Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

by Paul Torday

  I feel very sorry for you. I suppose the money is some compensation while it lasts, but how long will it last? What happens to you when the project is complete or, more likely, stopped? As for me coming back, I am amazed you think so little of my career and what I might want to do. I am afraid I am not as whimsical about career changes as you have become. I have plans for my own career which now depend on me doing at least two years in the Geneva office, and I am afraid I am not coming home just so that you get the washing and ironing and cooking done for you. Life doesn’t work like that, not in modern marriages between professional people. Anyway, won’t you be spending half your time in the Yemen? Your project can’t all be managed from behind a desk, can it?

  So, I am sorry, but your abrupt job change, far from making me feel more secure about our joint income, suggests to me that it is more important than ever that I consolidate my position as the main breadwinner, notwithstanding the (I am afraid, probably temporary) elevation in your salary. No, you did not mention ‘Ms Chetwode-Talbot’ to me before. Who is she? Is she your new boss? I looked her up when I checked out the website. Her photograph is shown there. She does not look much like a businesswoman, does she? Is she qualified in anything?

  Love,

  Mary

  PS: I am conscious I have been a little brief with respect to personal matters. I appreciate your saying you miss me. I have been too busy of late to reflect as deeply on personal issues as I should. I recognise that a work-life balance has to be sustained, and that to wholly subordinate one’s personal life to one’s career is self-defeating and just as likely to damage one’s career path as the other way round. Therefore you might like to make a diary note that I have some leave coming up next June, which is only eight months away. Perhaps it would be appropriate to spend a few days together to reassess our lives, jointly and individually.

  Email

  From:

  Fred.jones@fitzharris.com

  Date:

  16 October

  To:

  Mary.jones@interfinance.org

  Subject:

  Re: New employment

  Mary,

  Are we married or aren’t we?

  Fred

  PS: What are you implying about Harriet Chetwode-Talbot? She is an extremely able manager running a project whose budget runs into millions.

  Email

  From:

  Mary.jones@interfinance.org

  Date:

  17 October

  To:

  Fred.jones@interfinance.org

  Subject:

  Re: Re: New employment

  Fred,

  I suggest we resume communications when you are in a more temperate frame of mind.

  Mary

  PS: I am not implying anything about Ms Chetwode-Talbot. Or Harriet, as you referred to her just now. I know my own personal life is free from blame or complication. I trust you can say the same.

  Article in the Daily Telegraph, 1 November

  Prime minister has other fish to fry

  Following the reported assassination attempt on a Yemen sheikh in the Scottish Highlands, in a statement today a spokesman for the prime minister distanced his office from the Yemen salmon project. The spokesman denied there had been any such incident and cited the absence of any involvement by local police forces.

  The Yemen salmon project was officially launched in June this year. It initially received technical support from the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence. Now NCFE has announced it has ceased advising the salmon project team. David Sugden, director of NCFE, stated: ‘It is not a priority for the centre. We did carry out some advisory work in the early stages of the project, but the centre’s mandate has always been, and will continue to be, scientific work to support the Environment Agency and others in their task of looking after fisheries in English and Welsh rivers. Getting salmon to run up watercourses in the Yemen has never been high on our agenda, and although we were delighted to make an initial technical contribution, the project falls well outside the mainstream of our work.’

  In July this year Prime Minister Jay Vent indicated his support for the Yemen salmon project, although the project never achieved official inter-governmental status. Sensitivities about other British and US initiatives in the region have resulted in the prime minister’s office backing away from a closer association with salmon fishing in the Yemen.

  The spokesman from Number 10 Downing Street added, ‘The prime minister is always supportive of sporting and cultural initiatives such as this one, but at the moment he has other fish to fry.’

  Editorial, the Rannoch & Tulloch Reporter, 3 November

  Prime minister casts doubt upon the veracity of our reporter

  Last week we published a detailed account of an alleged attempt on the life of an eminent local resident, the Laird of Glen Tulloch, Sheikh Muhammad.

  Eyewitness reports which reached us suggested that the individual concerned in this attempt was wearing a Campbell tartan which we feel sure he was not entitled to wear but no doubt was intended to help him avoid detection until he was close enough to make the attempt. We understand that this individual may have been of Arab extraction and that his attempt to pass himself off as a native of this glen was not notably successful. We are given to understand that the alleged would-be murderer was only restrained at the last moment by the intervention of one of the sheikh’s employees, the respected and enterprising Colin McPherson.

  We understand Mr McPherson detained him with a size 8 Ally Shrimp treble hook on a 15-pound line, and took less than five minutes to play him. After that achievement, it is unclear what the subsequent fate of the individual was. We make no allegations, but merely speculate that if he is not in Glen Tulloch, then he is somewhere else, possibly somewhere with more sand than Glen Tulloch.

  No doubt events in remote Scottish glens are of little interest to the London or even the Edinburgh press these days, but we were surprised that no other paper saw fit to reproduce our scoop. Indeed the first notice that anyone outside of our regular readers took of this event was when an official from the prime minister’s office rang up and asked us what our source for the story was. It is not this newspaper’s policy, and never has been, to identify a journalistic source without consent. In this case we have no such consent. We also note from the national press the day after we broke the story, that it was labelled a ‘hoax’, by a spokesman from the prime minister’s office. We are not given to hoaxes in this paper. We are here to report the facts, and we are appalled and alarmed by the casual slur by the prime minister’s spokesman on the integrity and competence of the Rannoch and Tulloch Reporter, which has been faithfully reporting on events up and down the length of Glen Tulloch for the last hundred years.

  Editorial , Trout & Salmon

  Traditional British common sense

  We are pleased, even delighted, to record a rare victory for common sense in the world of British fisheries science. Readers will recall our dismay earlier this year at the way the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence had been drawn into supporting the Yemen salmon project. We commented that there were enough unsolved problems in our own rivers without diverting scarce resources to what sounded like a scientifically impossible project to introduce salmon into non-existent watercourses in the Middle East.

  It is therefore with some pleasure that we saw David Sugden (the director of NCFE) quoted in the national press as saying that NCFE was no longer involved in this project. We might all speculate as to the reasons behind this apparent change of heart by the government, whose interest, we suspect, led to the involvement of NCFE in the first place.

  Now NCFE has freed up the considerable resources it was devoting to the Yemen salmon project, could we, through these pages, urge Director David Sugden to allocate time to some scientific issues in the real world? We desperately need more research into the effects of rapid changes in water temperature on the hatching of dace eggs.

  Article in the Yemen Daily News />
  Translated from the Arabic by tarjim.ajeeb.com

  (Arabic Internet-based translation site).

  Fish project is spawning new initiatives

  The piscatorial initiative of Sheikh Muhammad ibn Zaidi bani Tihama is reaching new levels today. Work has now started on the construction of artificial lakes in which salmon from UK will swim around until summer rains are coming. When the rains are coming, the salmon will leave the lakes and swim up the Wadi Aleyn.

  Considerable sporting interest is already arousing amongst the peoples in the Wilayat Aleyn. Well known and famous local businessman, Ali Husseyn, is already importing through his extremely notorious and excellent business Global Import Export LLP, the finest fishing rods manufactured by his family interests in Mumbai, India.

  Also interesting tourism possibilities are occurring, with the promised opening after Ramadan of two new guest bedrooms in the Aleyn Rest House, with inside washing room facilities in the European style.

  Soon a team of top scientists and engineers is coming with the sheikh to stay at his palace and make scientific observations and deductions, in order to have the best possibility for the future survival and sporting value of the introduced fish.

  The Yemen Daily News is gladly announcing such initiative by Sheikh Muhammad, who is also a personal friend of the British Prime Minister Mr Vent.

  19

  Correspondence between Captain Robert Matthews and Ms Harriet Chetwode-Talbot

  Letter

  Captain Robert Matthews

  c⁄o BFPO Basra Palace

  Basra

  Iraq

  1 November

  Darling Robert,

  I keep writing to you and they keep returning my letters marked ‘Addressee unknown’. I got my father to ring up one of his old friends in the regiment and they gave him the runaround and even the commandant general could find out nothing about where you are or what you are doing.

  So now there’s this new thing. I sit and look at this pile of letters returned to me, and I think of all the words I wanted to say to you-did say to you, in fact-and which you have never read. You will never read them either, when you come back-I would be far too embarrassed to show them to you. For now, I will keep them though. It’s a bit of a one-sided conversation, like talking to someone as they lie asleep. But it’s better than no conversation at all. When you come back, we’ll talk of other things.

  I keep looking on the MoD website where they list fatalities for Operation Telic 2. That’s what the MoD calls what you are all doing in Iraq, isn’t it? Your name is never there, but every morning I log on and there’s a moment of nausea as I scroll down and look at the new names. The list is growing.

  How hypocritical people are. I don’t go to church; I haven’t done so since I left school except for friends’ weddings and the funerals of my parents’ friends. But now I find myself muttering prayers for you. I am praying to a God I don’t believe exists, but I am praying to him all the same.

  And both from God and from you there is a deafening silence. It all became too much a few days ago, and I did something I swore I never would do, because I know it will make you angry when you find out. I rang 41 Commando Royal Marines last week and asked if anyone could tell me where you were. I was passed from one man to another, and none of them seemed to have any idea at all. They were hardly prepared to acknowledge that you even existed. I kept ringing though, and eventually I must have got through the outer defences because a cheerful-sounding voice quite different to the other people I’d been talking to said, ‘Good God, how did you get put through to me? Bob Matthews? Last I heard he was working around As Sulimaniyah. Bandit country. Close to the Iranian frontier.’ But before I could get any real news out of him, somebody shut him up and then I got a different voice, a smooth purring voice on the line: ‘I’m sorry, madam, we don’t give out information of that sort for operational reasons.’ I must have tried a dozen times since then, ringing up your regiment, ringing up the MoD. I even tried the Family Support Group, but they said they had not been given any information.

  I’ve had your mother on the telephone once or twice. They have been very stiff upper lip about the whole thing. I know your father served in Northern Ireland, and probably other dangerous places too, so perhaps they are more used to the idea that people can be out of touch for weeks on end. Your mother keeps on saying, ‘Don’t worry, dear. He always turns up in the end. I expect he’s a bit busy to write just at the moment.’ I think she is worried though. I think I can hear worry in her voice. Robert, I’m getting on with my life. There’s plenty to do. But I have to be honest with you even if you never read this. The worry is like an ache. Sometimes it is more like I imagine a malignant ulcer must feel like, deep within me. Sometimes, not often, the pain is fierce. Mostly it’s just a remote but ever-present hurt.

  There’s any amount of work to keep my mind off things. The project, which is how we all refer to the sheikh’s salmon fishing plan, is all-consuming. You probably don’t remember what I am talking about-I can’t remember how much I told you about all this before the letters started being returned. I do long to tell you all about it. The whole thing is so absurd: a mad scheme to introduce salmon fishing to a desert country. And yet it’s happening.

  Next week I am flying out to the Yemen. We will be there for several days as guests of the sheikh completing our field studies and doing the final checks before the project goes live. So, darling, I will be in the Middle East at the same time as you! I am going with Fred Jones, the fisheries scientist, and the sheikh himself, and we will inspect the construction work that has now started and have a look at the Wadi Aleyn, which one day the sheikh believes will have salmon running up it. Fred is getting really excited about the trip. He works as a consultant to Fitzharris & Price now.

  NCFE fired him, for political reasons which neither he nor I understand. The sheikh understands though, I think. He is now Fred’s employer. So we are travelling in his plane to Sana’a and then driving into the mountains, the mountains of Heraz. It sounds so mysterious, a name from the Old Testament.

  How frustrating that you are only a few hundred miles away and yet you might be on the other side of the planet for all I know. Actually, I looked at a map and I know you are more than fifteen hundred miles away from where I’m going to be. I wish I knew exactly where it is that you are, just this moment, as I write these words.

  I can’t bear this.

  Loads of love

  Harriet

  Letter

  Captain Robert Matthews

  c⁄o BFPO Basra Palace

  Basra

  Iraq

  4 November

  Darling Robert,

  I’m writing again so soon because we are off in three days’ time, and I don’t know how long it will be before I can write again. Something happened tonight that I have to tell you about.

  Tomorrow we fly to the Yemen and spend a couple of days in Sana’a, the capital, before travelling to the sheikh’s house at al-Shisr, close by the Wadi Aleyn. There’s been so much work to do this week, I’ve hardly had a moment to think about anything except the preparations for the journey. Fred (that’s Dr Jones) has been brilliant. When I first met him I thought he was very pompous. He told me the whole project was a joke and not worth him spending five minutes even thinking about. He’s improved out of all recognition since then. He’s a really nice man, rather old-fashioned, very strait-laced, I should think, and totally dedicated to his work. He’s also going through a rather difficult patch in his marriage, but he hasn’t let that affect his work in any way.

  The sheikh inspires him. The sheikh inspires all of us. Most of the time I am so wrapped up in the detail of the project that I haven’t had time to think about what we are all doing. I think it’s self-protection, really, because the whole concept behind the project is totally bizarre. If I ever did really try and think about what we are trying to do, I’d probably never be able to go on with it. I didn’t need Fred to tell me
(when he was still Dr Jones) that salmon needed cool, oxygen-rich water to swim in, and that conditions in the Yemen were less than ideal. I had worked that one out already.

  But the sheikh believes he can do it. He believes that Allah wants him to do it, and therefore he must and will complete his task. He never contemplates failure. He never shows fear or doubt. And he manages to keeps us all believing, just as he believes. We concentrate on the detail of each step we have to take, and think ‘If this can be made to work, then maybe we can take the next step. If we can get the salmon, alive and well, into the holding tanks in the mountains. If we can keep them reasonably cool in the holding tanks until the rains come. If the rains come and the flows in the wadi are good enough, we can release them through the gates into the wadi. If they turn upstream and run…If, if, if…But, as Fred keeps saying, we have the technology. The rest is up to the salmon.

  I try to think of other insane projects where belief has overcome reason and judgement: the Pyramids, Stonehenge, The Great Wall of China-the Millennium Dome, come to that. We are not the first and will not be the last people to defy common sense, logic, nature. Perhaps it is an act of monumental folly. I am sure it is. I am sure people will laugh at us and scorn us for the rest of our lives. You won’t be able to marry me because I will always be the girl who once worked on the Yemen salmon project.

  Last night we sat late in our office together, going over equipment inventories, cash flows and project milestones. The sheikh maintains an iron grasp of the detail of his project. If we fail, it will not be because he has forgotten something. While I was clearing papers away and switching off computers he said, ‘Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, I shall always be in your debt. You have worked for me diligently and well.’ He nearly always calls me by my full name. I don’t know why. Anyway, I blushed. He usually gives instructions, rarely praise. ‘You think our project will fail.’