Billingsgate market at 5am on a Friday is a hectic blur of activity; thousands of boxes of frozen, prepared or still active sea-beasts being bargained over, shifted around, kept fresh with tonnes of ice. I walked around, still asleep, after driving to Canary Wharf in a total dream state.
Shouting, wet slanting floors, stacks of cash being counted.
My eel man was doing just that, sleazily turning the corners of crumpled twenties with a licked finger, belly out.
I had gone with the intention of buying an eel, to photograph, but my feeble imagination had gone only as far as imagining a dead or prepared one, not drawer after drawer of very alive looking specimens. “Don’t come any fresher than alive”, he said. I took a ‘small one’ with a slightly dodgy eye. Slapped into the scales. “9 quid”.
He squirmed on the passenger seat beside me all the way home, trying to find the way out of a knotted blue carrier bag. As a distraction I put on the radio - awful early morning Radio 1 jingles.
This was all becoming quite distressing (for both parties), and after the pictures I faced up to what was necessary. Two hours and a sharp boning-knife purchase later, he was scrubbed and gutted and chopped and sitting in a green marinade in the fridge. I was shaking slightly.
