No need to buy anything for dinner tonight, says the email from my husband.

A bloke in our office went fishing over the weekend, and I’m bringing home a trout.

Two hours later, he staggers in with a large parcel and a wide grin.

“Six pounds of trout for six quid,” he says, almost delirious with joy, for the parcel satisfies two of his conditions for a happy life – an abundance of fresh fish and a tight grip on his wallet.

He places the parcel down on the kitchen worktop as if it’s a new born baby. I watch as he unwraps the plastic, and reveals the weekend’s catch. Blimey, if you gave birth to a baby that size, it would probably be taking its first steps before you could walk again.

My eyes water a bit. That’s not six pounds, I say. I’ll just get the scales.

Trout don’t have scales, he quips, but I ignore him and we lift the fish to weigh it. The scales says eight and a half pounds. The trout says nothing, but stares at the ceiling with a knowing look. We’ll never eat all this tonight, I say.

I know, says my husband, still beaming. I’m going to fillet the rest and freeze it.

My heart sinks. It’s Monday. We don’t usually do stuff on a Monday night. We eat something easy. Slump on the sofa. Try a bit of telly. Then head for bed.

I sit down and watch the surgery begin. Out comes a filleting knife. Out comes lots of kitchen roll and plastic bags. And, bit by bit, out come the entrails and the fins and all the other bits that the trout had so craftily hidden from us until now.

This fish was destined to be caught. He could never have been the one that got away. He’s far too big to even get out of his own way. This is the fish that ate all the pies, or flies, or whatever it is that trout guzzle away on while they’re waiting for men in tall wellies to take them on. I wouldn’t want to mess with this fish. Well, not while it was still drawing breath, or water, or whatever they do.

I have to admit that my husband is a dab hand at reducing fish to flesh and skeletons. He may have a few shortcomings (see all columns from 2002 to 2009 for details) but he has developed stripping a fish into an art form.

However, I don’t think even he is prepared for the quirky physics that this trout employs. The more he works on the fish, the bigger it becomes. You know how a tree looks, well, tree-sized when it’s just standing there, but doubles in volume as soon as the lopped branches touch the ground? Well, this fish plays that trick as well. By the time my husband has finished, if we only had a spare loaf or two, I’d feel confident we could lay on supper for a good five thousand close friends tonight.

Much later, much, much later, Jeremy Paxman is speaking the closing lines on Newsnight, and the ex-trout is neatly labelled and chilling out on the top two drawers of our freezer. On the plate in front of me is what’s left of the largest fish steak in the world. Except for the one my husband’s tried to finish.

On the stove is a pan of freshly made fish stock, and on the ceiling are the smoke alarms with their batteries hanging out sadly, cursed for alerting us to the smoke that poured off the griddle as my husband seared the fish steaks half an hour ago. As if we hadn’t spotted it.

That was very good, I say, truthfully, wiping my eyes.

What we need is a gas griddle in the garden, says my husband. Then we could have grilled fish a few times a week.

I have an uneasy feeling that the fish fingers that do us proud on week nights may soon become an endangered species.