by Paul Torday
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Paul Torday
This is the story of Dr Alfred Jones, a fisheries scientist-for whom diary notable events include the acquisition of a new electric toothbrush and getting his article on caddis fly larvae published in ‘Trout and Salmon’-who finds himself reluctantly involved in a project to bring salmon fishing to the Highlands of the Yemen…a project that will change his life, and the course of British political history forever. With a wickedly wonderful cast of characters-including a visionary Sheikh, a weasely spin doctor, Fred’s devilish wife and a few thousand transplanted salmon-Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a novel about hypocrisy and bureaucracy, dreams and deniability, and the transforming power of faith and love.
Paul Torday
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
© 2007
Title
Extracts from a Return to an Address of the Honourable House of Commons by the Foreign Affairs Committee and a Report into the Circumstances surrounding the decision to introduce salmon into the Yemen (Yemen Salmon Fishing Project), and the subsequent events.
1
The origins of the Yemen Salmon Project
Letter
Fitzharris & Price
Land Agents & Consultants
St James’s Street
London
Dr Alfred Jones
National Centre for Fisheries Excellence
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Smith Square
London
15 May
Dear Dr Jones,
We have been referred to you by Peter Sullivan at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (Directorate for Middle East and North Africa). We act on behalf of a client with access to very substantial funds, who has indicated his wish to sponsor a project to introduce salmon, and the sport of salmon fishing, into the Yemen.
We recognise the challenging nature of such a project, but we have been assured that the expertise exists within your organisation to research and project manage such work, which of course would bring international recognition and very ample compensation for any fisheries scientists who became involved. Without going into any further details at this time, we would like to seek a meeting with you to identify how such a project could be initiated and resourced, so that we may report back to our client and seek further instructions.
We wish to emphasise that this is regarded by our client, who is a very eminent Yemeni citizen, as a flagship project for his country. He has asked us to make clear that there will be no unreasonable financial constraints. The Foreign & Commonwealth Office supports this project as a symbol of Anglo-Yemeni cooperation.
Yours sincerely,
(Ms) Harriet Chetwode-Talbot
Letter
National Centre for Fisheries Excellence
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Smith Square
London
Ms Harriet Chetwode-Talbot
Fitzharris & Price
Land Agents & Consultants
St James’s Street
London
Dear Ms Chetwode-Talbot,
Dr Jones has asked me to thank you for your letter dated 15 May and reply as follows.
Migratory salmonids require cool, well-oxygenated water in which to spawn. In addition, in the early stages of the salmon life cycle, a good supply of fly life indigenous to northern European rivers is necessary for the juvenile salmon parr to survive. Once the salmon parr evolves into its smolt form, it then heads downriver and enters saltwater. The salmon then makes its way to feeding grounds off Iceland, the Faroes or Greenland. Optimum sea temperatures for the salmon and its natural food sources are between 5 and 10 degrees Celsius.
We conclude that conditions in the Yemen and its geographical location relatively remote from the North Atlantic make the project your client has proposed unfeasible, on a number of fundamental grounds. We therefore regret we will be unable to help you any further in this matter.
Yours sincerely,
Ms Sally Thomas (Assistant to Dr Jones)
Office of the Director, National Centre for Fisheries Excellence
From:
David Sugden
To:
Dr Alfred Jones
Subject:
Fitzharris & Price⁄Salmon⁄Yemen
Date:
3 June
Alfred,
I have just received a call from Herbert Berkshire, who is private secretary to the parliamentary under secretary of state at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
The FCO view is very clear that this project is to be given our fullest consideration. Notwithstanding the very real practical difficulties in the proposal from Fitzharris & Price, of which as your director I am fully aware, the FCO feel that we should seek to give what support we can to this project.
Given the recent reductions in grant-in-aid funding for NCFE, we should not be too hasty to decline work which apparently connects us to excellent private sector funding sources.
Yours,
David
Memo
From:
Alfred Jones
To:
Director, NCFE
Subject:
Salmon⁄Yemen
Date: 3 June
David,
I appreciate the points you have raised in your memo of today’s date. Having given the matter my fullest consideration, I remain unable to see how we could help Fitzharris & Price and their client. The prospect of introducing salmon to the wadis of the Hadramawt seems to me, quite frankly, risible.
I am quite prepared to back this up with the relevant science, should anyone at the FCO require further information on our grounds for not proceeding.
Alfred
Office of the Director, National Centre for Fisheries Excellence
From:
David Sugden
To:
Dr Alfred Jones
Subject:
Salmon⁄Yemen
Date:
4 June
Dr Jones,
Please accept this memo as my formal instruction to proceed to the next stage of the Yemen salmon project with Fitzharris & Price. I would like you to meet Ms Harriet Chetwode-Talbot and receive a full briefing, following which you are to develop and cost an outline scope of work for this project for me to review and forward to the FCO.
I take full responsibility for this decision.
David Sugden
Email
From:
[email protected]
Date:
4 June
To:
[email protected]
Subject:
Yemen Salmon Project
David,
Can we talk about this? I’ll pop round to your office after the departmental meeting.
Alfred
Email
From:
[email protected]
Date:
4 June
To:
[email protected]
Subject:
Job
Darling,
I am being put under unreasonable pressure by David Sugden to put my name to some totally insane project dreamed up by the FCO to do with salmon being introduced into the Yemen. There have been memos flying around on this for days and I suppose I thought it was so bizarre I didn’t even mention it to you last time we spoke. I popped into David S’s office just now and said, ‘Look, David, be reasonable. This project is not only totally absurd and scientifically nonsensical, but if we allow our name to be involved no one in the fisheries world will ever take us seriously again.’
Sugden was totally stone-faced. He said (pompously), �
��This one is coming from higher up. It isn’t just some minister at the FCO with a bee in his bonnet. It goes all the way to the top. You’ve had my instruction. Please get on with it.’
I have not been spoken to like that since I left school. I am seriously considering handing in my resignation.
Love,
Fred
PS: When are you back from your management training course?
Email
From:
[email protected]
Date:
4 June
To:
[email protected]
Subject:
Financial realities
Fred,
My annual salary is £75,000 gross and yours is £45,561. Our combined net of tax monthly income is £7333 out of which our mortgage takes £3111, rates, food and other household expenses a further £1200, and that’s before we think about car costs, holidays, and your fishing extravagances.
Resign your job? Don’t be a prat.
Mary
PS: I am home on Thursday but I have to leave on Sunday for New York for a conference on Sarbanes-Oxley.
Memo
From:
Andrew MacFadzean, principal private secretary to the secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs
To:
Herbert Berkshire, private secretary to the parliamentary undersecretary of state, FCO
Subject:
Salmon⁄Yemen Project
Herbert,
Our masters tell us this project should be pushed on a bit. The sponsor is not a UK citizen, but the project can be presented as a template for Anglo-Yemeni cooperation, which of course has wider implications for perceptions of UK involvement in the Middle East.
I think you could quietly drop a word in the ear of David Sugden, whom I believe is the director of the fisheries people at DEFRA, that a successful outcome to this project might attract the attention of the committee putting forward recommendations for the next New Year honours list. Equally it is only fair to point out that an unsuccessful outcome might make it difficult to defend NCFE against further cuts in grant funding in the next round of negotiations with the Treasury for the new financial year. This might help get the right messages across. We have, of course, talked at a senior level to the appropriate people in DEFRA. Keep this off the record.
Lunch at the club at 1 p.m. tomorrow?
Yrs,
Andy
Memo
From:
Director of communications, prime minister’s office
To:
Dr Mike Ferguson, director veterinary, food & aquatic sciences, Chief Scientists’ Group
Subject:
Yemen salmon project
Mike,
This is the sort of initiative that the prime minister really, really likes. We want some broad-brush comments on feasibility from you. We do not require anyone to say absolutely that it would work, only that there is no reason for not trying.
Peter
Memo
From:
Dr Michael Ferguson, director veterinary food & aquatic sciences, Chief Scientists’ Group
To:
Peter Maxwell, director of communications, prime minister’s office
Subject:
Yemen salmon project
Dear Mr Maxwell,
Monthly average rainfall in the western mountains of the Yemen is around 400 millimetres in each of the summer months, and mean temperatures at elevations above 2000 metres fall to a range of between 7 and 2,7 degrees Celsius. This is not uncharacteristic of British summer weather and therefore we conclude that for short periods of the year conditions exist, particularly in the western provinces of the Yemen, which are not necessarily inimical to migratory salmonids.
We therefore speculate that a model based on the artificial release and introduction of salmonids into the wadi systems for short periods of the year, linked to a programme of trapping the salmon and returning them to cooler, saline water during other periods of the year, would not be an inappropriate starting point for a modelling exercise to be carried out by the departments with the relevant expertise. I believe NCFE is the most appropriate organisation for this.
I hope this brief note is sufficient for your purposes at this stage?
Yrs,
Michael Ferguson
PS: Have we met?
Memo
From:
Director of communications, prime minister’s office
To:
Dr Mike Ferguson, director veterinary, food & aquatic sciences, Chief Scentists’ Group
Subject:
Yemen salmon project
Mike,
That’s great. No, we haven’t met, but I look forward to it some day soon.
Peter
Memo
From:
Peter
To:
Prime minister
Subject:
Yemen salmon project
PM,
You will really like this. It presses a lot of different buttons:
positive and innovative environmental messages
sporting (cultural?) links to a Middle Eastern country not as yet closely aligned with UK interests
secular Western technology bringing improvements to an Islamic state
a big, positive news story that will take front-page space away from less constructive news items coming out of Iraq, Iran and Saudi
A great photo opportunity: you standing in a wadi with a rod in one hand and a salmon in the other-what an image that would be!
Peter
Memo
From:
Prime minister
To:
Director of communications
Subject:
Yemen salmon project
Peter,
I like it. The photo idea is great!
2
Extracts from the diary of Dr Alfred Jones: his wedding anniversary
7 June
Until today, my diary has for the most part been used to record the times of meetings, appointments with the dentist, or other engagements. But for the last few months I have felt the need to set down some of the thoughts that come and go, the increasing sense of intellectual and emotional restlessness which has grown in me as I approach middle age. Today’s date marks our wedding anniversary. Mary and I have been married now for over twenty years. It seems right, somehow, to start recording the pattern of my daily existence. Perhaps it will help me find a perspective from which I can appreciate and value my life more than I am able to just at present.
For Mary’s anniversary present, I have bought her a subscription to The Economist, which I know she enjoys reading but begrudges the cost of buying for herself. She bought me a replacement brush for my electric toothbrush, which is most useful. I never think much about anniversaries. The years pass seamlessly. But for some reason tonight I feel I ought to reflect on what is now many years of marriage to Mary. We married not long after leaving Oxford. It was not a whirlwind romance, but I think ours has been a calm and settled relationship suitable for two rational and career-minded people such as ourselves.
We are both humanists, professionals and scientists. Mary’s science is the analysis of risks inherent in the movement of cash and credit around the world’s financial systems. She has written papers such as ‘The role of SDKs (Special Deposit Reserves) in mitigating unusual flows of non-reserve currencies’ which have attracted a great deal of attention and I enjoyed reading myself, although I could not follow some of the algorithms. Mary has now moved from the more academic wing of the bank into the managerial side. She is prospering, well paid and respected, and likely to go far. The only disadvantage is that we are tending to see a little less of each other as she has to travel a great deal these days.
I made my name with my study ‘The effects of alkaline solutions on freshwater mussel populations’, which introduced some groundbreaking new concepts concerning the mating of freshwater mussels.
Since then, my career has developed too. I am not as well remunerated as Mary, but my work gives me satisfaction and I believe I am well thought of by my peers.
Mary and I have chosen not to have children. Our lives are therefore relatively unruffled. I am aware that a childless marriage is sometimes an excuse for selfishness and therefore we both make a conscious effort to engage with our community in the little spare time that we have. Mary gives lessons in economic theory at our local immigration centre to migrants from Chechnya and Kurdistan, who seem to end up in our area. I give lectures to the local humanist society from time to time. Last week I gave the third in a series of talks, ‘Why God cannot exist’, and I like to think that these talks in some way provoke the audience to question the superstitions of earlier eras which still linger on in the religious teachings that regrettably persist in some of our schools.
What else can I say about more than two decades of marriage? We both keep ourselves fit. I go running two or three times a week; Mary does Yoga when she can. We were vegetarians but now eat fish and white meat, and I allow myself alcohol from time to time although Mary does so rarely. We enjoy reading as long as the books are improving or informative, and occasionally go to the theatre or to art exhibitions.
And I fish, an unreconstructed activity of which Mary disapproves. She says fish feel pain whereas I, as a fishery scientist, know that they do not. It is perhaps the one subject on which we have to agree to disagree.
