Eels have been a part of my life for many years, probably as a result of having grown up in Gloucestershire. I used to fish for them in the Severn, usually at night using lobworms harvested from our lawn. Very tasty indeed. The last time I caught eels was probably about five years ago, when I cooked two fish of about a pound apiece that I'd caught in a particularly deep hole in the Severn. There was also a time when I was fishing on the Thames opposite Hampton Court Palace; a slight twitch of the rod tip indicated that something was up; when the culprit surfaced, it turned out to be a sports sock. I unhooked it (carefully, as I was not proposing to eat the sock and was going to return it to its natural habitat) and then found that a small eel had taken up residence in the sock. It suddenly struck me that this fine creature had navigated its way across a vast ocean and battled up tidal Thames, somehow clearing the lock at Teddington only to settle down in a flippin' sock...
I also remember meeting the chaps out on the river in springtime between Tewkesbury and Gloucester (the beautiful meadows at Deerhurst, near the Saxon church and Odda's chapel, were a particular hotspot for elvering) who used to earn vast sums in a very short space of time when the elvers were running. I never saw them at work, just set up, waiting and playing cards with each other as the sun went down. Some of them were quite happy to chat about the old days, when the elvers were so plentiful that there was often a surplus, and the leftovers would be put in hessian sacks, tied to the handlebars of a bike and pedalled all the way to Bristol where they'd be sold to a glue factory for not very much at all.
Is it true that eel blood is poisonous unless (a) it has been cooked) or (b) you are a hedgehog? And is there really a drink that you can buy in pubs in Lydney called Fart, which in cider with ginger and is usually drunk with a pint of live elvers? I may be misremembering...
