Huckleberry Finn should never go to reggae night

"You need to lighten up," says my husband.

“What?” I say defensively. I’m a Capricorn. The words don’t compute.

“No one wants to read about doom and gloom. There’s so much that…well it’s not all like that is it?” he says.

“I have a sense of foreboding that if I write about the nice stuff…” He cuts me off: “You have a sense of foreboding about everything.”

I know this is nothing to do with tending towards the real. It’s because he wants me to write about The Fishing Trip. But that would involve a loss of face, and I won’t be drawn.

“Write about the fishing trip,” he says, eventually, then picks up a kit bag and heads off. He’s going for a week to East Africa to chase the story of Somalian Pirates’ wavering demands for a couple of captured Brits.

Odd trip for a West Africa correspondent, I say. Why’s he off there? “British lives in danger,” he says. It calls for hands on deck from all corners of troubled, starving, war-torn, famine-ridden (not everywhere, remember?) Africa.

He’s going to miss the beach in this heat, I think, mucking about in temperate water, playing cricket with Magnus, finding a rare breeze that wafts smells of fish cooking on the grill.

Fish I didn’t catch.

Let me explain first that I have never thought myself an expert.

I spent a childhood in Wales persuading my father to spend rain-soaked evenings in ugly estuaries so we could catch flounder and plaice, and he would stand patiently with me in gales while we hooked tiny crab and threw them back.

In three years of this we caught one edible fish which my mother cooked and shared four ways. It didn’t matter that we caught little; I went to escape a wasteland that was children's TV.

That was a long time ago. Now I was ready to fish the great shoals of rare and beautiful fish that I would girlishly wrestle from the sea and bring home and serve to my own family. They would marvel at my skill, and I would feel like a huntress.

I knew there were tilapia in Ghanian water, a strong-spined fish you cook with cocoyam leaves, or with okra in a hot stew that’s slippery, like an overbloomed swamp whose crocs have long gone in shame, but which tastes like chilli velvet.

And much else besides: yellowfin and big-eye tuna, mackerel, sardines, sea bream, blue marlin and further afield barracuda.

But all this needs practice, requiring a trip to the beach for some concentrated learning. The boys come along for moral support, but it isn’t the peaceful mission I desire.

“Welcome to reggae night!” shouts a boy from a bar. He pulls up three plastic chairs for us to start drinking beer. One of us is 6, but that’s the least of my new problems.

I’m here to dip my hook quietly into teeming sea, but there’s a cacophonous crowd fired up for a big night and we’re suddenly centre-stage.

The fishing rod is an immediate source of entertainment. Fishing here is a job done with boats and nets, not a hobby. They want to help. Someone wants to buy the rod from me. He’s persuasive but I can’t, it’s the closest I get to adrenalin sport since a ski accident that broke my leg for a year.

They want to know everything.

“What’s on the line?” I show them hooks and beads and weights. I demonstrate how to put the rod together and how to use the reel, and I show them where in the water I want it.

“What are you trying to get? You want tortoise?” I assume they mean turtle. Magnus would cry forever.

The bit I am dreading is the inevitable next question.

In anticipation, I pick up the tackle box and pretend it’s time to move to a better part of the water, but they’re pretty jazzed up, they really want to know what this is all about.

And then it comes: “What food are you using to catch the fish?”

This is the bit my husband loves.

I’d prefer to produce a baby’s leg than show them what I’ve got. I had no time to stop for bait on the way; there was a risk of missing the last of the light.

So I took what I could from the fridge. Something that might sashay in the sea and fox the fish into thinking it was food. But it’s not really going to work, and it’s not going to pass muster with my new fishing friends.

They see I’m hesitant, and while two of them keep me protracting another looks in my fishing box and pulls out the “bait”.

I wish away my audience but it doesn’t work. They have found my oyster mushrooms, and I shudder.

So there we are, Huckleberry Finn and the Strange Bag of Fungi. The reggae boys are politely perplexed. I’m crestfallen. I reach for a magic goat horn but there isn’t one there.

“You won’t catch,” says one. “I’m getting you a fish.” He disappears into a bar and returns with a sardine’s tail, cuts it up and puts it on the hook. Then he asks me for more money than I would’ve paid for the entire fish at the market.

I disappear into the sea, a leg-wounded Fisher King, and pray to the god of Ghana and all his ancestors that I don’t fall over in the waves.

I try to fish, but I entered the realm of slapstick some minutes ago and now find it hard to stay serious. My sardine tail catches two plastic bags, one white, one black. I achieve racial harmony at least.

I look over at Magnus who’s been drawing animal pictures in the sand during the whole episode but has seen that the boys have found the mushrooms. He looks back, apologetically, fondly, thinking: “I love her but I don’t think I am hers.”