By Frampton Jones

It was always likely that Sarah Louise Ephemery would be killed by some hungry inhabitant of the island. Being one of the few people who moved towards our non-human denizens rather than away from them has always put her at risk. I greatly admired her ability to reveal the true lives of things in rapidly taken images that, when put one after another, evidenced the motion. Objects that turned out to have legs. Trees that were not trees. Faces that were not imagined. We spent many happy hours comparing notes and photographs and I shall miss her greatly.

It is a sad irony then, that her death came about as a consequence of having eaten the wildlife, rather than being eaten by it. Sarah Louise Ephemery is the second victim of The Crow’s latest food incident.

Her brother, Jack Ephemery told me: “We try really hard, but when food is in short supply and something comes in you’ve never seen before, sometimes you just have to guess. Mostly we guess right. Sarah has been eating my dishes for years and I’ve not done her an injury before. Well, nothing she couldn’t get over within a week. I feel awful about this. I always do when someone dies after eating here, but, what can we do?”

It is a fair point. Who amongst us has never been hungry enough to take their chances cooking black eyed meese? Who hasn’t bought some troubling sea creature from a fisherman and wondered if it was a good idea? Who has not lost a loved one to a bad decision about what to put in the stew?

The official medical advice from Doc Willoughby is, ‘Steep everything in alcohol. Serve it with alcohol. It cleans the insides and keeps you safe and is why I am such a fine and healthy specimen of a man.’ My own method has been to boil everything, and then boil it again just to be on the safe side, and be ready with a large stick in case anything tries to get in the saucepan during the process.

There will be a wake for Sarah at The Crow tomorrow. Jack assures me there will be no experimental recipes whatsoever.