She was doing a postgrad course in a town by the sea, and a strange thing happened to us one afternoon. On the quayside we saw lobsters being sold from a trestle table. Only one of them remained and I squinted at it, close up. The sharp oval claws, like holsters, had been bound in elastic bands to stop them nipping customers. It seemed a small-minded precaution. These imposing pincers were cumbersome and useless on dry land. But in the sea, with the water’s buoyancy to give them mobility, they would be swift and lethal weapons. Yet the lobster-catcher had neutralized them with a pair of turquoise bands. What for? The beast was already defeated, plucked from its natural habitat by a giant human being, and yet the victor was fearful of the tiniest nip from his prisoner’s claws.

We carried the lobster back to her kitchen in a plastic bag. We hadn’t thought about how to cook it. It was a fascinating creature, dark brown with tiny spots of color on its bony outer skeleton, a thing of incalculable antiquity. Ten million years old? Or 350 million years? It looked strangely modern with its jointed limbs and sunken central base and those slow, lumbering pincers. It might have been a demolition machine or an extractor for grabbing ore from the side of a mountain. The........

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