My earliest memory of the sea is not of the sea itself but of a photograph. It
was taken two years after the end of the second world war on the beach at
Skegness, by my mother, with the ubiquitous Box Brownie. I am 18 months old,
dressed in a knitted romper suit and taking peculiar interest in a black
leather bag. Inside it, apparently, is a packet of Smith’s crisps.
My newest memory of the sea is from yesterday. I am on a marsh near my home in
Norfolk, gazing upon the same North Sea that lured my parents all those
years ago to Skegness. The place is beyond beauty. It is sublime. The tide
is high, changing a landscape of creeks and sand bars into a rippling sheet
of silver. Geese, ducks and gulls stipple the surface. Wading birds feast in
the mud. A pair of seals raise their heads above water that has surged maybe
two metres deep across a footpath. They register the human interloper, then
roll and wrestle like puppies.
Nowhere in the UK is more than 72 miles from the sea. Every aspect of our
lives – our diet, climate, politics, art, suspicion of foreigners – even the
blood in our veins – is conditioned by it. As a people, we are not so much
by the sea as of it. Transmuted through the deep-fat fryer, it taints the
air in every city and town. It is our favourite day out, our pride and
national identifier. We can’t know when our oldest ancestor first launched
himself on a log. By some time between 1890BC and 1700BC, however, Bronze
Age Britons were advanced in the art of building proper, internally braced
planked boats with caulked seams and keels. We lagged behind the Egyptians,
who had the technology at least 700 years earlier, but few nations on Earth
have left a more powerful wake. When Julius Caesar arrived, he found an
energetic maritime nation ploughing a well-furrowed sea and with a
well-established tradition of shipbuilding.
The eastern shoreline is dynamic and ever-changing. Cliffs are nibbled away,
sand swept by the tide to raise new beaches further south. Whole towns and
villages lie beneath the waves, and more will follow. And yet, in the wild
places, there is a feeling of unchangingness. A Bronze Age man, a
Neanderthal, any half-sapient hominid from the entire span of human
evolution, could return to a place like this and be entirely unconscious of
the passing millennia.
It is a powerful illusion, but an illusion all the same. Go to any beach. Even
on the most pristine there is garbage, tide lines delineated not just by
wrack and driftwood but by cans and plastic bottles. Readers of The Sunday
Times in the late 1970s did much to make such despoliation illegal. Hundreds
joined in a beach-litter survey that, by recording and analysing serial
numbers on plastic bottles, demonstrated what everyone always suspected but
never proved – that Britain’s rim of rubbish was the gift of the merchant
marine, garbage dumped from ships. Armed with this data, the Department of
the Environment (as it then was), had all the evidence it needed to ratify
Annex V of the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from
Ships, known as Marpol, outlawing the dumping of garbage, which came into
force on December 31, 1988.
But fouling the sea is an invisible crime, and unstoppable. The proportion of
plastic in beach litter increases all the time as older, less durable
materials – wood, metals, glass and textiles – are supplanted. In 2005 it
was 59%. On the beach it abrades over time into synthetic sand. At sea,
where it accounts for more than half the floating litter, it endangers
birds, animals and fish. More than 90% of the 30,000 gannets’ nests on
Grassholm Island, off the Pembrokeshire coast, now contain plastic material
in which legs can become ensnared. Plastic bags block the intestinal tracts
of mammals, turtles and sharks. Globally, 1m birds and 100,000 marine
mammals and turtles are killed every year by plastic.
In 2005, the Marine Conservation Society calculated that each kilometre of
shoreline yielded on average 1,981 items of rubbish. This included 117
pieces of plastic for every 100 metres – more than one a metre. “Sanitary
items” washed out through sewers occurred at seven-metre intervals, and
glass at 16 metres.
But “average” of course conceals significant local differences. The northern
tip of Scotland, for example, suffers only 26 bits of “sewage related
debris” per kilometre. West Wales and northeast England get 744.
Almost all of it is illegal. Marpol bans all plastics from the sea, and
severely restricts all other kinds of waste. No rubbish should be dumped
within three nautical miles of the coast. Garbage that is not ground to a
particle-size of less than 25 millimetres is banned to a distance of 12
miles, and buoyant lining and packaging material to 25 miles. And yet it’s
hard to see that much has changed. The Sunday Times survey 30 years ago was
designed by Trevor Dixon, then a PhD student at King’s College London, now a
senior lecturer at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College. He still
surveys the Kent coast and reports that 90% of litter still comes from
ships. It’s the same old stuff that we were finding in the 1970s: drinks
bottles, household detergents, bleach. The Hellenic Marine Environment
Protection Association has calculated that a plastic bottle at sea will take
450 years to biodegrade, raising the possibility that maritime theme pubs in
the early 26th century will adorn their nooks with Harpic.
Britain’s appetite for sea rather than freshwater fish seems to have developed
during the early 11th century. This may have been due to the poisoning of
waterways by urban effluents; or it may have been a matter of taste, for who
would have preferred the mud-flavoured denizens of lowland rivers to the
salty tang of cod? For whatever reason, it launched a new age of heroic
adventure. By the first decade of the 15th century, ships from England’s
east coast were a common sight around Iceland. They sailed in March for a
round trip of 1,800 miles, after which the survivors would return with salt
cod in August or September. In favourable conditions a ship might reach
Iceland in a week. In bad, it could take a month. In the worst, the best a
man could hope for was to perish swiftly. In 1419, a storm off the Icelandic
coast sank 25 English boats in a day (this at a time when the entire fleet
might have been no more than 30). That ship owners were prepared to hazard
their vessels, and crews to risk their lives, says much about the value of
the trade – it benefited richly from meatless days in the religious calendar.
Faith in the infinitude of the sea was like a religion, too. We have long
known the belief to be false, and yet we continue to behave as if the seas
were stocked by magic. The result has been a programme of increasingly
spectacular vanishing acts. Typical of many, the Newfoundland cod fishery,
once famous for being more fish than water, collapsed in 1992 because we had
eaten the breeding stock – an act of wilful self-harm that would have
stretched the credulity of a Neanderthal. The North Sea, too, once seethed
with shoals. Herring to East Anglians was like gold to the Incas – it raised
them up; it brought them down. Lowestoft in the early 20th century could
handle 60m fish at a time, but it was not enough. On a single day in 1907,
the drifters brought in 90m. During the eight-week season, from
mid-September to November, more than 1,000 boats would steam south from
Scotland to join the plunder, shooting their nets as the fish rose at dusk.
Everything moved to the rhythm of the shoals. Just as the marrying season for
farm workers and their girls was in October and November after the corn had
been stored, so the fishwives enjoyed their season between November and
February, after the salting of the herring. Now it sounds as quaint as the
maypole. For all the usual reasons, plus a few extra (disruption by war,
loss of export markets through changing tastes), another golden goose honked
its last. In 1967 just a single drifter sailed out of Lowestoft, and 10
years later the government banned all herring fishing in the North Sea.
I have heard this described as a “salutary lesson”, but 30 years on, with cod
on the brink and entire marine ecosystems made moribund, fishermen still
plead for the right to clear the seas of everything with flesh on its bones.
Scientists advising zero quotas tug Europe’s fisheries ministers in the
direction of sanity. Nationalism, their domestic fishing industries and the
appetites of their electorates tug them towards the chip shop. Better empty
seas than lost elections.
My paradisiacal evening walk is along the southern shore of the Wash, part of
what is known as fishing area IVc, stretching from Grimsby south to
Folkestone, and across to northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands. As
recently as 1995, IVc netted 2,472 tonnes of cod. Eight years later, in
2003, a dwindling UK fleet landed just 678 tonnes. In four years, total
landings at East Anglia’s principal fishing port, Lowestoft, crashed from
5,400 to 1,667 tonnes. In 2004 it plummeted again, to 657 tonnes, which
included more sprats (272 tonnes) than the combined weight of cod (135
tonnes), sole (38 tonnes), herring (3 tonnes) and haddock (nil). In the
following year, even that would invite tears of nostalgia – the total cod
catch by UK vessels in fishing area IVc in 2005 was 206 tonnes. It’s the
same across the rest of the country. Less than 20% of the cod eaten in the
UK now is caught by its own fleets: the rest is air-freighted from Iceland,
Russia, Denmark, Norway, the Faeroes and, in processed form, from China. To
put it more starkly: in 1947, the year of my first acquaintance with the
sea, the UK fleet landed 273,135 tonnes of cod. In 2005 it managed just
21,000, and Britain’s contribution to global fish production fell to less
than 1%.
And yet we can’t seem to stop ourselves. Science repeatedly tells us no more
cod should be taken, but European ministers in December 2005 voted for a
quota-cut of just 15%. Not only this. Quotas for other species in the same
seas had actually been raised, thus increasing the “bycatch” of young cod
and hitting the breeding stock even harder. It was the same last year. The
UK minister Ben Bradshaw returned from the traditional pre-Christmas haggle
pleased to announce quota increases variously for mackerel, hake, monkfish,
prawns and haddock. The bad news for fishermen was that North Sea cod would
be cut by 14%, and days at sea by between 7% and 10%, depending on the size
of trawler.
The deal as usual pleased nobody – not even Bradshaw himself, who had wanted a
bigger cut but predictably had been thwarted by the politicking. For Bertie
Armstrong, the chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, the
cut was “wholly unsatisfactory”, and took no account of “the huge efforts
made [by] the Scottish fleet to fish sustainably and responsibly”. The
chorus was taken up by Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party.
“The Scottish fleet,” he said, “are represented by a Whitehall minister who
doesn’t care, and a Scottish minister who’s not there when it counts. This
annual pantomime has turned into farce.” But Salmond of course is a
politician, not a scientist, and what he’s fishing for is votes.
One thing at least has got better since my childhood. Then a visit to a beach
would involve not only calamine lotion for sunburnt skin but also turpentine
for oil-smeared limbs and ruined towels – people could smell you coming, but
didn’t know whether to expect a powdered aunt or a decorator. Like all
improvements at sea, it took a disaster to make it happen. The wreck of the
Torrey Canyon on the Seven Stones reef off the Scillies in 1967 caused what
was then the worst oil spill in history (40 years and multiple sinkings
later, it still ranks seventh).
As 100,000 tonnes of oil drifted towards Cornwall in a slick the size of an
English county, the prime minister, Harold Wilson, and his colleagues met
and acted like a war cabinet, ordering Royal Navy Buccaneers to bomb the
wreck. In all, they dropped 42 1000-pounders, earning derision by hitting
the target only three times out of four. Behind them came RAF Hunters,
spraying aviation fuel to ignite the oil. It didn’t end even with that. The
BBC was soon talking about rockets and napalm, and sightseers crowded the
cliff tops to watch. It was the very darkest of black comedies. After each
bombing-run, the smoke would drift to reveal the ship, blackened and broken
but refusing to sink. Worse was to come. Spring tides put out the flames,
leaving commanders no option but to sound the retreat, leaving the hulk to
go on seeping through the night until the bombers could finish it off in the
morning. At least 70 miles of England’s most beautiful beaches (93 by some
accounts) were coated in disgusting brown sludge, Cornwall’s tourist
industry took a massive hit, and tens of thousands of sea birds died (though
miraculously the fisheries were very little damaged, and most of the harm
came not from the oil itself but from the detergent used to disperse it).
The French had it even worse.
Of course it was not catastrophes like this that routinely caked the beaches –
for that we could thank ships’ captains flushing their tanks at sea. In
theory this had been barred in coastal waters since 1954, but it was a bit
like expecting dogs to respect “No fouling” notices. It was not in their
nature. Torrey Canyon changed all that, albeit at a speed that was slow even
by the standards of international diplomacy. It took two years, until 1969,
for the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) to agree to a special
conference, another four years, until 1973, for the conference actually to
meet and agree the basic outline of a treaty. Even then, three years later,
only Jordan, Kenya and Tunisia had signed up. Oil tankers meanwhile were
behaving as if they regarded Torrey Canyon as a role model.
So IMO tried again. A conference in 1978 relaxed the anti-pollution timetable
from snail’s pace down to something easier for the negotiators to keep up
with. It was not until October 2, 1983, 16 years after Torrey Canyon, that
Annex I of Marpol, “Prevention of pollution by oil”, became law, and we got
something in return for our patience. Double-hulled ships are now gradually
reducing the risk of accidents (the UK has not had a big one since the Sea
Empress in 1996), and technology has mostly done away with the need for
tank-washing. It shows that international co-operation in marine
conservation is possible. It also shows that the sense of urgency struggles
to exceed manana – a problem that can still be marked in sewage.
Here, too, improvements have been hard won. Old, overloaded sewerage systems
are sometimes still caught short with horrible consequences after storms,
but it’s no longer policy to treat coastal waters as an unfiltered extension
of the national U-bend, and swimmers are much less likely to strike out
through floating faeces than they were in the 1950s – a decade when not even
a polio outbreak convinced the government that sewage was a bad thing to
swim in, and when the only controlling mechanisms were our noses and
stomachs. So long as the water did not make us vomit, we could frolic in it.
It was not until 1976 that the EC set limits for faecal coliforms
(Escherichia coli, for example) in “designated bathing waters”. After a slow
start (only 27 in 1979), the number of such waters has risen to 493 in
England and Wales (though nine are inland), and 63 in Scotland. This means
they are regularly monitored and meet official standards. But it does not
mean they are free from faecal matter, or that a coliform swallowed at a Blue
Flag beach is any less likely to make you sick than one sampled from a
sewer. In 2006, 99.5% of English designated waters reached the EC’s
“minimum” standard for coliforms, and 75.1% the higher “guideline” standard.
Only two sites failed, and only one of these – Staithes, in North
Yorkshire – was coastal (the other was Hampstead Heath ladies’ pond in
London).
If you are reassured by that, prepare for a shock.
By accepted criteria, the risk of contracting a gastrointestinal illness is
14% in minimum-standard European designated water, and 5% in
guideline-standard, per swim. Research in the UK has shown that surfers –
and thus, by implication, swimmers too – are three times more likely than
non-surfer/swimmers to contract hepatitis A. Imagine, say, that strawberry
yoghurt carried a 5% risk of diarrhoea and vomiting. It would be off the
shelves before you could say “Food Standards Agency”.
In March 2006, a much-needed revision of the EC Bathing Water Directive came
into force. “Coming into force”, however, didn’t mean it was any more
sensible to dive in with your mouth open – the UK has two years (ie, until
next March) to introduce any legislation necessary to comply, and until 2015
to bring it fully into effect. Given the government’s tragicomic,
foot-dragging and generally losing battle with European environmental
directives (on toxic waste and waste electrical equipment, for example), one
hesitates to celebrate too wildly.
Eventually, the old “mandatory” and “guideline” standards will be replaced by
four new ones: “poor”, “sufficient”, “good” and “excellent”. The last two
are backed by the World Health Organization (WHO), which reckons they will
cut the risk of infection to 5% and 3% per swim respectively. The
“sufficient” standard, however, lags behind at 8%, or gamblers’ odds of
25-to-2, which is why WHO will not support it. According to Defra, only 51%
of English designated waters currently would pass as “excellent” and 26%
“good”, with 15% (ie, 61 beaches) “sufficient” and 8% “poor”. Pending the
inevitable “stakeholder consultation”, it has yet to tell us how the low
scorers will be improved. The outcome will depend on arm wrestling between
legislators who want cleaner bathing water, others who want cheaper drinking
water, and the water companies, whose combined responsibility for sewage
disposal and water supply seems to involve a constant conflict of priority,
as if clean beaches and clean tap water were somehow locked in opposition,
like cousins contesting a will.
In the end it may all come down to labelling. The EC has until 2010 to design
a system of “clear and simple” symbols to be displayed at popular beaches,
with a target of 2012 – six years after the directive was introduced – for
the signs to be erected. So don’t ditch the Diocalm yet. Don’t ditch it
especially if you’re holidaying abroad. Only 24% of the UK’s sewage output
is still discharged raw, but in the Mediterranean it’s 53% (so don’t look
too closely at what the fish are nibbling in the bay). Even this doesn’t
make it a particular black spot internationally. The figure for Latin
America and the Caribbean is 86%, slightly better than eastern Asia (89%),
but worse than the southeast Pacific and west and central Africa (83% and
80% respectively).
The consequence is not just swimmers with their heads down the lavatory.
Pollutants including agricultural as well as human wastes are stimulating
algal blooms and creating oxygen-deficient “dead zones” – marine graveyards
where nothing can live. This is exacerbated by climate change, which is
causing shifts in winds and ocean currents. The UN Environment Programme
(Unep) reports that the number of dead zones worldwide has doubled in every
decade since the 1960s. In 2006 there were 200, and they are not small. Off
the coast of Oregon, oxygen was sucked out of 3,000 square kilometres (1,150
square miles), suffocating everything that lived. No fish swam. The sea bed
was littered with carcasses, and the shore with dead sea birds. Migrating
salmon starved, and the whole episode lasted 17 weeks. Similar zones have
appeared in Scandinavia, the Gulf of Mexico, and off the coasts of South
America, Ghana, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal and, yes,
even the UK, though nothing yet on the scale of Oregon.
According to Greenpeace, soupy “plumes” of agro-chemically-enriched river
water have created areas of de-oxygenation in the southern North Sea,
Liverpool Bay and the Clyde estuary, and worse has befallen our neighbours.
In 2000, the Ospar Commission for the Protection of the Marine Environment
of the North-East Atlantic reported widespread problems “in particular
estuaries and fjords, the Wadden Sea, the German Bight, the Kattegat and the
eastern Skaggerak”. Fishing for Norwegian lobster (aka scampi or
langoustine) in the Kattegat had all but ceased, and the long-term build-up
of pollution meant it could take decades to recover.
I have written before on the curse of sea-cage salmon farming in western
Scotland – the perceived link (obvious to some, disputed by others) between
pollution from the farms, algal blooms and shellfish disease; the gradual
extinction of wild Atlantic salmon by sea lice from farmed fish and
crossbreeding with the thousands of farm escapes. Anglers now catch four
truant farm-salmon for every wild one, though anyone mentioning this is
likely to be accused of hostility to the Highland economy (never mind that
the industry is dominated by the Norwegian giant Pan Fish, not by local
farmers), and the Scottish executive prances round the issue like a
one-legged sword-dancer over a snake pit. The Worldwide Fund for Nature
(WWF) and some others have stopped actively campaigning against the farms
because, as a WWF spokesman put it to me, “the Scottish Executive is so
neatly tucked up in bed with the aquaculture industry” that there is no
point.
There is an assumption, central to the case for aquaculture, that farmed fish
take the pressure off wild ones. But the reverse is true. To create enough
fishmeal and oils to grow one kilo of farmed salmon, you need to catch four
kilos of wild fish. Worldwide, about 30m tonnes are taken annually to make
fishmeal and fish oil, of which 70% of the oil and 34% of the meal goes to
fish farms. By 2010, at the current rate of increase, this is likely to
reach 100% and 50% respectively. By far the greatest single share – 53% of
the world output of fish oil – is eaten by salmon and trout. The wild
species used in fish feed are caught mainly in the northeast Atlantic and
southeast Pacific, off Chile and Peru. In February 2003, WWF-Norway reported
that fisheries were reeling under the pressure, and local governments argued
that catches should be eaten by people, not taken away for salmon feed.
Nor was this the worst of it. The fish used in oil and meal (which include
sardine, jack mackerel, horse mackerel, sprat, sand eel, pout, capelin and
herring) are essential to the survival of other species – not just mammals
and birds but, perhaps more importantly in the narrow context of seafood,
other fish. Dr Simon Cripps, director of WWF’s endangered seas programme,
spelt it out. “A decline in fish stocks used in fish feed,” he said, “can
have devastating effects throughout the marine food chain from wild stocks
of cod, haddock and other commercial species right on up to dolphins, orcas
[killer whales] and marine birds.” It is madness on a plate. The industrial
sand-eel fishery in the North Sea did indeed collapse in 2003, and even the
aquaculture industry has begun to realise that it can’t sustain itself like
this. Its own long-term survival will depend on alternative sources of feed
– soya protein, perhaps, or (following the example of the “organic” salmon
trade) the spare parts – heads, guts and so forth – of fish caught for the
table.
Even as we dither over climate change, the sea is bulking itself up, literally
expanding as the water warms and becomes more turbulent. We know the massive
storms and surges are coming; that parts of England and Wales have no more
chance than Bangladesh of staying dry. We know we can’t save every town and
village. But, though we have argued for years, we still can’t decide which
bits of coastline to set in concrete and which to abandon to the sea; how,
or even if, we will compensate those for whom a change of policy will mean
the loss of their homes.
Without the spur of electoral interest, governments move with the speed of
limpets over a rock. You would need a very long bus queue to find anyone in
it who knew what a Mehra was (and I suspect this would be the case even if
the queue was composed entirely of MPs). After the tanker Braer came to
grief off the Shetlands in 1993, the government ordered an inquiry under the
late Lord Donaldson to find ways of protecting the coast from pollution by
shipping. Among its recommendations were Marine Environmental High Risk
Areas, or Mehras, which ships’ captains would either avoid or at least
take care not to sink in.
Classic examples, said Donaldson, were the Scillies and the Minches. The
reasons were obvious. The Scillies are the most diverse sea bird site in
England (20,000 nesting birds of 13 species), and a vital migratory route
for birds of passage. Their rocks and reefs are also a notorious graveyard
for ships. So it is with the Minches – the busy straits between the west
coast of Scotland and the Outer Hebrides. Thousands of ships pass through
every year and it is a favourite short cut for tankers. In 2003, the
German-owned MV Jambo sank off the Summer Isles, spilling 1,600 tonnes of
zinc oxide; in 2005 an oil tanker grounded off Skye. Dolphins, whales, seals
and basking sharks flourish in waters whose bird populations are uncountably
vast. And so it goes on. Here were two areas of world-class coastline,
internationally important for wildlife and famous for their beauty, both
with a long history of accidents and damage from shipping.
And yet, after 12 years of deliberation, in February 2006, the Department for
Transport announced a list of 32 Mehras that included about 9% of the UK
coastline but (should one laugh or cry?) not the Scillies or the Minches.
The RSPB, WWF and the Marine Conservation Society were incredulous;
questions were asked in parliament. But it was no use. Somehow officials had
managed to design criteria for Mehras that specifically excluded the two places
that most needed their protection.
Back in Norfolk, at sunset, I watch a family canoeing home after a picnic.
They have left it late and are silhouetted against the water, two lithe
figures bending at the paddles, two more lolling in between. The falling
tide has exposed acres of mud, forcing them seawards and doubling their
journey. Behind them a long, low spit of shingle, home to terns and seals,
merges with the dusk. Their bright beachwear and the pillar-box red of their
plastic canoe are neutralised by the shadow, so that nothing remains but
their shape. It is an image as old as history. Fragile boat; infinite sea;
frail humanity. From this distance it would look no different if the canoe
were a dugout and its crew a Mesolithic family in furs. Driving home I see
barn owls, hares, deer, and enjoy the illusion of timelessness. But the
landscape is not the same as the one I knew in the 1950s, and neither is the
sea. It, too, has changed its chemistry.
In June 2005, the Royal Society published a report that articulated the fears
of scientists worldwide. To keep it simple: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
is absorbed by the oceans. It follows therefore that the more carbon there
is in the atmosphere, the more there is in the sea. Over the past 200 years,
says the Royal Society, the oceans have absorbed about half the CO² released
by fossil fuels, and this has increased the acidity of the water. If the
trend continues, by 2100 the seas will be at their most acidic for hundreds
of millennia, and the rate of change “100 times greater than at any time
over this period”. Why does it matter? Knowledge is incomplete, but all the
evidence suggests that acidification ultimately destroys the ability of
shellfish and corals to grow shells and plates from calcium carbonate.
“Other calcifying organisms that may be affected,” warns the Royal Society,
“are components of the phytoplankton and zooplankton, and are a major food
source for fish.”
Abandoning the measured language of the Royal Society, we find ourselves once
again gasping at our own stupidity. While we argue about cod quotas,
offshore wind farms, the vandalism of Brighton pier, we imperil the sea by
the very fact of our existence. Unless we cut the carbon, we face not only
the well-advertised decline in survivability of the land, but also permanent
destruction of life in the sea.
Yes, “permanent” is an exaggeration, but not in the context of human
timescales. Ocean acidification, says the Royal Society, is “essentially
irreversible during our lifetimes. It will take tens of thousands of years
for ocean chemistry to return to a condition similar to that occurring in
pre-industrial times”.
That’s an awfully long time to go without fish.
Sea Change, by Richard Girling, is published on July 2 by Eden Project Books,
price £14.99. It is available at the Sunday Times BooksFirst price of £13.49
including postage and packing. Tel: 0870 165 8585 or visit www.booksfirstbuy.co.uk
