Worshipping seaweed

‘So. Jeremy. Why do you want to learn about eating seaweed?’ said Ingrid as we trooped down the leafy farm track to the beach. Ingrid, our leader for the day, was a spry woman in her early fifties wearing a hand-stitched buckskin Hiawatha tunic and possibly little else. She was going to show us how to identify, harvest, prepare and cook a four-course seaweed ‘feast’ over a driftwood fire. I was preparing myself for the collapse of civilisation, I told her. ‘When we’re all eating each other,’ I said, ‘I’m hoping that a side dish of seaweed will vary my diet a bit.’

A dozen of us had responded to the flyer pinned to the vegetarian café noticeboard advertising Ingrid’s day of instruction. My fellow punters were all foot soldiers of the New Age and they all had that air about them of holy children treading lightly upon the earth. They couldn’t work me out at all.