I was delighted to read Steven Barsky's letter about lobsters in last month's Diver. It was breathtaking in its political incorrectness.
     How long is it since it was morally acceptable for a diver to catch something and eat it? Ten years? Twenty? When I took up the sport, your goody bag was as vital a piece of kit as your regulator or your wrecking hammer.
     If you didn't surface with the last representative of a threatened species and the skull of a Chief Petty Officer, you were a girl.
     The French have the right idea. Recently I ran through the Amazonian rainforest in the company of a French naturalist. I would point to some rare and exotic reptile and ask: "What is that, Jean-Paul?" And he would reply: "Ah-ha! Zat is delicious eef you broil 'eem lightly in garlic butter, wiz ze pommes de terres sautées an' ze 'earts of ze artichokes!"
     The French have a refreshingly simple view of mankind's duty as custodian of the planet: If it moves, sleep with it. If it doesn't, cook it.
     We Brits used to be the same (apart from the sex thing, which has never really caught on here). Your dive knife wasn't for cutting yourself free from monofilament fishing nets. It was designed by dedicated craftsmen exclusively for murdering flatties.
     I remember gastronomic orgies in Wales and Cornwall when whole mountains of sea creatures, victims of our wholesale and undiscerning submarine pogroms, were roasted over open fires and swilled down with Party 10 cans of Watney's filthy Red Barrel.
     Nowadays, if you so much as glance appraisingly at a common limpet, you're branded as an ecological Vizigoth and a barbarous enemy of our beautiful, fragile planet.
     Surface with a brace of scallops and you're likely to be unceremoniously separated from your private parts by the active service unit of an animal rights organisation.
     Of course, as I've pointed out on countless occasions in this journal, the chances of actually encountering an example of marine life in our home waters, let alone of capturing and digesting it, have diminished by nine to the power of 90 during my diving career.
     If the goody bag were rehabilitated today, it would be a shadow of its former self - perhaps the size of a folded pocket handkerchief. At the end of an hour-long dive in the English Channel, it might contain the hair of the dogfish and half a shrink-wrapped sea-cucumber.
     The moment I had finished my O-Levels (GCSEs to my adoring audience of under-30s) I retired to Runswick Bay with two mates and £5. The money was reserved for sweet cider and ran out on Day Two. For the rest of the week, we had to live on what we could catch. We could have stayed for a year.
     The whiting scrambled aboard our boat and cheerfully surrendered. The mackerel clambered up the beach to our chalet and obligingly gutted themselves on the veranda. The codling wrestled for the honour of being first to hurl themselves into our frying pan.
     But if, like my younger son, I had just completed my papers in Gender Studies and Damian Hirst: Genius or Pretentious Little Twat? and I'd chosen to celebrate my freedom at our hut in Runswick, I would have starved.
     Here's my advice: if you see it, kill it and eat it. If you don't, a factory ship will come along and suck up every living thing for 20 miles, then chuck out 99% of the catch because it doesn't meet the standards of some supermarket chain.