I've no idea how much a lobster pot costs, but an awful lot of the ones washed up after the winter storms get smashed to pieces on the rocky Mourne coastline. A few are returned to their owners, while others end up cluttering garden sheds; serving as a painful reminder of a tiring walk across a rock strewn shore, weighed down by a cumbersome ornament for the garden. The pot I rescued quickly became entangled in couch grass, bindweed and nettles before finding a home in the garden shed. Keen to restore one such ornament to its former profession, I hauled the pot back along a mile of coastline and wedged it between the rocks at low tide. Once baited with a frozen mackerel, though apparently cat food is just as effective, it's simply a matter of waiting for the tide to come in and go out again. Catching a lobster is one thing, getting it out of the pot could cause problems but killing one is a different matter. Opinion seems to be split regarding the most humane method of stunning the creature before it is cooked. It's a choice between a metal spike through the eye or a slow freeze followed by emersion in boiling water. Thankfully the lobster has little brain power and a strange nervous system; if it had a brain it would no doubt favour the latest method and choose to be electronically stunned. In the end killing a lobster wasn't a problem; returning to the rocks next day I discovered that either the sea had reclaimed the pot or perhaps it's on its way to someone else's garden shed.