The Trouble With Love

Prologue

S pringtime, and up and down the Western Isles of Europe, ribbon-like glass eels arrive on a migration which begins deep within the doldrums of the Sargasso Sea.

On tidal swells some wash up the River Avon – where they grow into elvers – and travel on past the old Roman docks at Sea Mills to navigate twists and turns and pass underneath Brunel’s suspension bridge, where many moons ago an Edwardian lady threw herself off its parapet, her billowing skirts opening like a parachute, landing her safely on the water below.

These elvers continue their way upstream, some ending in Bristol’s docks, where the unlucky are picked off by angling cormorants as others make their way along The Cut up to where the river narrows and otters fish for bigger prey and kingfishers spear sticklebacks.

These plucky elvers hide in mudholes, cracks and burrows, where they mature into large brown eels biding their time until one stormy October night, urged on by Atlantic trade winds and a full moon, they are said to haul themselves up out of the water to clamber across land in search of the waterways that will transport them back to the spawning grounds of the Sargasso, where the monster Kraken lurks.

It is then that the waters squirm with sleek fat eels, come together in writhing masses, thick as the sargassum weed that winds around them.