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idea to cuddle a lion cub.

As a four-year-old, I was even more hardline about this than I am now. In this weird country where no one could speak comprehensibly and we were living in a strange stationary yet wheeled shed, the two people charged with my care had located and purchased a sort of giant aqua wasp, brought it into our cramped living quarters still alive and now proposed to make it the focus of dinner. At this point I would have settled for a croquette potato.

But what could I do? I argued, I moaned but, deep down, I figured my parents knew best. They seemed all-powerful and all-knowing. Which shows you how stupid four-year-olds are, because now I realise that they were 31 and broke. When I was 31, I don’t think I had a credit card. I was living a studenty existence in a council flat with no candles. The idea that, with only such a brief span on the planet as preparation, they felt able to make a four-year-old, take it to France and obtain a miniature monster for dinner is breathtaking. Why weren’t they just hanging around London getting pissed?

And, as if to prove the very point that our four-year-old hero might go on to make 33 years later if he survives his encounter with the monster of the deep (I’m trying to build suspense), it soon transpired that my parents didn’t have the first clue what to do with a live lobster other than release it back into the wild via a long, agonising and smelly death in a bin.

Actually, that’s not fair. They had several clues – as I imagine you do if you’re one of the many people who’ve never cooked a lobster but have been hanging around in a world where that’s the sort of thing some other people do. You’ll have vague notions about plunging it into boiling water, or maybe sticking a pin into it in a very precise way that kills it but doesn’t hurt it – or, according to some, agonisingly paralyses it but stops it from wriggling around, which amounts to the same thing. You’ll be simultaneously thinking about what’s most humane and also what might preclude getting your finger snipped off by one of the beast’s terrifying claws. What they, like you, didn’t have was any facts.

But they had a secret weapon: my mother is a woman and is consequently able to ask strangers for advice and information. And my father, being a man, is able to sidle up while she does this and vaguely listen. So they formed a plan: they would ask the French couple in the caravan next door how you cook a lobster. Brilliant.

My parents don’t really speak French. There is no transcript of their exchange with the French couple but, having concluded it, they returned to the caravan firmly of the opinion that the way you cook a live lobster is to put it straight in a pan of cold water, making no attempt to poke it with a pin or anything, and slowly bring it to the boil.

When I’ve told people about this since, reactions have varied. Some say ‘Oh my God, how barbaric!’ Some give a nervous ‘Oh, right …’ in expectation of the horrors to come. Others say, ‘Didn’t they mean boiling water? Don’t you plunge it in boiling water?’ and still others say, ‘Yes, that is how you cook a lobster.’ I’ve noticed that responses of the last kind go up proportionally to the age and life-experience of the people I’m telling the story to. Therefore, sceptical though I have long been of the French couple’s knowledge and my parents’ linguistic skills, I’m forced to contemplate the possibility that that is genuinely how you cook a lobster. If so, let me tell you it’s no picnic. No idiomatic picnic. It may circumstantially be a picnic but one which you will come away from humorously saying, ‘That was no picnic.’ If you do, may that shaft of levity help you come to terms with the horrors.

The caravan was narrow. At one end were two bedrooms, the bathroom and the door to the outside world; at the other, the main seating area. In between were the galley kitchen and dining table booth. This formed a bottle neck – you could only walk on one side, the galley kitchen side, of the table if you wanted to get out. This wasn’t usually a problem. (See map.)

My mother was twitchy from