W

ith age I find my health improves. Looked at from a certain angle. I used to be a manic-depressive. Now I am merely a depressive.

Maybe I should rephrase that in modern terminology. For one must, while one is living, keep abreast. The current term is, I understand, “bipolarity”. So what does that leave me? “Unipolarity”, I suppose.

The trick, I suspect, of staying upright is, as on the unicycle, to just keep pedalling. However slowly. Adjust what the keen or professional cyclist calls one’s cadence. An—to further mix metaphors—imperfect cadence (tonic to dominant) at that.

It suits me, the settled life. Yet I still, I have to confess, miss the unpredictability of the bipolar state, the manic verve, the mood swings and roundabouts, the chance of achievement.

For achievements there have been, strange to say. And I can give an example. (Though to phrase it thus suggests there were others, which, on reflection, may not be true. However ) It has to do with the lobster. Or rather, to be pedantic, with lobsters.

I have long loved lobsters. And I mean that equally pedantically, for I use the verb with at least three connotations, those usages denoting stages in a sequential pattern.

My introduction to them was tangential, by crabwise moves. I had a friend in my younger days, for I was once young and did have friends, who made a collection of telephones. Not of course the modern mobile type, for many seem to collect those now, but of the stationary type, of which most people at the time had only one. (There must be a word for people who collect telephones. “Campanophiles”, perhaps. “Telecommunicants” maybe, for the most devoted.)

My friend had an extensive collection, from the most antiquated to the most modern of the time. He kept them on a shelf in chronological order: a candlestick phone, with Bakelite earpiece and wood-and-brass ring box; a black Bakelite Neophone with chrome dial; a rare ivory-coloured model of the same; an Ericsson; a Bakelite 232 in Chinese red; an Ericaphone Dial, one of the first one-piece phones; a Bakelite Crocodile; the latest Trimphone.

On another, shorter shelf he kept the novelty phones: a Micky Mouse, the ears forming the mouth- and ear-pieces; a Winnie the Pooh push-button; a Shell petrol-pump phone; a Wimpy Bar ketchup-tomato phone.

All these he claimed to have renovated to working standard, though only one could be plugged in at any one time. He never convincingly demonstrated the claim.

As a prank—this was obviously in an extrovert phase—I somehow acquired an old black Bakelite phone, and a lobster. The lobster was dead; I bought it dead, remaindered. I glued it to the handpiece of the phone. I gave it to him, pointed to the Ericaphone, said, You’ve got a Dial, now you’ve got a Dali. He didn’t twig.

I finally had to show him the illustration in the Public Library copy of Surrealist Sculpture, explain the anagrammatic play. He wasn’t appreciative. (When the Tate acquired one of the originals—there were six extant—I bought the postcard and sent it to him.)

But in assembling the lobster-telephone, I had a sudden access to Dali’s fascination. The lobster’s penetrating beauty—the turquoise and tortoiseshell mottling of the carapace (I had bought it unboiled), its glass-pinhead eyes, its alien crustacean-ness—coupled to the black mundanity of the phone was transfixing, disturbing. Surreal, in a word.

I saw it in my dreams, clawing up from the slumbrous deep.

That was in my impecunious youth (I had to save up for the lobster, even one going off). In pecunious maturity, my relationship with the lobster changed. I still delighted in its mottled beauty; I delighted also in its taste.

When flush—financially and emotionally, in expansive phase—I would dine out, alone or à deux, in a bistro on the Thames. I would spend as long as allowed watching their reflex-riven immobility before picking one out, returning to my table to await its chromatic transformation to a deep boiled pink.

I enjoyed it in several gastronomic guises: classic—viz. lobster thermidor, though substituting béchamel sauce for double cream; oriental—cooked with fresh ginger, orange peel and a sprig of lime leaves; exotic—with chocolate sauce and saffron rice; economical—as part of a cacciucco.

Such indulgences were of course well-spaced, separated by long periods of inanition, either financial or emotional and often both. No matter. They occurred.

My relationship to the lobster changed yet again, in another crabwise step.

When the highs peaked and I felt the downward pull, I would, depending on the gravity of the descent, prepare myself with homeopathic doses of Philip Larkin, a chapter of Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, or, as I had done some time-trialling in my youth, listings of long-dead cyclists, preferably Continental, which, like ancient editions of Wisden, would be reliably melancholic.

Ploughing desultorily through one such chronicle, of French National Championship winners of the 1950s, I alighted on a name that provided a flicker of amusement; his nickname, rather: Popeye. Real name: Roger Godeau, professional between 1943 and 1961, with eight Firsts to his credit.

As luck, ill or otherwise, would have it, a revival of Samuel Beckett’s play opened a few weeks later. I had touched bottom, was on the up by then. One of the reviews caught my attention. It offered as one derivation of the title, sanctioned by Beckett, a crowd of Tour de France spectators telling him they were “waiting for Godot”. Could it, I wondered, have been the same, the name mis-heard or artistically altered? Could Popeye, predominantly a track man, have competed also in the Tour, taking the position, in one stage at least, of lanterne rouge? The review offered in corroboration the multiple occurrences of bicycles in Beckett’s works. My interest was piqued. Despite having always seen Beckett as hard-core melancholia, I began, when sufficiently robust, to read him. More: I immersed myself in the boil of his writing; I identified with his decrepit protagonists, I who am still young enough to experience the pleasure of micturition; I absorbed his influence, not deliberately but as it were osmotically. I was smitten.

I route-marched through the Trilogy, wended slowly through Watt, thus working backwards via Murphy arrived at his early short stories More Pricks Than Kicks, in which my eye was arrested by the title of the very first: Dante And The Lobster.

The hero—or as near as we get—peruses a canto of Dante, prepares and consumes his lunch, of Gorgonzola, mustard and carbonized bread, picks up a lobster from the fishmonger on behalf of his aunt, musing on his journey over the failed petition of a convicted murderer who must hang on the morrow and endure the night, attends his Italian lesson and returns to his aunt.

He hands her the lobster to be cooked for their tea. Not realizing that assurances of its freshness implied its vivacity, he is horrified to see his aunt plunge it still moving into boiling water to both kill and cook it in one fell swoop.

He allow himself the mollification of his aunt’s insistence that it feels nothing, the consolation that “it’s a quick death, God help us all”.

It ends with the author’s ironic thrust: “It is not.”

Indeed it isn’t.

Brought up short by this affront to my own complacency, I dug and probed the issue. Two to three seconds is the traditional estimate of the lobster’s death. Two to three minutes is the RSPCA’s correction. Longer when boiled en masse.

My assumption that the spasms I had observed in my chosen specimens had been reflexes akin to those of headless chickens I now recognized as self-deception; recognized indeed my complicity in such brutal immolations. It shook me with an almost Damascene tremor.

I resolved overnight not just to give up lobster but to attempt some redress. I conceived a plan of campaign under the provisional banner of Liberate The Lobster. I began buying up lobsters, those still alive, from local fishmongers and releasing them into the Thames. As for those on the bistro’s death-row, I bought a leather hold-all of “gym-bag” size, then as funds permitted, would take it packed with ice, secrete it under my table, make my choice then whisk it into my bag and settle my bill.

I convinced some of my dining companions of the rightness of the cause. Our conclusion though, dismally, was that it was an expensive and almost futile gesture when so many lobsters were still at risk. We switched tactics.

We began enquiring of restaurants, prior to booking, if they employed electrical stunning equipment, RSPCA-approved. If not, they were boycotted. We agitated, proselytized, propagandized; the boycott spread, the campaign widened. Restaurants increasingly installed the machines. Many diners, in the wake of media coverage, followed my lead in relinquishing the dish.

I felt, even in the depressive phases of my cycle, a quiet, Franciscan reassurance.

In the meantime I continued my reading of Beckett, working now forwards, from “How It Is” to “Stirrings Still” and encompassing the plays; enjoying the lampblack humour in my upswings and crests, the calmative fellowship in my troughs.

Also the secondary literature: biographies, memoirs, exegesis. Thus it was I came across a volume of reminiscences in centenary tribute. There were those touching on his French Resistance, his years of obscurity, his fame and acclaim and saintly compassion. But what took my eye, took me aback, was the memoir of a Frenchwoman married to an Irishman and living in Dublin, on whom Beckett would call on his trips to Ireland. This was in the post-War years, synchronous with the writing of the Trilogy, a decade and a half later than “Dante And The Lobster”. The chronology is important.

For she relates the love Beckett had—a taste he shared with her husband—for . . . I needn’t spell it out.

Her most vivid memory is of the two men sitting on the step, cracking the shells.

Were I writing this in one of my old tidal surges of creative élan, I would perhaps conclude on a flourish, loop back to the beginning, attempt a further pun on Dali/dial, maybe one on thermidor, work in some Dantesque allusion, leave the ending dangling . . .

But that was then.

Such wordplay seems beyond me now.