The fictional and the overpaid

Daft Idiot

Inspector (Commissario) Montalbano, the fictional Sicilian police chief, will be known to many Britons and expats. The books, by Andrea Camilleri, are excellent, and available in English, and the television programmes, also very good, are shown on the BBC, with subtitles.

Now the good Inspector is in trouble. In the books and programmes, much is made of his passion for food, in particular (being Sicilian) fish, but the European fisheries commissioner, incredibly a Greek called Maria Damanaki, has complained that his liking for baby squid, totani, is wrong, in that the sale of them is illegal under her regulations. She is writing to Andrea Camilleri – good luck there, he is a chap who speaks his mind – to ensure Inspector Montalbano in future eats only food approved by her, perhaps fish McNuggets.

This is awful on so many counts it is hard to know where to start. Firstly we are paying her a six figure sum annually to come up with this dross. She has scores of assistants, also well paid and with good pensions, none of whom saw fit to advise her not to be such an idiot.

Second, Montalbano is a fictional character: that is to say not a real person, Maria, but one who exists only on the pages of a book and the frames of a film. It will be difficult appearing before a court to prosecute someone who doesn’t exist. The Courts don’t like it.

Third, the eating of baby fish – not just squid but all types - is common in Mediterranean countries. One place it is just as common as Italy is Maria’s native Greece.

Next, the European Union’s contribution towards saving fish stocks is to make fishermen throw fish away, dead. So if you are fishing for sole, with a licence from Ms Damanaki, and you accidentally catch a red mullet, over the side it goes. It doesn’t help fish stocks because now, like Inspector Montalbano, it is not alive.

I don’t expect to solve the EU problems overnight (at least my solution for any self-respecting sovereign nation is to leave it) but could we please, some time, take some small tentative steps towards reality? Please?