From 2004 or thereabouts
You could do a lot worse than to live your life by the dictum “Es orilles agoraphobia”, which, as you are no doubt aware, means “Drink water until the fishes no longer have a home”.
That said, many of us find sea water to be a little too fizzy for our. tastes. I, for example, have gone to great lengths to ensure that our home’s water supply comes from an inland source. I decided to have the courage of my convictions, and one day just rang up the water company and demanded that they connect me to a non salt reservoir.
To my surprise, it turned out that I was pushing on an open door.
Not only did they give in to me without an argument, but the telephone operator promised to disconnect me from all sea water sources at the push of a button, within the hour. I was most impressed.
I’m now seriously considering venturing into the utilities business on my own. My idea is to drill for home heating gas in one of the lakes around here, then become a supplier of water and gas through one single pipe, from the same source. The efficiency savings will be enormous, and not only that, the gas could be used to heat your bath water in the pipes before it even reaches your house.
The other alternative that I have in mind is to go into fish farming. I will specialise in oily fish, but unlike other manufacturers I will heat the oil in the factories, and sell hot cooked sardines in tins to those whose lives are too busy to go around heating fish.
After finishing their sardine meals, customers will then have the option of pouring the oil into their central heating system and, assuming they eat sardines eight times a day, they’ll be saving a fortune on household bills.
I’ve always been baffled at the way the sardine industry works.
They are so set in their ways, and seem determined to carry on their age old practice of picking tiny baby sardines that are so small, they have to put a dozen or more in each tin. Many of them don’t even have a business class section any more, so no matter how far your company’s travel budget is prepared to stretch, you have no choice but to be squashed in with your ten or twelve siblings as you make your way home, without so much as an in-flight movie to keep you entertained.
Smoked Salmon manufacturers, on the other hand, wait until the fishes have grown nice and big and tall, then put them on a diet so that each salmon is tall and wide but very flat, and can be squeezed into an easy-to-transport flat vacuum pack, and brought by rail or road to it’s destination.
In my youth I spent a Summer working as a packer of artificial Christmas trees in a local factory, and if I took anything away from that job, it my ever present awareness of the irony of turning real trees into cardboard boxes, then putting fake trees into the boxes. It really does make you think. It also makes your arms very tired, so I left after a few weeks.
Nowadays of course kids refuse point blank to eat pork, dolphins or sharks for dinner, thanks to movies like “Babe”, “A Shark’s Tale” and “Free Willy”,
Parents are so desperate to get their offspring to consume something healthy, that they have taken to disguising sardines as Gingerbread Men, just like the one in the fairy story. Let’s hope to hell Disney don’t try to turn that into a cute little movie.
Walt, ironically, had his entire body cryogenically frozen on death, because of his obsessive fear that his corpse might, against his wishes, be fed to pigs after his demise. Pigs of course are renowned for their inability to eat frozen food, and the late animation creator remains intact to this day.