Fisherman's AGM

Mr Angus told me that I had to go to Lochmaddy, which is in North Uist, for the Annual General Meeting of the Western Isles Fisherman's Association.

I had hoped that Captain Birdseye would be there, as I wanted to thank him for making some excellent fish-fingers which I often eat daily with ketchup and precisely 25 frozen peas, to ensure my five a day intake of vegetables. I send Mr Alex a monthly report on my diet, to show that I take the business of politics very seriously, and provide him with details and diagrams of my bowel motions, which record and chart weekly for size, density, colour and smell. Surprisingly, none of my colleagues seem to do this, which will certainly mark me out when the next reshuffle takes place and I will have a chance of becoming assistant apprentice junior under-secretary assistant with special responsibility for Gaelic books.

I was met at the door by the Chairman who asked who I was, and when I explained he reassuringly told me that I would fit in perfectly as I was an 'odd fish', which is most definitely a compliment coming from a fisherman.

I listened carefully to the detailed debates on prawns, nets, seaweed and how to catch kippers for a mere 4 hours, nudging Mr Angus occasionally to keep him awake. I took plenty of notes for both Mr Angus and I, but looking back at the notes I have absolutely no idea what they were talking about. I will ask Kenny to write a press release as he knows more about this than I do.

At the end of the meeting I had to speak so I told all the fishermen about Mr Alex's plan to personally ensure that all the fish were allowed to be caught only by local boats and that he was working literally 24 hours a day 7 days a week to ensure that the prawns were no smaller than 1 stone each. They were stunned by my revelations, and as I read the speech that was carefully written for me by Kenny, they were rapt and open-mouthed as I recited the landings for 1996 by species, port and weight and compared then to the landings for 2006 clearly showing that the Labour Party had been wholly responsible for the reduction in fish in the sea as clearly shown by the statistics for megrim landed at Northbay, namely; in 1996 2 megrim were landed by FV "Bottom Wind" CY99 weighing a total of 17lbs whilst in 2006 only 1 megrim was landed by the local boat "Seniorita Esperanza MacNeil" CY99 weighing a total of 15lbs. This clearly shows that Jack McConnell and Alasdair Morrison had deliberately destroyed the fishing leaving fishermen impoverished, children without food on the table and mothers destitute and having to sell their bodies and babies to passing tourists on the pier at Castlebay in order to fund a passage, steerage class, to Glasgow where they would have to work in domestic service for fifty years as part of the new Highland Clearances.

I was able to reassure them that landings this year included 17 boxes of fresh smoked mackerel straight to the Co-op, up from 16 the year before, indicating that the SNP would deliver on it's policy of 'fish for everyone, whether they like it or not.'

Then Mr Angus regaled the audience with stories of catching crabs. The first story was of his youth in Barra, when he built the first million-pound trawler ever seen on the west coast out of old fish boxes and bits of machinery lying around the croft, and how he used to dive without oxygen for hours at a time hand picking the crabs for shipping to the finest restaurants in the world. The second story had something to do with Amsterdam, a German woman, and liberal doses of ointment.

Shortly after, Mr Angus had to go away as he had something 'hooked', and left with a young lady he met in the bar who presumably was driving him to his next appointment.

I had to catch the ferry, and headed for Lewis. As I sat on the ferry I entertained all the fishermen with my stories, certainly they were laughing at everything I said. As we docked, one of the skippers said "I hear you like bottom fishing when you are in Edinburgh. Do you often get bites on your worm?", which just goes to show how little attention he paid to my stories.

As the last bus had already gone, I stood on the main road and thumbed a lift back to Stornoway, waving to all the fishermen as they drove past, whilst I stood in the drizzle waiting for a car to come along. I was back in Back within three hours, after another successful day.

Fishermen spoken to: 23
Lifts thumbed: 2
Speeches read without many mistakes: 1