Before you say anything, I have to tell you that if you haven’t tried carrying a fish in your handbag, you don’t know what you’re missing. Sure, you say that you’d never stoop to carrying a trout in your Marks and Spencer bag.
But then you’d start to wonder what all the fuss was about. You’d go to the Pike Place Market and slip a little halibut into your bag. Maybe you’d add a hunk of Chilean sea bass, just to make sure that whatever effect fish carrying conveyed wasn’t species-dependent.
You’d walk through the public market without your usual disdain for the tourists, without feeling closed in by the crowds. In fact, you’d feel better than you remember feeling in years. And you’d wonder if there was something to this fish-in-a-handbag thing after all. You’d keep going back to the market, getting salmon, black cod, rockfish. You’d progress to Dungeness crab and squid tubes. You’d make it a daily event. The staff at Pike Place Fish would know you by name.
And one day, you might realize that you’ve gone too far. You’d go back to Marks and Spencer to return the bag. They’d ask you if there was a problem. Caught off guard, you’d say the first thing that came into your head. “It smells a little fishy.”