Vol. 25 No. 15 · 7 August 2003
pages 34-35 | 4709 words
Diary
Kathleen Jamie
I hacked off the gannet’s head with my penknife, which turned out to be one of those jobs you wish you’d never started. It was a Swiss Army knife, with a blade only two inches long, and a diving gannet can enter the water at ninety miles an hour: they have strong necks. It was early morning, low tide, and I was glad to have the beach to myself. When the head was at last free, I rolled the body with my foot. It was light and dense at once, still with much of its plumage, but the white breast was dirty and the black-tipped wings bedraggled. No doubt it was an Ailsa Craig gannet, because it was washed up on the shore on Arran. I left the body among the dried wrack and shell-grit, and took the head home in my bag.
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Letters
Vol. 25 No. 16 · 21 August 2003
From Joseph Nuttgens
Kathleen Jamie should have used quicklime rather than caustic soda to deflesh her gannet's skull (LRB, 7 August), but maggots would have been best. Some years ago, a badger was killed by a car and left by the side of the narrow lane down which my daughters had to run each morning to catch the school bus. It began to stink and the girls complained, eventually threatening to play truant rather than go past the corpse again, so I was compelled to remove it. The stench was atrocious, but I managed to shovel the maggot-ridden body into a shallow grave. Three weeks later I dug it up and found only a clean, odourless skull, which now sits on a shelf where I work. On the subject of gannets, in Sea Room Adam Nicolson tells how his life was imperilled then saved when one dived straight at his boat with such force that it penetrated the hull, but in so doing plugged the leak with its head and enabled him to row back to his Shiant island.
Joseph Nuttgens
High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire
