“Yes. Well, to be quite honest, it never actually came on the market. I knew Archie Brannon, the owner of Seascape, quite well, and I’d been up to Fort William a number of times to see him. He had started a really good business, processing langoustines and prawns for the European markets, primarily Spain, Italy, and France. He found out that when all the fishing boats came into harbour up here, they were just dumping the small catch over the side. So he decided to capitalize on it and he made a bloody good job of it too. The only trouble with Archie was that he had one appalling failing. He couldn’t keep his pants on. Eventually, his wife ran out of patience and dragged him through the divorce courts, and she came out with a hefty settlement. Archie was already heavily borrowed at the bank, so he was left with no alternative other than to sell the business.”

“How did you find out about it?”

“We were working on some research for Seascape at the time, and I got a telephone call from Archie saying that we had to stop everything. He told me the whole story, and that night I went home and discussed it with Kate.”

“What do you mean? Buying the business?”

“Exactly. I wasn’t going to hang around. At the time, we’d only been married a couple of years. We had no children, no animals, no commitment to anyone else but ourselves. Kate was working as a secretary in some law firm in Plymouth and was bored out of her skull, and I would much rather have been working full-time around the harbours in Falmouth and Penzance than teaching hungover and apathetic students in the classroom. So we grasped the opportunity. I negotiated a price with Archie, we sold the house in Plymouth for a packet, and then moved up here, the proud owners of Seascape.”

“And how did you cope with the change?”