AT BREAKING POINT

With the world at the mercy of a global pandemic and the likely loss of his most profitable season, Guy Grieve’s normal coping mechanism is truly put to the test

The global pandemic Coronavirus has Guy Grieve reminiscing of better days

Iconsole myself that human nature is such that this column, which will detail the purgatory of my life at present, will at least provide some comfort to those of you lucky enough to be insulated from the hardships and risk of primary food production.

The last few months have been unbelievably tough. So awful that I’ve had to revert to an old tactic of mine which I often employ when times are hard in order to maintain my sanity. The tactic is to find a non-fiction book written by someone whose sufferings have far exceeded mine. Let me illustrate with a few examples.

In 2008 I was skippering a 41-foot boat across the far North Atlantic. It was a rough crossing from Halifax, Nova Scotia bound for Mull and 800 miles west of Ireland our luck ran out when we got caught up in Hurricane Bertha. Steadily things got worse and worse until the seas were so high that there was no wind or light between the waves and the spray on the peaks was so hard that we could no longer see anything.

Realising that we would die if we remained on deck, either through human error or just being blown off, and with night falling my crewman and I trailed warps, battened the hatches and lashed the wheel to windward with a rope that gave just enough to ensure that we didn’t jar the rudder off the hull. We then packed a survival bag for abandon boat emergency and lashed ourselves into our bunks with silent prayers that we would make it through.

It was then that I reached into my locker and pulled out a battered copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, a beautifully written book which detailed forensically his experiences as a hapless victim of the great crushing, cruel, Russian state. As the boat rolled, knocked down so that the portholes showed green and the wind screamed, I read on and on. Each page pulled me away from the uncomfortable present and reminded me that others had had it worse, far worse than me. My torture would last for four days but Solzhenitsyn was locked away in Siberia for eleven years. That comforted me.

Recently life as a scallop diver on the west coast has been relentlessly dire. Months of horrendous weather have made getting out to sea nigh on impossible and on the rare occasions when we have managed to get out the water has been so stirred up and full of sediment that it’s been nearly impossible to see anything. My faithful, wonderful crew are having an appalling time. We have been sustained by what must be man’s most ancient hope, the dream of summer. The balm of light, calm seas and above all else a market that is hungry for our dived scallops.

At that stage the London restaurants we supply were full of corporate types and the wellheeled, while in the late summer when London is on holiday our chefs in the rest of the country come into play as they feed throngs of tourists eager to sample the best British shellfish possible. An old adage kept coming to mind as we waited, we endured, we argued, we got depressed: ‘Men and boats go bad in harbour’.

We hoped things would change and yet for a long time we were storm bound in Tobermory. Money going out and nothing coming in.

And then… A global pandemic came to the UK. And it arrived just as we had started to fish again and our other boats started to land their catch to us. Chefs started calling and telling us their places were empty, events were cancelled, London was a ghost town socially speaking and the tourists were cancelling their bookings. As I write this I hear all around me that things are getting yet worse.

The weather is improving and I’ve got a brilliantly effective new diver joining my team.

If it weren’t for the virus we’d be about to make some serious hay.

And then last night a pal called me. He’s a consultant surgeon who had just come out of a special Coronavirus emergency meeting.

‘It’s not great news Guy, it’s peaking in three months and gone in six is the forecast.’

I replaced the handset in silence. That would mean our entire summer lost and then immense pressure to catch and sell just as the weather turns for winter and the darkness returns. In silence I walked over to my bookshelf, then ran a bath and sank into it armed with a whisky and Antony Beevor’s opus Stalingrad.

Things are so bad that it’s not enough just to hear about one person’s misfortune – this time I need the balm of reading about entire armies being annihilated.

As I write this I hear all around me that things are getting yet worse