Free Rancid Pansies by James Hamilton-Paterson Page A

charted. A munitions ship whose cargo is breaking up and decaying might easily account for your phosphorus levels locally. See if you can find out, if only to eliminate it. Munitions are not my thing but a few years ago someone at Aberdeen (I forget who but you can easily find out from Marine Lab.) did great work on dumped explosives in the Beaufort’s Dyke disposal site after phosphorus shells etc began washing ashore in N. Ireland & the Firth of Clyde & even as far as Islay.
    By the way – & this is just an idea – do you have figures for Eury-thenes ? I know it’s not a bivalve but it’s pretty voracious even for an amphipod, & as it scarfs up practically any organic detritus that comes its way you might get higher P concentrations from it & a quicker pinpoint on your grid for a possible source. Assuming a fairly constant demersal current (which of course there may not be) you might be able to establish a transect. I’m sure you’ve thought of all this & more & what do I know about it? Just a thought.
    I’m glad you’re licking Luke into shape, if that’s the correct metaphor, and that he’s turning out to be fully domesticated. I onlywish I could be as cheerfully uncritical about Gerry. He’s not the flavour of the month at present, and not just with me. This follows a dinner party at my sister’s last Saturday that went badly wrong. So wrong, in fact, that it actually caused the death of one of the guests. OK, the guest in question was 93 and had a bad heart, but I thought before dinner he looked good to make his century. We were all poisoned – all of us
except
for Gerry, that is. What happened was that we were overcome by violent puking of a kind I’ve never experienced before. It took us completely by surprise. One minute we were tucking into Jennifer’s excellent roast leg of lamb and the next we were upchucking for Britain. What was odd was there was no real nausea beforehand, just a slight feeling of unease. Then suddenly you opened your mouth and out came vomit instead of words. When you have seven diners at the table all doing it at the same moment you’re talking major barf-fest. I’ll spare you the details. Except for poor old Dougie Monteith we’re all fine now, though it makes me a bit queasy just remembering it.
    It turned out that Gerry had prepared some ‘special’ starters of his own bizarre invention, one of which he hadn’t eaten. This was – and you’ll have to get a grip on your credulity here, Penny –
field mouse vol-au-vent
. He said he’d trapped the mice himself, but it seems at least one of them had already eaten bait laced with something the gardener had put down for rats. So we all spent a night in hospital, where poor Dougie succumbed from heart failure. Luckily the poison was something called squill, which comes from a plant and isn’t supposed to be toxic long-term once you’ve got it out of your system . And boy! did we ever get it out of our systems, and all of us at exactly the same moment. It was like community singing.
    Upshot: Gerry grilled by police & grudgingly exonerated of murder, manslaughter & deliberate mayhem, but his reputation has taken a severe knock. I actually feel sorry for him but I was majorly pissed off at the time. It was so typical of his irresponsibility. He’s got this anarchic streak that makes him think the ordinary laws of common sense simply don’t apply to him. His sense of humour is equallysuspect. Who else helps someone tottering with nausea into an ambulance with the murmured encouragement ‘Queasy does it!’? The person who has found it easiest to forgive him, oddly enough, is my illustrious brother-in-law Max, even though he was quite poorly for a couple of days afterwards. Maybe Max has a bit of Gerry in him that I’ve never suspected before. (If my sister’s worried by this possibility she’s decent enough to say nothing.)
    Anyway, it sounds to me as though your Luke is a good deal more of a regular guy than my Gerry