What catching crabs taught me about British society
Crabbing at Cromer Pier: A communal, competitive, and crustacean-filled adventure for all ages.
“It’s called a devil crab”, the old man told us, plunging his hand into the cloudy bucket. He neatly plucked the crab from its plastic lair and raised it to head height. “Red eyes”, he pointed out helpfully, as the tiny crustacean struggled in his hairy palm. Ted, 5, looked on in fascination. “Dunno what this one is”, the man continued, aware of his rapt—and growing—audience. He pulled a pale-looking crab from the milky water. “Bottom feeder”, he added, as he flipped the shell-dweller upside down to show us its strangely-muscular undercarriage.
We were visiting the famous Cromer Pier, just days after the World Pier Crabbing Championship. From a distance, the pier looked like some kind of bizarre wooden jellyfish: dozens of wispy orange tendrils floated in the sea breeze below its wooden deck, which I realised were the crablines of hopeful fisherfolk. As we got closer, we saw that the entire structure was lined with families, individuals, couples, people old and young – all fervently dangling their lines over the side in the hope of landing a crab.
Proximity to water seems to break down British barriers: nowhere else in the country will you wave, unprompted, at a stranger – unless one of you is on a boat. The communal dining of fish’n’chips in sight of the sea, while everyone watches the gulls steal for their supper. And now the mild competition of crabbing, where the only prize is brief custody of a bemused crustacean, and your competitors tend to be of the excitable, pre-pubescent kind.
I found myself approaching strangers to ask how their crabbing fared, and calling my family over to excitedly point them towards a promising bucket: nobody had a haul as impressive as the old man and his devil crabs, but a few enterprising kids had landed a decent-sized brown crab and were gingerly picking it up with faux nonchalance to show it off. One man had just a claw in his bucket, orphaned from its owner. Another bloke was excited to show us his “crab”, which turned out to be a rubber one. “You should use it as bait to try to trick the real crabs”, Ted suggested, and the man briefly considered this cannibalistic lure.
Teenagers made actual eye contact with us and even spoke in full sentences, explaining their choice of bait (old bacon is the de facto choice) and admitting that there’s no way to tell when a crab has taken the bait: you just pull your line up every now and again to see if there’s anything there. The stakes were so low and the technique so simple that I suddenly saw why everyone was enjoying themselves so much.
One elderly bloke at the back of the pier was wearing a cowboy hat, swigging from a not-very-well-concealed bottle of white wine under the table, and winding in his crabline to the soundtrack of an enormous Bluetooth speaker stashed somewhere in his baggage. Kids excitedly baited their lines as their parents dozed in the sun, their heads warm against the salted rime of the wooden pier. Pensioners out for the day looked around, heads raised and eyes on stalks like their arthropod cousins. Kids ran everywhere, shouting in the Norfolk sun. Nobody had a mobile phone in sight.
We didn’t go crabbing ourselves: one dad with a Guy Fieri goatee told me that they’d been there nearly three hours in order to land the disappointed-looking crab in their bucket. Doing the rounds of the folks on the pier gave us a vicarious summary version, and we left feeling like we’d had the highs and lows of crabbing without having to encounter mouldering bacon.
I was struck by how great it was to see a bunch of completely disparate people, spanning the entire spectrum of age, gender, race and social class, happily jumping in (not literally, the pier is dozens of feet above sea level). And the best part? Not a single crab is injured during the event (unless a wayward child gets too bucket-happy when exhibiting their catch). Maybe we all need to catch crabs.
Mini-feels this week
Out of the mouth of babes
We just got back from a week’s family holiday in Norfolk, and we filled it with kid-related activities. Yesterday we went to “ROARR!”, a dinosaur-themed park where I managed to get shat on by a bird within minutes of arrival (don’t worry, I won’t write another newsletter about it).
My son’s highlight of the visit was “Dippy’s Raceway”, a tiny go-kart track where kids could race each other. I became uncomfortably aware of how much Ted is picking up from me when he sits up front on long car journeys when we heard him yell “YOU’RE DRIVING REALLY DANGEROUSLY YOU KNOW” at another child who overtook him with a bump.