My earliest memory is being in a quarry near my parents’ house, I was about 5 at the time, they were draining the quarry to build a road through it and there was an enormous amount of fish being drawn out there, I‘ve got a terrible fear of fish. It ‘s a phobia so absolutely irrational. It ‘s a place we used to play all the time so it is like a beach, it has a lot of rocks but it’s silent water, but there ‘s all sorts of carnage going on as they try to fish out all these fish, tench mania, they supposedly got 45 thousand tench, in the meantime they also pulled out congreels, bloody great eels, I remember a man in high waist waders hoisting a bloody great eel out of a big net, the eel, biting him, flying out of his hand, flying through the air and hitting me on the head and it landed at my feet. The eel was absolutely berserk and my visual memory is this horrifying animal, sorry fish, raving around my feet. And it is still quite a profound moment for me now.

Memory