A crab: every bit of its armour is a container for a precious object
This is a recipe for moéche, the green, soft-shelled crabs that live in Venetian lagoons: mix a batter of flour, eggs, salt and parmesan cheese in a bucket. Drop live crabs into the batter, which must be cold so that the crabs will feel at home. For 30 minutes, the last of their lives, let the moéche scuttle around in the batter, eating it. Then drop them into a pot of boiling hot oil: self-stuffing crabs.
The moéche are crabs – “true crabs” – that have moulted: they have soft shells for just a few hours, before their exoskeletons turn hard. To climb out of their too-small skins, they fill themselves up with water, so that the carapace splits. Then, they pull every part of themselves from their own skins – from the tips of their legs to their eyeballs.
They are a delicacy, a treasure “on par with the white truffle”. As children, my sister and I would find crab treasures to take home – a pincer, or a fivelegged crab – in a river in the park where we walked our dogs. We would take this booty home and keep it in an old tin in the fridge, visiting it after school.
Every crab, and every crab claw, makes an impression. We caught a live crab in a rock pool on the first day of a summer holiday, and watched her for hours: she was a swimmer crab and her back legs were furry paddles. They were strangely poignant, as though this was a crab who had given up something hard for something softer, like hands, or paws.
A crab’s complicated face, like an intricate chest of drawers, or a jewellery box: press on this part and it opens to reveal a mouth, on that, and an eye pops out on its stalk. Every bit of its armour seems as though it is a container for a precious object – which, of course, it is.
Every crab makes an impression. William James, Henry James’s older brother, was a psychologist and philosopher. When he set out to study people’s individual relationships with religion and mysticism, in lectures that eventually became a book called The Varieties of Religious Experience, he anticipated criticism:
Watching crabs “clicking out past themselves”, as Dennis Saleh put it, you know they are saying only this: I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone. And for a few hours, the moéche, for a few hours themselves, themselves, alone. An animal lucky enough to live behind armour suddenly feels everything. How could we not want to know what that tastes like?
• Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. Her first book, a memoir called Freak of Nature, will be published in 2024
varicella zoster virus reactivates in the body. However, community circulation of chickenpox can help to boost their immunity and prevent this from happening.
The JCVI says data from the US suggests that vaccinating children would not result in a rise in cases of shingles among adults.
Under the proposal, all children would be offered two doses of the vaccine – one at 12 months and another at 18 months – while the recommendations also include provision for a temporary catch-up programme for older children.
The move appears to have been spurred, in part, by the impact of the Covid pandemic, when social restrictions led to reduced mixing and hence a larger pool of children who have not yet had chickenpox.
Research suggests the introduction of the chickenpox vaccine as part of the routine childhood immunisation programme would have widespread support: a survey of about 600 parents published earlier this year by researchers at Keele University and University College London revealed around that three-quarters said they would support such a move, with 18% saying they were unlikely to accept such a jab for their child and about 8% unsure.
“The addition of a vaccine to the UK vaccination schedule to protect children against chickenpox will be welcomed by many parents,” said Helen Bedford, professor of children’s health at UCL and a co-author of that research.
“Although chicken pox is usually a mild infection, children have an itchy rash and often a fever which makes them feel very miserable. Chicken pox infection can also result in serious complications such as nasty bacterial skin infections, pneumonia and inflammation of the brain.
“Providing our children with this additional vaccine would be a welcome addition to the highly successful UK vaccination programme.”