their sockets. His tail convulses. His jaw opens and closes, as ours might do, but no scream emerges. The mallet strikes again. 
There is a dull sound, that of densely packed brain and experience, shattering inside a tight bony cage, triggering the thought that we too are never more than one hard slam away from a definitive end to our carefully arranged ideas and copious involvement with ourselves... 
Rich red blood explodes from the creature's brain and sprays across the boat. Two of the younger crewman rush forward and slit open his mouth, pulling out his gills and ventilation system. Next their turn their knives to his stomach, releasing the undigested bodies of smaller fish - fusiliers, cardinal fish, sprats - on which he breakfasted at the start of this infernal day. The deck becomes slippery with organs. As the killing spree goes on, I find myself thinking obsessively of my elder son, four years old and about the same length as some of the larger fish. It is no longer implausible that, as many religions maintain, we are all, in the end, from moth to president, members of the same large, irrevocably fraticidal family...One wonders what the atmosphere will be like in the school, 60 metres below, as the survivors pursue their way to Somalia; whether there will be a memory of the absent members and, in the pitch-black waters, a terrible fear.
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