Fear isn’t always rational. It doesn’t always scale either. I’ve jumped off bridges, held wild tarantulas, and climbed glaciers. None of them prepared me for the absolute existential horror of eating a fish.
✓ Project Bucket List is all about getting back out there in the world. It’s important to balance the big adventures with the little wins. Without the small stories, you can’t carry momentum forward to grow. That’s why the list is full of little weekend tasks that won’t fundamentally change my life one by one, but all together, make an entirely different story.
I remember travelling through France as a young kid. My Mum and Dad, exhausted after a long day of hauling two entitled little shits around, decided to stop and get ol’ reliable – pizza. Lo and behold, instead of the margarita that I believed was coming, we’d somehow ordered an anchovy pizza. I was unable to eat it, and after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, my mum decided to prove a point that it’s perfectly edible, and after taking one bite, decided that I could skip dinner and just have ice cream.
And thus began a lifelong obsession with not putting fish in my mouth.
See, I’d always hated fish; there’s something about it – the smell, the taste – something just hits at the “absolutely not, thanks” switch in my brain. I remember going for sushi with friends and looking on politely. I remember walking past delicious food stands in Spain, home of some of the best food on the planet, and not being able to enjoy the full range. There’s a whole culinary world that I’m not privy to, on account of this hypersensitivity of mine. Hell, I can even recognise when ice has been near fish in the freezer.
I’ve even done research on this. I got myself a copy of McGee on Food and Cooking, and found a tiny little paragraph talking about trimethylamine oxide (TMAO). See, fresh fish contains TMAO, which is completely odorless. The second a fish dies, bacteria start to reduce the TMAO into trimethylamine (TMA). And, that’s the thing that smells fishy.
Most chefs will balance the taste out with something acidic, like lemons or vinegar. It pairs well, but it also neutralises TMA, plus it makes for great product photography.
Now, it turns out that freshwater fish produce much lower levels of TMA, so they don’t tend to have as much of a fishy taste. So as I grew more and more envious of sushi fans, the idea of trying fresh fish started to swim around in my mind.
Thing is, the second you start looking for freshwater fish for sale in the UK, you start to realise how rare it actually is. People will scoff and recommend any of the major supermarkets in the country, none of which seem to stock it. Or, you ask online, and people will direct you to garden centres or aquariums. Maybe it’s being in the Midlands, but they’re near impossible to find, much to everybody’s surprise.
Which brings me to today. Lidl rotates its stock, and around Christmas, this special smoked trout comes out. Bingo.
We buy the trout, smoked, so the fishy taste should be less, and bring it home, with the intent of trying it that very evening. I don’t know if you’ve ever had it where you put something off you really don’t want to do. It took a week before we finally sat down and had it.
In the kitchen, we set it up with chutney, melba toast, and rocket with balsamic vinegar. Look at it, it’s beautiful. And more interestingly, it looks like ham. I have this mounting feeling that this might actually be ok.
I grab a piece of the toast, prep it all nicely with a thin slice of trout on top, and bring it up near my face, and find that I can no longer move. My shoulders tighten, and the fish hovers precariously close to my face.
This is going to sound stupid, but the closest feeling in recent memory I have, standing over the sink with a little bit of trout in my hand on a bit of bread, is the bungee jump. Stop laughing. I’m standing there with a bit of fish in my hand, comparing it to jumping off a bridge, and you’re laughing. Barney the Dinosaur would expect you to be kinder.
Anyway, I count down in my head, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and step off the edge of the bridge. At first, I can’t taste anything, then the chutney kicks in, then a coolness, a jelly-like substance, balsamic vinegar, and then it hits. The ever so slight whisper of a memory of a thought of a fart of the smell of fish.
I gag. I feel like I’ve just stuck my toothbrush too far down my throat. I try to swallow again, keeping a keen eye on the empty sink right next to me, and then I get another bit of the taste of it in my mouth. I try one more time to swallow, but my body just won’t let me, and as the taste rears its ugly head one more time, I lean over the sink and:
SPLAT.
See, I tried. I promise I did. In fact, I was really brave; I tried twice. I trialled having just the fish by itself, and same result, a gip, and a sad lump of chewed up trout in the sink.
I thought that trying a freshwater fish would grant me some sort of invitation to a new culinary adventure, but oh my god, not at all. That small sliver of TMA just felt wrong. I kept trying to swallow, but couldn’t do it.
Not everything has to have some big character transformation by the end of it. If you came to an article about me wanting to eat a fish and expected some sort of revelation, I dread to think how disappointed you were by Pirates of the Caribbean 4. I’ll throw back to the Marathon Hike here. Failure is ok. ✓ Project Bucket List isn’t just about winning, it’s about growing as a person.
And look, fear doesn’t scale in the same way for everybody. I can throw myself off a bridge and still be defeated by a piece of trout. Do not minimise the small, silly, ordinary things. They are what life is, once you strip away the highlight reels.
As far as I’m concerned, I’m ticking this off the list. I didn’t embrace some massive change in personhood, and I didn’t come out of this much wiser, or stronger, or happier. But that’s not the point. The point is to try it, that’s the whole contract I signed with myself.
But I did it, it was a big deal, screw you.