WHY LEMON IS THE SOLE OF LOWESTOFT AND NOT OFFSIDE

"Of course, the offside rule has changed recently," said Elder Daughter as she carefully turned the fish fillets in the frying pan.

I am not sure what prompted this remark. Certainly nothing that I had meant to say for I have as little to do with football as is wise in her household, headed as it is by an Arsenal supporter straight out of the pages of 'Fever Pitch.'

Left to my own devices I suppose I should never have attended a football match in my life but on the renowned principle that one should sample everything once - except incest and folk-dancing - I allowed myself to be 'taken' a couple of times on the basis that it would be an education. So is prison they tell me.

Most recently my sister insisted I should accompany her to watch Ipswich playing Manchester United. I found that conditions had improved, now at least we had seats, even if nothing else had, but I felt it would have been churlish to pull out a book.

Elder Daughter however is built of sterner stuff and proceeded to demonstrate the multi-tasking skills of an Arsenal supporter's wife by cooking fish and explaining the offside rule at the same time. Commandeering our glasses of Pinot Grigio 'Frizzante' she turned them into attacking players and defenders after the manner of the scene in 'Bend it like Beckham.' You know the one where a youthful Keira Knightly does much the same thing, putting her football wild oats behind her before getting properly stuck in to a more interesting game of bodice ripping with Johnny Depp.

I stood, or rather sat, amazed. Even I, for the first time in my life, understood. Is there nothing that Elder Daughter cannot do? Or, for that matter, doesn't know? Yes, there is.

"Why is lemon sole called 'lemon' sole," she asked, turning the fish again and reluctantly returning the glasses to their thirsty owners? I thought for a moment. Dover sole is presumably called after the port from where it is caught - so Lemon……….."is a port on the Sussex coast between Littlehampton and Worthing, I said."

But already she could see the dimples in my cheeks and a twinkle in my eye. It was ever thus. Besides which disbelief in anything a parent says is rooted deep in my children's psyche for a reason that I have still quite to fathom.

Had I had more time I might have plausibly suggested that lemon was a cockney contraction of Littlehampton - the yesteryear porters of Billingsgate wishing not to lose good drinking time in mouthing four syllables where two would do. This might have sustained the pretence a little further.

But my 'esprit d'escalier' conclusion was that I should have spun a story about two species of sole, the one from the Channel and the other from the North Sea, Lowestoft for preference, whence it travelled to London care of the old, but interminably slow Great Eastern Railway, and for want of ice on steam trains, had to be preserved with slices of lemon.

This I felt she might have bought and retailed to her own children in due course. Facts, I have always felt should never be allowed to spoil a good story.

And I do know that very good sole comes from Lowestoft - or did - when the North Sea was actually populated with fish rather than the accreted garbage of Eastern Britain and Western Europe. In my younger days I found myself regular turning up in Lowestoft like a species of bad penny to visit the Government's Fisheries Research Laboratory.

That may by now have gone the way of the fish, for all I know, but in those distant times I remember stepping into an old world of charm and courtesy whenever I set foot on Lowestoft station. A world in which everything moved slower and more gently; and where the fish were the size of monsters and tasted better than I have ever known before or since.

As with all things, the real reason for the lemon name, now that I have looked it up in that most essential of reference books 'Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,' is of course entirely prosaic and unromantic. The elegant descriptor 'lemon' has nothing to do with the fruit, but comes instead from the Latin 'limus' meaning mud, in or on which these fish live. The French expanded this into 'limande' and the porters of Billingsgate - no I am speculating again - shortened and anglicised this to 'lemon.'

I must email Elder Daughter directly.