mink

This is P's favourite insult. He uses it of sleazy people, people who are disgusting or dishonourable.

P and I have just come back from one of the Scottish slate islands where we went on a writing retreat. Two dogs took us on a tour of the island one hot day, through tangles of wildflowers, over rocks, past abandoned quarries which had been flooded. We swam in one like the ruins of a roman bath. Sheer rock flecked with gold, the water slate blue, smooth, calm, shadowy. But this would be a bleak place in winter - exposed to wild winds with the great heaps of slate piled everywhere grey and unforgiving with no sun to pick out the metallic sheen. And half the island's population gone since many of the cottages were only holiday homes. The ferryman told us that the trend for second homes meant cottages went for six figures now and many local people could not afford to live there. He was a happy man, the ferryman. Every night he'd go out to sea to catch his tea and dig up veg from his allotment to eat with it. He had lived his life on the island and would tell us about it as he ferried us back and forth. One time he pointed out a group of black and white birds with orange bills. Oystercatchers. They were under threat, he said: some years before there had been a mink farm on the island. Animal rights activists had freed the mink who now lived wild and ate the oystercatchers' eggs. We asked if anything was being done to preserve the oystercatcher population on the island but the ferryman said no, they were not a protected species and that gradually they would just die out.