THE decision by Young’s Seafood to send Scottish langoustines on a 17,000-mile round trip to Thailand has been met with protest and some derision. The company justifies its move on grounds of cost and quality.
It is cheaper to have the langoustines – or big prawns in hard shells as I think of them – transported to and from Thailand for hand-peeling than to process them by machine at their Annan factory.

Hand-peeling also makes for a better piece of scampi when the prawn makes its return journey to Annan to be breaded and fried.

Environmentalists are opposed on the grounds that the trans-shipment of 120,000 tonnes a year of this seafood will leave a carbon footprint of 47,500 tonnes of CO2, which is a lot of gas.

The situation is of much more immediate concern to the 120 workers at Young’s in Annan who are likely to lose their jobs. They cannot compete, even if, on Britain’s £5.35 minimum wage, with the Thai prawn-peelers who are paid 25p per hour.

The Annan workers and the customers who fancy a spot of Scottish seafood for tea are left in a hard place between climate change and globalisation. I have a solution to this problem. Let us not send 120,000 tonnes of prime Scottish langoustines to Thailand to be peeled and sent back to Annan to be breaded and put into boxes for sale in supermarkets. Let us do something radical with our indigenous prawns.

Why don’t we just eat them ourselves? The Scottish diet could certainly do with a higher level of consumption of seafood and a lower intake of factory-knitted CJD burgers, chips and ginger.

In a background briefing, the good people at Young’s tell us that 95% of our langoustines go for export, which seems an unacceptably high proportion. This may be because we have a scampi culture instead of a langoustine culture. Scampi was invented in Scotland in the 1940s by Young’s, the very people who now want to peel off to Thailand. How very Scottish to take a health-inducing bit of seafood and stick it in a deep-fat fryer.

The decision by Young’s to ditch 120 of their Scottish employees and transfer work to Thailand was explained by Mr Mike Mitchell, who rejoices in the title, director of scampi. He presumably works alongside the director of crabs and both answer, line management-wise, to the head of crustaceans.

I have done much research into langoustines, shrimp, crevettes, and prawns of the king, tiger, Dublin Bay, Norwegian and many other varieties. In my experience, the best way to prepare a prawn is not to deep-freeze it and send it across the world to be defrozen, peeled, refrozen, shipped back to Scotland to be defrozen again, breaded and fried and refrozen and put into boxes and sent to a supermarket. A better way is to take your fresh prawns and cook them in a hot pan with some olive oil or butter, a hint of garlic, and some flat-leaf parsley. You can add a dash of spice by crumbling in some dried chillies.

If you must get the deep-fat fryer out, try gambas en gabardina, which means prawns in little raincoats. The raincoats are made of your standard fish batter but with cava added to make it lighter.

There is one stumbling block in getting Scots to eat more of our indigenous seafood: the high prices charged in the fish shops for these delicacies. It is a mystery how a dish of prawns back home necessitates a second mortgage while the supermarket round the corner from my Barcelona abode can sell them at €7.75 a kilo, which is a whole lot of gambas for a fiver.

LEARNING THE HARD WAY

MORE parents in Scotland are choosing to educate their children at home. Scottish Executive statistics show that 580 children have been taken out of the school system, a 39% increase on last year. With my built-in prejudices, I assume that the people who choose to shun the standard method of education will be tree-hugging, muesli-eating, hippy idealists. They will be teaching their offspring peace and love and political correctness. Their bedtime stories will be readings from Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society or John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum Of Compulsory Schooling.

It strikes me as unfair that it is only the children of these committed, caring, and highly-principled parents who get the chance not to go to school. The opportunity to give the nine-to-four routine a miss should also be extended to weans whose parents don’t really give a toss about education.

For those unlikely to delve into the philosophies of Ivan Illich or mug up on the theories of John Taylor Gatto, I suggest the following lazy parents’ guide to home-schooling. An important part of the curriculum is film and TV studies. This involves planking the child in front of the telly to watch cartoons for a couple of hours while the home-teacher has a long lie.

Parents who wish their children to have a linguistic twist to the cartoon-watching can point the remote in the direction of a show called Charlie Is Lola. This sounds as if it is based on the Kinks’ song about transvestism but is actually the animated series Charlie And Lola dubbed into Gaelic.

The entire school day must not be devoted to cartoons. As part of the applied sociology class, the little ones will have to watch Trisha. Simple tasks can be used as learning experiences. Home economics can be making mum a cup of tea and a roll and sausage to save her leaving the sofa. Maths can be helping dad work out how much he might have won on his coupon if Celtic hadn’t scored against Hearts in the fifth minute of added time. Geography can be made fun if the child is given an atlas and told to find the many different countries of origin of the players on the Rangers subs’ bench. History can be brought to life with a demonstration of how children were put up chimneys in Victorian times. Parents can pass on practical skills too . A wee bit of engineering as dad shows junior how to bypass the electric meter or a field trip with mum to M&S as part of the shoplifting for beginners module.

While home education can be rewarding, it can also be stressful for the parent. Fortunately, the option exists to take a day off by sending a note to yourself saying wee Johnny will not be attending classes today as he is full of the diarrhoea.

ON THE NUREMBERG TRAIL

THE move by German prosecutors to put former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld on trial for war crimes has intriguing possibilities. Nuremberg would be a suitable location for such a court appearance.

Rumsfeld should not be alone in the dock for his atrocities in Iraq. He should be joined by messrs Bush and Blair, the men who put the mess into Mesopotamia. The punishment should fit the crime. Bush was an enthusiastic proponent of capital punishment as governor of Texas and should have no argument if it is his turn for a lethal injection.

Blair has an impeccable liberal anti-death sentence pedigree. A few years in an open prison would suffice and give him peace and quiet to get on with writing his memoirs.

open and shut case

THE latest manifestation of Holyrood’s attitude that it knows best what is good for us is the plan to impose a ban on stores opening on Christmas and New Year’s Day. I am all for a world where there is less shopping but very much against politicians telling us what we can and cannot do. There is further irony in that the ban is proposed by Karen Whitefield, Labour MSP for Airdrie and Shotts. As we all know, lady Labour MSPs from Lanarkshire do their shopping via the Grattan catalogue and won’t be affected by the enforced closures.