Hi Paul
(Did you get my reply, 5th Sep,to your e-mail, btw?)
After it had become apparent, to me anyway, that getting hold of Paros was going to be difficult, I started digging around with the assumption that Continental Europe was going to be the source.
Eventually I dug down to the Fish Health Inspectorate – a substratum of the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science … itself a division of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The upshot is that, so long as one has authorisation from the FHI, via an application form coded as AAH2, and so long as the animals are packed so to avoid health issues in transit, then one can bring them into the UK from the EU without even mandatorily presenting them at the border for inspection.
My plan was (or will be) to undertake a Eurostar trip to collect whatever specimens might make themselves available within reasonable distance/time. My ‘contact’ at the DHI, who had to slog through my explanations of what I was envisaging, didn’t seem to think that authorisation would be a particular difficulty.
Thanks everso for your Fish Hut link – I will surely investigate! I don’t ‘do’ Facebook (etc.) so I’d appreciate his e-mail address. It’d be good, though, to try to get hold of species that aren’t well-represented over here already?
Best
Andy
(Vale! has an exclamation mark – it’s Latin!)