When I was a child on my granfers' farm in Abbotsbury, Dorset; Sunday was always spent the same way. We'd go help out with the afternoon milking, then picnic tea on Chapel Hill. After tea, mother, granfer and the rest would go home, uncle Harry would go to church to ring the bells and my dad would take me down to the beach - Chesil Bank. There would be groups of men just standing around, chatting, smoking... hands in pockets, doing nothing much, just watching the sun sink lower over Lyme Bay.

Suddenly there would be a yell from the boat out in the bay, the men would all rush forward and start dragging seine nets out of the sea, absolutely stuffed full of mackerel, the odd sea bream and other fishy goodies that as a 6yr old I couldn't identify.

We'd buy mackerel from the fishermen, straight out of the net into a bag. Short walk up the hill to the farm and those fish would be topped, tailed, gutted and in the pan for supper before they realised they'd been caught!

They were just fried in unsalted butter, served up with new potatoes that had been in the soil the day before and it was a meal fit for heaven. Have never tasted mackerel like it since, because no matter how fresh they are in the shops, they've always been there longer than an hour.

The closest I get to fish these days is canned tuna and fish fingers -no-one in this house likes fish and we've been around Micca so many years (he's allergic to fish) that we just never have it.

LTS