A couple argues. He or she looks back as he or she leaves the room and says something with a dash of venom. That is the last sting of the dead jellyfish. Two men fight. One knocks the other to the ground and puts the boot in. That is the last sting of the dead jellyfish.
Edward James, the surrealist collector who commissioned Salvador Dalí to make the lobster telephone, had four nieces and a nephew, Angus James. When Edward decided to build a castle and his own Garden of Eden in the Las Pozas tropical rainforest in Mexico, Angus left Eton to become his uncle’s amanuensis. The childless Edward told Angus he was his sole heir and would leave him everything.
In a surrealist gesture, Edward wrote a will to be read by his lawyer after his death. In it he left cash sums to his four nieces in order of their prettiness: £20,000, £10,000, £5,000 and £2,000. Angus did not receive a penny and the multimillion pound fortune went into a trust to maintain Edward’s country estate as a museum for his surrealist collection. For Angus, it was the last sting of the dead jellyfish, a knife in the back from which he never fully recovered.
More than revenge, that nip from the invertebrate sea jelly extinguished on the sand or sliced in two by a careless speedboat is steeped in schadenfreude, that cruel satisfaction that comes from witnessing the troubles, failures and humiliation of another.
Jellyfish – medusas, Portuguese man o’ war, Australian box – are generally free-swimming marine creatures propelled by their umbrella-shaped bells and armed with trailing tentacles for capturing prey, warding off predators and stinging the unwary swimmer just for the hell of it.
There is only one way to switch the tables on a jellyfish and that is to eat it. They are a delicacy in some countries where the bite disappears in preparation and the translucent gelatine wobbling on your plate will remind you of the last sting of the dead jellyfish by being odourless, flavourless, tasteless and thoroughly unpleasant.
He met actress Carol White in Hollywood and wrote her memoirs, Carol Comes Home. It was the first of a dozen books as a ghostwriter, including the Sunday Times bestseller Today I’m Alice – the story of multiple personality disorder survivor Alice Jamieson. His latest book, “How to Rob the Bank of England”, was published in September 2024.
www.cliffordthurlow.com