BEACHCOMBER

101 YEARS OLD AND STILL PONDERING BREKFAST AND CLEVER FISH...

What a week this has been! First there was the draft deal with the EU and then the publication of a highly significant scientific advance. Let us deal with Europe first.

Many of you will, I feel sure, have been bemused at the two years it has taken to cobble together a draft agreement of a mere 500 pages. This is roughly one page every two days. I have always felt that one should be able to scribble a page in about an hour, but I believe I have discovered what took all the time in this case.

When negotiations were lagging over a year ago, the teams agreed that some speeding up was needed, but they then became bogged down again over what to call the ultra-rapid version. The British side proposed “Brekfast” while the EU side came down heavily in favour of Brequik. The UK pointed out that the deal would be the start of a new day in Euro-relations, and there is no better way to start a day than with a word that sounds like breakfast.

Questions were then raised about whether a full English breakfast would be the same as a Scottish or Irish breakfast, and whether those would include black or white pudding or both and whether the bacon would be Danish. Negotiations were then adjourned as both sides went away to find out whether Denmark was part of the EU or not. Their research indicated that Denmark and Sweden are part of the EU but Norway isn’t, though all three are part of the Schengen passport-free area, which the UK isn’t. The implications of this for post-Brekfast bacon trading remained a point of contention. Over the past few days, the most common opening phrase uttered by MPs replying to radio interviewers has been “I haven’t read it yet myself, but ...”. Well neither have I, so let us get back to the startling scientific revelation of the week.

It came in a paper in the journal Animal Behaviour, “Object recognition in fish: accurate discrimination across novel views of an unfamiliar object category (human faces),” reporting research showing that fish can not only learn to recognise human faces but can then go on to recognise faces viewed from unaccustomed angles. I tried to ask a goldfish about this but he said he hadn’t read the paper yet himself.

Then he swam off in his bowl singing the Beach Boys hit “Round, round get around, I get around.” Further research is clearly needed.