The Last Sting Of The Dead Jellyfish 

A couple argue. He or she looks back as he or she leaves the room and says something sparkling with a four letter 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. He fed his rage shooting pigeons and with a deadly forehand smash in table tennis that made the celluloid shriek like a rat in a bag.

In 1444, Barbary coast pirates sacked the village of Cadaqués in Spain. They killed the men defending the church and packed the women and children into galleys to be sold as slaves in Tripolitania. After burning everything that would burn, the pirates calmly took down the church stone by stone. It was an act of spite and humiliation, the last sting of the dead jellyfish.

Revenge of the Dead Jellyfish

More than revenge or reprisal, 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 pleasure and satisfaction that comes from witnessing the troubles, failures, pain, suffering and humiliation of another. Schadenfreude – epicaricacy is the little used term in English – is often the refuge of those with low self-esteem, according to psychologists, but if, say, a vile politician has tripped over his own ego and landed face down in a mound of dung, we can forgive ourselves a wry smile.

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.  

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