Good morning everyone!
This weekend I found myself on the Suffolk coast with some friends and their four children, one of whom is my godson and is five years old. I had looked into this place beforehand and, worried that this British seaside jaunt may actually be quite dull, I had looked into the possibilities of taking the kids fishing. As always, I'd made too ambitious a plan, but was offered shrimping as a compromise. Now I've never actually spent any time on the sorts of sandy beaches in the UK that allow for shrimping, so this was some exciting stuff. Also an opportunity to clean the Kentish mud off my wildfowling waders. We did eventually have a decent haul of shrimps, mostly through my own efforts as the children lost interest after a while, and that's where I started earning my crust as a godfather. Because for some reason, neither the children or their parents had ever made the metal connection between "shrimping" and "shrimps". Although as the seven year old girl said "Maman, it has SHRIMP in the name!". Her older sister was pretty dubious about the whole concept of eating things you'd found in the sea. But my godson was super keen, and in the end, all of them wanted to learn to shell shrimps (fiddly), and everyone ate them, except for Mrs PM who somehow just always manages to be somewhere else whenever I cook shrimps, crabs or crayfish that I've caught. I also had to give my godson a bit of a speech about putting back the small shrimps. "Why can't we eat the small shrimps?". "Because they're babies". "Well, why can't we eat babies?". "Because if we did that, they'd never grow up and have more baby shrimps". They were pretty confused about the eggs that some adult shrimps were carrying too, not quite understanding the primary purpose of eggs. They were thinking about omelettes, that sort of thing...
View attachment 44834
More to follow.
This weekend I found myself on the Suffolk coast with some friends and their four children, one of whom is my godson and is five years old. I had looked into this place beforehand and, worried that this British seaside jaunt may actually be quite dull, I had looked into the possibilities of taking the kids fishing. As always, I'd made too ambitious a plan, but was offered shrimping as a compromise. Now I've never actually spent any time on the sorts of sandy beaches in the UK that allow for shrimping, so this was some exciting stuff. Also an opportunity to clean the Kentish mud off my wildfowling waders. We did eventually have a decent haul of shrimps, mostly through my own efforts as the children lost interest after a while, and that's where I started earning my crust as a godfather. Because for some reason, neither the children or their parents had ever made the metal connection between "shrimping" and "shrimps". Although as the seven year old girl said "Maman, it has SHRIMP in the name!". Her older sister was pretty dubious about the whole concept of eating things you'd found in the sea. But my godson was super keen, and in the end, all of them wanted to learn to shell shrimps (fiddly), and everyone ate them, except for Mrs PM who somehow just always manages to be somewhere else whenever I cook shrimps, crabs or crayfish that I've caught. I also had to give my godson a bit of a speech about putting back the small shrimps. "Why can't we eat the small shrimps?". "Because they're babies". "Well, why can't we eat babies?". "Because if we did that, they'd never grow up and have more baby shrimps". They were pretty confused about the eggs that some adult shrimps were carrying too, not quite understanding the primary purpose of eggs. They were thinking about omelettes, that sort of thing...
View attachment 44834
More to follow.