My two teenage daughters have ribbed me mercilessly during the writing of this book. I’ve cheerfully weathered routine comments such as ‘Dad, who, apart from your seriously weird friends, is going to buy this book?’ and ‘How come you aren’t having salmon for breakfast this morning?’ One day, clearly worried that my salmon obsession had gone too far, Ivana (who insisted I should have been writing about a fish that was actually interesting – such as the piranha) asked me whether I’d rather be a salmon or a person. My reply to this profound question (‘Surely you already know the answer to that’) did nothing to reassure her. On another occasion, when particularly annoyed with me, she told one of her friends in a bitter tone that her father probably wished that he’d had salmon instead of children. Yet one of the sweetest things that Giuliana has said to me recently is that when she’s rich and famous she’ll buy me my own river that I can fill with as many salmon as I like. (I shall remind her of this promise in years to come.) But this one is for Graziella – not least for first spotting flash-frozen crimson-coloured wild Alaska sockeye salmon at the supermarket fish counter.
I’d also like to thank the following for various forms of assistance or simply for being so keen to talk salmon with me: Will Adams, Johnny Ajluni, Jeremy Bristow, Jonathan Burt, Jess Dunton, Claudia Escobar, Simon Evans, Richard Harrad, Ron Inouye, Susan Irby, Joe Jissel, Sara Mall Johani, Seth Johnson-Marshall, Mike Johnston, ‘Pete River’ Kaufman, Gideon Lack, Harry Marshall, Garry Marvin (for bringing the ‘Animal’ series to my attention), Tom Moffatt, Heather Pegg, Gabrielle Rivers, Stephen Marsh-Smith, Steve Wells and Adrian Williams. I also wish to acknowledge the enormous assistance that the University of Bristol provided in the shape of a University Research Fellowship, without which this book could never have been completed in timely fashion. My university’s Arts Faculty Research Fund and BIRTHA Institute also contributed to the cost of reproducing the illustrations.