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- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
What chaps really like to do in bed is to think about shooting and fishing. the pastel shades and heady fragrances of the boudoir are a far cry from their natural habitat of coverts, moors and marshes, lochs, lakes ponds and meres and, if they are honest, all a bit unnerving. There may be stuff that they get up to in bed from time to time, recreationally or otherwise which they will undertake with zeal and gusto deriving from a natural sense of inquisitiveness and a proper understanding of their obligations - but in the end they will always return to fishing and shooting. In this collection of essays by Roderick Emery and Giles Catchpole from The Shooting Gazette and Trout & Salmon, the authors drift agreeably here and there through the world of shooting and fishing and relate tales of high drama, low rivers, successes and failures, occasional triumphs and periodic disasters, some very funny, a few very sad; each graphically illustrated by Olly Copplestone. If you are a chap, or if you share a bed with a chap, this is your book. It will not make you a finer Shot or a better angler and it will not improve your technique, but left beside the bed it will always be there when you want it which is, as any chap knows, the whole point.
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For all those who invite us, put us up, and put up with us.
GC & RE
Contents
Acknowledgements
Boundless thanks are due to Sandy Leventon, Editor of Trout and Salmon, for permitting Giles Catchpole’s fishing pieces to be included in this anthology and for encouraging them to be written in the first place.
Mike Barnes, the former publisher, and for many years Editor, of The Shooting Gazette met Roderick Emery, for the first and only time, while shooting at Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire and sincere thanks are due to him for permission to reproduce the shooting pieces from The Shooting Gazette.
Foreword
by Liz Kershaw, former Publishing Director of Cosmopolitan magazine
When I was the publisher of Cosmopolitan in the 1990s a good deal of our time and many of our pages were devoted to the question of what men really wanted in bed. I’m not sure that we ever found an answer; indeed I’m not wholly sure that there is one. At least not a solution that will, in the great scheme of things, be “all things to all men”.
However there is now at least a partial answer that may be applied to an important sub-set of the species – to wit, Chaps. And what a Chap really wants in bed is, as the subtitle of this book succinctly puts it, a book of shooting and fishing stories.
Given that shooting and fishing are what Chaps do and what Chaps talk about most of the time, and the method by which Chaps measure other people to boot, their need for this book should not come as a surprise. It is a very funny book whose wry humour and witty illustrations provoke consistent chuckling and occasional gut-wrenching guffaws that will make a Chap nose-job the claret.
What is perhaps more important, not least to those who have tried and failed to arouse the interest of a Chap in other arenas, is the insight these pieces give to the rest of us into the inner workings of a Chap’s mind.
It is not only, apparently, simply about the pursuit of fish or fowl, less still about rods and guns and tools and technique, it has to do with the mind-set of a certain sort of Chap - the sort of Chap which the authors, and their chums, manifestly are - and who would not recognise a mind-set if it leapt out of a bush and bit them.
But not all men are Chaps and all Chaps are not necessarily men which means that some who will be whiling away many happy hours in bed with this book, instead of any number of the things we tried and tested at Cosmopolitan, will be women – which makes the whole issue more complicated than ever.
If I were you, and I probably was, more or less, before I discovered the pleasures of shooting and fishing, I would simply stop worrying about the whole thing and settle down with a damned good book. Like this one.
Liz Kershaw National Magazine House, May 2004
Beyond Cure
I was asked, the other day, as you are from time to time: Why do you do it? The fact that we were standing in a particularly claggy Fenland field, in the teeth of some particularly vicious Fenland sleet in the rather vague and improbable hope of encircling some of those especially canny Fenland pheasants who had been dotting the landscape some minutes ago but which seemed now to be somewhere else, and that the question was being posed by a very fetching, if somewhat soggy, sceptical girl of recent acquaintance in whose none too distant future I had some ambitions to loom large and longing, gave me cause for a proper consideration of the answer.
We are all bonkers.
Why do people sleep on the pavement outside department stores, in ghastly conditions, for days and nights before the January sales? Just in order to get 15% off the latest fridge-freezer. Why do devoted fans queue for days in order to get a ticket for this concert or that show, when for a fraction of the price they could secure an adequate CD for listening to in the comfort of their own homes? Why pay well over the odds to be at the match you could better watch on the sofa? Why pay serious amounts of dosh to stand in a field in freezing rain? Why stand in a bobble hat on the end of Platform 19 at Crewe with a notebook and an Instamatic?
The answer, of course, is that we are all to some extent or other as mad as snakes and if we did not channel our personal and particular madnesses into what we laughably call a hobby, then the rest of the world would quickly recognise the fact that we are, none of us, more than a fine line away from picking spots of light off the wallpaper and putting them in a basket and would waste no time flat in heaving us into a padded cell and throwing away the key.
The interesting part though, given that we are all - without exception - inclined to undertake something which others see as odd, is who would be strapped into the stiff white overcoats first. You may take the view that the painstaking accumulation of the 15 different versions of Manchester United’s away strip - in their original plastic bags, mark you - at several bundles of notes a pop, stored in a cupboard at a controlled humidity and never otherwise used, beyond a very occasional secret fondle on high days and holidays - that this is a pretty bizarre way to carry on. And I would not be slow to agree with you. You might also arch the eyebrow if it were suggested to you that you might find solace and relaxation by spending the weekend re-hanging the horticultural implements in the pricking-out room, or nailing the shovel to the potting shed wall as it is sometimes termed, but I assure you that a great number of folk spend a good deal of time in quiet and restful contemplation doing just this. I know. There are even television programmes made especially for them. And if I suggested that sliding at maniacal speed down a snow covered precipice was worth doing at a grand a week you’d be dialling the paramedics before I could extol the virtues of lying completely still on a bath-towel for a fortnight wearing nothing but an oily coating of grease and grit and a strategically placed thong thang.
Nope, the fact of the matter is we are all bonkers to a greater or lesser degree, and all that is important really is that we embrace this very diversity of craziness and celebrate it, instead of seeking to grind each and every one of us into a drab conformity of disinterest. Which is the ultimate objective, naturally, of Canneloni Tony and his Cromwellian crew of crawling prodnoses, whose dearest wish is that we should all consent to be moulded in their dull and anodyne image, eating our processed gruel, watching our processed TV, adoring our processed and approved icons and living our sad little processed lives.
So why do I do it? Well, I had thought it was because it permits me to accumulate great quantities of seriously expensive gear, to wear outlandish trousers in polite company without feeling foolish, and go for long walks with some friends, a gun and a sense of purpose, instead of an approved anorak, a fizzy drink and a sense of social injustice. I now realise however that I have been making a political statement which should instantly project me to the cutting edge of libertarian freedom fighting and social acceptability.
In the time that I had been explaining all this to the girl, the pheasants, which had been legging it down the dyke towards the marsh, as Fenland pheasants will, given half a chance and a ditch, met a spaniel coming in the opposite direction which a wily Fenland beater had instructed to “Gerrin yon ditch, an hoofem budsup!”, as such beaters do. The pheasants, Fen pheasants never being without a contingency arrangement, therefore adopted Plan B, which was to rise like a jump jet on full thrust, pause for a moment to take a bearing or two, identify which Gun coffee-housing in the distance represented the biggest gap in the line, before making a bee line for the out-door at maximum velocity.
Said Gun, in a flurry of ciggies, matches, flasks and cartridges manages to wrench himself through a knee twisting, braces bursting, disc prolapsing 180-degree turn at the last minute to face himself in the right direction and nails two of the squadron with a right and left which drew enthusiastic applause from the soggy, cold and sceptical girl whom we met at the beginning of this very piece.
Which is, of course, the real reason I do it. The right and left part, I mean. Obviously.
He nearly bit through the stem of his pipe.
Miss Ballantine
I was reading again Georgina Ballantine’s description of her epic struggle on the Glendelvine water of the River Tay in 1922 with her record 64lb salmon. It is a piece to which I regularly return. In the absence of being able to catch 64lb salmon myself, or even being able to fish for them on a regular basis, there is nothing for it but to listen to the exploits of others.
In addition to which it does me good to contemplate the sheer effort involved in these ancient battles. Imagine fishing all day with a sixteen foot double handed split cane rod. With two hundred yards of braided horsehair line on a wooden reel the size of a dinner plate and a twenty foot woven silk leader. The weight of the whole set up must have been beyond belief, and as for the feasibility of fighting some great leviathan for several hours on gear of such intrinsic fragility - it just boggles the mind and flabbers the gast.
I cannot but admire too the fortitude of a generation of fishers whose idea of a pair of waders for a brisk day’s spring fishing on a roughish river, was a decent layer of goose lard, some well wound puttees, a pair of heavyweight tweed breeches and some stout shoes. The tackle bag shrinks at the very thought.
Still, back to Miss Ballantine. There is a marvellous sentence in her journal entry regarding the big fish. Having made a couple of stout runs, during which Miss B and her father had careered about the river, hopping in and out of the boat and dashed back and forth up and down the bank in order to keep in touch, the fish finally paused and gave some considerable thought to the whole proceedings. “During this time” writes Miss B “the fish remained stationary and sulked.”
There’s understatement for you. The whole episode took more than two hours from start to finish. The beast was hooked at 6.15 pm as dusk was more or less falling and was finally boated in the dark. The sulking lasted the thick end of thirty minutes.
The point is that I was reminded of the phrase the other day on our own bit of water when I had a fish that sulked. I was fishing with the Aging Parent, for trout I’m bound to say rather than salmon, and with a normal set up. Which in our lives means a ten foot, three ounce, graphite rod, a floating line in fetching fluorescent pink with a nine foot 3lb nylon leader. I can’t tell you what bug was on the end of all this because as I am always explaining I can’t remember their damn names. It’s not especially important. I think it was a black one.
We were fishing from the sea-wall side of the lake. The wind had been blowing consistently northerly for a week, and the AP’s view - he being a bloke who thinks about these things - was that the trouts’ food supplies would have been drifting down to the sea-wall end accordingly. Accumulated there would be a fishy buffet of epic proportions, and congregated there too, in his opinion, would be every fish in the district. Of course this also meant that we would be casting into the teeth of said breeze. Which in my case means flailing back and forth half a dozen times, before depositing several yards of line neatly in a heap at my feet; with a fly on top. Still, if it makes the old boy happy. To make matters worse, such weed as floated on the surface had also congregated at the sluice end, so that in order to make any sort of contact with the actual water, we had to cast beyond a twenty foot blanket of the green and gruesome. So there we were. He shooting out his usual thirty yarders and me flailing and spooling as described. Still, the sun shone. Life could be worse.
Then the breeze died. Just like that. Pooooff! Gone. Several flails later and I laid a dead straight cast gossamer light well beyond the weed. Chuffed or what? And having finally got the bait thus far, I savoured the moment and left it there for the nonce. This, I felt, deserved time to be savoured, and a ciggy to boot. So having got lit up and having relished the moment I began to retrieve and to quote Miss Ballantine once more “the bait he seized with no great violence” on about the third tug. After which nothing. No jiggle. No scorching run. Zippo. The Aging Parent, seeing my rod tip bending came bustling up, as APs will. Still nothing moved in the water. “You’ve caught the bottom” says he, dismissively, “Give it a yank and let’s get on.” But I was not so sure. I pulled the rod sharply one way, and there was no doubt that the line slowly but surely followed my direction. “Do that again.” says he. So I reversed the process, and sure enough the line turned and followed. Whatever was going on, I was not attached to the bottom. I put some more pressure on, fearful of the leader, but gradually the rod unbowed and I reeled in a few feet. There was still no normal response from below however. “During this time the fish sulked.” I knew at last what she meant. Again I bent the rod tip almost double, and again I retrieved a few feet. A little easier now. Once I got him moving, it seemed that he went with the flow. I continued the process, feeling as if I was fighting a marlin off Bermuda. My wrist was seriously aching too. Slowly the line cut a path through the weed. I was seriously worried about my nylon with the additional burden, but steady pressure seemed to be doing the trick. Father was fiddling with the landing net.
As the leader knot broke the surface there was a pale flash through the weed. The old man nearly bit through the stem of his pipe. Scepticism forgotten he began to babble instructions as fathers will.
With only a few inches to go the rod tip flew up abruptly and the line slackened and Father blew a series of mains fuses. “Idiot! Nitwit! Cack-hander!” and much else besides. I pointed at the line. The leader was intact. The fly in place. All that remained of the monster was a ribbon of polythene bearing the name of a popular supermarket chain. As the last of the water dribbled out of the plastic bag that I had fought with so resolutely for so long I thought of Miss Ballantine and wondered how she might have reacted if her record Tay salmon, on being gaffed at last, had turned out to be a bin-liner.
I dare say she might have sulked too.
A baton is passed
Future Perfect
I am going to shoot grouse this year. Or at least I am going grouse shooting this year. Many a slip twixt cup and lip and other assorted aphorisms. But all other things being equal I am going to shoot grouse this year. Why is that remarkable? Shooting journos like me spend our lives shooting grouse after all, do we not? Invitations to the finest moors in these islands fall from the Editor’s desk like so many ripe fruits in a late summer storm, do they not? They do not.
There was a time when I shot grouse regularly. Not often, but regularly. There were a troop of us in the early days of the Boys’ Team (of myth and legend) who used to make the long trek to Scotland at the back end of summer to pursue occasional grouse on the outlying parts of various estates where the older and better heeled guests failed to reach. We yomped and pottered here and there with a motley crew of dogs and girlfriends and from time to time someone would stand on a grouse and it would rocket off, as grouse will when trodden on, and one of us would, might, pot it before it had gone too far. And was there ever such rejoicing over a bird in the bag? I doubt it.
Times though, change; and people with them. Or perhaps not people, but their circumstances. Girlfriends became wives, and with wives came families and with families came responsibilities. And responsibilities came first. And the annual trip north became a snatched weekend; and the team became no more than two or three gathered together for the purpose and finally became just me. And I was no fun. When the dog emigrated into the bargain, it was no fun flat, and I turned to other pursuits in the summer.
For a decade or more I have mustered teams here and there in the winter for a go at the pheasants. It began with day trips and modest outings, by-days of hedges and ditches with perhaps one proper drive after a sandwich and a beer in a barn. Slowly, slowly we graduated to weekends and two days of shooting back to back, and grown up pheasant shooting at that. The team has varied over the years, but not by much, and the only thing which can be said of them with any real certainty is that they have become better and better at it.
In the beginning we always had a couple of duffers in the team. We liked them because they happily chipped into the subscription fund but contributed only slightly to the bag, and that meant more for the rest of us. But they too have got better with the passage of time and now they are, slice them where you will, a pretty fair team of killers. Charming and agreeable and properly discriminating, for sure, but pop a pheasant over, by or round any of them these days within a respectable distance and a pound gets you a penny one of them will top it. There are drives up and down the country where we used to line out in a positive fever of apprehension and were beaten hands down by the keeper and his birds. Now the Boys load up, shrug their shoulders and shoot their socks off.
But of grouse, I haven’t seen a feather.
Now an invitation has indeed fallen into my lap. Not a letter now but an e-mail, times change but the content is the same. “We have taken the lodge for a week, so bring rod, stick and gun because we shall be walking the hill, no doubt, and flogging the loch. It’s time the kids got their first grouse.”
Full circle. The names remain but the faces are, or will be, different. A new generation is poised eagerly to address the hill. Up and down the country, boys and girls – I almost said little; but they aren’t any more – even as we speak, are polishing their 28s and 20s and counting their cartridges and trying on stiff new cartridge belts and wondering whether they will come home with grouse and honour.
And do you know the weirdest thing? I shan’t mind if I don’t shoot a grouse. I shall pack my little 28b to be sure and cartridges too, and if we don’t shoot some grouse I will be beside myself; but if I can lend the little gun to someone to shoot their first grouse with, that will be all the pleasure I need. Sitting in the sun on a heather clad hill with a dog and a piece and a grouse or two in the bag, by whomever’s hand and aim, will be enough for me. A baton has passed. And it’s up to us to make sure it passes again.
Mark you, I’ll have the gun back quick enough if the kid misses more than once. Generous and avuncular I may be, but I don’t get enough invitations to be that magnanimous and I’m not so old as to be actually stupid. Oh, it’s going to be glorious.
Ignorant, wholly unjustified and plain rude.
The Eternal Optimist (Part I)
In the end I had to borrow most of the gear from my brother-in-law. He has two of everything. I did find my waders however so it wasn’t a complete scrounge, but the Tweed is, when all is said and done, a serious river and does call for the right tackle. Thus it was that I set off for the station filled with boyish hope and expectation and laden with as many bags as a chap can handle. Plus a rod case with little wheels at one end so that I could drag it along the platform.
I travel a good deal on trains and they really aren’t designed for the peripatetic sportsman these days. There isn’t a specific luggage limit as such, but if you are travelling with more than a carrier bag and a holdall, then generally speaking you are, in the words of the immortal bard, stuffed. In the end I abandoned the waders and the rod case at one end of the carriage and the suitcase and the tackle bag at the other and slumped into my seat clutching the backpack. Then, because I could not see the rods and waders anymore because I was facing the wrong direction, I lugged the rod case and the boot bag to the other end and parked them again, so that I could make sure that no one interfered with them. I don’t suppose that anyone would, but how would you feel if you arrived for a week’s posh fishing in Berwick and your rods got off at Darlington? Come to that, how would I explain to the b-in-l that his rods had gone AWOL en route? Call me alarmist, but these things do happen. They happen to me anyway.
The change at Peterborough was managed without incident and I found my friend Jonathan hunched over his lap-top beyond the buffet. I left him to it and settled down with the crossword.
A car and driver were waiting for us at Berwick; Jonathan being that sort of bloke, and accordingly we were at the St Ednam’s House Hotel shortly thereafter. Was ever a hotel so completely fish-oriented? My room looked out over the Junction Pool; one of the most famous sights in the world. To us. Taj Mahal? Tschah! Tour Eiffel? Pah! Junction Pool? Gosh! Wow! The hall was full of rods and the bar was full of anglers. Principal amongst whom, broadcasting malt with expansive gestures and setting fire to himself with smokes as usual, was the Editor of Trout & Salmon. He nearly swallowed his tab and nose-jobbed the malt when he saw me walk in, but soon recovered enough to enquire, in his bluff cheery way, what the dickens I was doing there.
…filled with boyish hope.
“I’m here to catch a salmon,” I said. “I hope,” I added. “Have a drink,” he said. “And meet the boys and girls,” he added. The evening began to dissolve into an agreeable blur of drink and fishing talk..
I did carry away important information however. The river was in fine fettle. The water was nigh-on perfect. There were fish in abundance, though only a few were fresh, the beat I was to fish was prime, they’d had nine in the first two days of the week and even I therefore was in with a decent chance.
At 8.30am there is a migration from the hotel to the tackle shop across the road. As surely as salmon swim upstream a tweedy column snakes its way across the street to replenish lines and lures and to secure the killer flea of the day. A quick computation of the fish reported caught in the bar last night, times the fly they were taken on, divided by the distance from where they were caught to your beat, less the number of pints you and the person you were talking to have had leads you to the Eternal Optimist which is a sort of black and yellow tube and a Gordy Dunn which isn’t, but since he is gillying for us we had better have lots. Having spent the GDP of a small country, the tweedy tide rolls back to the hotel and saddles up, and in a scene reminiscent of the start at Le Mans, each team grabs its lunch box from the hall table, legs it to the nearest Range Rover and roars off in pursuit of fish.
We grabbed, we roared, we arrived at the river at a collected canter where the formidable Mr Dunn and his assistant Lee were waiting.
“Ye’re hie a’ last then?” says he. “And what flee will ye be hurlin’ a’ ma fush the dee?” We proudly displayed the morning harvest from the tackle shop. “Tscah! No. No. They’ll never catch the noo. The watter’s too chill. Ye’ll be wantin’ yin o’ thee. Hev ye no gottny? Tach! Whut sort o’ fushermen are yu? Ah weel. Ah’ve a few in ma pock fur ye, anyways. Just as well one of us kens wha’ he’s aboot. Let’s be at it then. Fush is waitin’.”
As if to underline the point a large fish jumped even as the great man spoke. We duly shouldered our rods and addressed the river.
Did I catch one? If you think I’m going to jump to the last chapter at this juncture, you’ve got another think coming. This is fishing remember: no instant gratification here. A deal of work before you get a sniff. Although Roger, who was another guest in the party this morning, was into a fish before he’d even got his waders wet. It makes you weep, doesn’t it?
Wallflowers at the Ball (Part II)
Now the beat is a beat of three rods and four turns in the river along the way. This means that each fisherman fishes in glorious isolation unseen by the others. So your companions can’t see you flailing away and getting your fly caught in the grass at your back or cracking it off on the stones or getting it stuck on the bottom for that matter. It also means that you cannot see how the others are doing and keeps the unhealthy air of competition out of what is, after all, a deeply spiritual and elevating experience.
Until, that is, Gordy puts in an appearance. “Hev ye no catched a fush then?” he roars from the opposite bank. “Not yet,” we say, smiling bravely through the disappointment “but it’s all in the lap of the gods.” “Gods iss it, ye say? Gods be damned! Roger’s hed anither agin and the big man’s hed two the dee alraddy. Mind, he’s a jammy sod. He’s as like to catch a fush on his back cast as in front o’ yin. I dinna ken hoo ’e duzzit, Ah dinna. Mark you, they’re black as ma boots and uglier then ye are, just. Girt lang things, thee are. Tscach! Ye’ve no a touch, then?” Not even that, we admit. “Tscach!” he says again, “Ah’d best away back then. Yin’s probably choking anither as we gas, and he’ll like to drown it, wi his luck, if Ah’m no there ta stup ’um.”
So Jonathan and I returned to the water with renewed vigour. We waded a little deeper and taking turn and turn about we fished a little harder and a little more diligently and we covered that river inch by inch. There were fish there, no error. We knew that because they kept leaping out of the water all around us, but of takes, snatches, tugs, pulls, knocks and lippings we had not a single tittle, iota or jot.
Lunch came and went. The others were quietly content with their morning’s work and there was a robust debate about who was going to be buying the drinks this evening. Jonathan and I listened stoically as the argument veered between the biggest fish of the day on the one hand and the most fish on the other. Jonathan sucked on his Scotch egg and kept his counsel, but I could see that he was prey, as they say, to emotions. I’ve told you, I know, that he’s a successful bloke. And you don’t get to be successful, at least not to anything like the extent that he has, by sitting quietly by and letting other people tell you how successful they are. You get off the proverbial sit-upon and get involved and I could see the man’s resolution firming up even as we sat there.
We all know, of course, that salmon fishing is pure luck. The fish do not feed in freshwater and their taking a lure in the river is all a matter of irritation, ennui and erratic behaviour. The frightful pheremone means that girls catch all the best fish at the least likely times, but that is science and as fishermen we naturally discard the boffins’ conclusions out of hand altogether. It is however the case that the harder you work the luckier you get, as the great red bearded gillie never ceases to tell me, and that afternoon Jonathan was working very hard indeed. If we had covered the water inch by inch in the morning he went at it in the afternoon with a microscope. There wasn’t the width of a fag paper between casts. And was he rewarded for his diligence in due season?
Was he buggery. In your dreams. Darkness came and with it came Gordy. “Aye, it’s time we were leaving them too’t the dee. Hev’ ye catched yit? They’ve hed two more oot the other end, ye ken. Wha, nuthin? Hev’ ye bin fushin’ or gassing like a lot of wimmin?” and more besides. Jonathan was wearing a face like thunder. Slightly knackered thunder, to be sure, but thunderous for all that.
Talk in the bar that night was all of the day’s bags. They’d had 27 out of the Junction. Downstream they’d had a dozen. Our team had seven for the day. Even the Editor and his party had caught fish, and big fish too, 20lbs plus and there were smiles and malts all round and many a bumper of claret was swilled that night, I can tell you. Jonathan and I were the wallflowers at the ball.
We would be fishing separately on the morrow and since one of the ferrules had fallen off the bro-in-law’s rod – probably through exhaustion – I was short of a rod for the final day. Given the Editor’s expansive mood, fished up and malted up and clareted up as he was, I wondered if he had a spare stick for a struggling scrivener? “By all means,” he roared genially, thrusting a glass into my hand, “I’ve got a nice little 16’ graphite Sage sitting in my room. Take it with my blessing. It needs an outing. It’s brand new. Never been kissed. Have another?”
Thus it was, dear reader, that the next day found me equipped with the last word in modern piscatorial equipment, confronting the river, by myself, several fish behind the curve and determined that today would be the day.
“Hev’ ye a new pole the dee, then?” says Gordy. “Aye weel, it’ll do as well as any, Ah s’pose. Hev’ ye a flee with ut? Ach, no, no, no. Tha’ll niver do the dee. Watter’s too clear. Ah hev’ the very thing hiar. Aye, tha’ll catch; happen it’s in the reet place. Let’s gie t’oot then. Tight lines.”
Was I going to end the year with a fish?
Testing the Mettle (Part III)
The last thing Lee said to me before abandoning me to my own devices was “It’s much easier to fish this stretch well, if you cast left handed.” Well, thanks for that. If I could shoot out a halfway decent line right-handed, would I still be a salmon virgin at my advanced age? If I could Spey right and left, if I could roll, if I could cast into wind, upstream, over water would I still have blank spaces on the study wall where the modest collection of portmanteau fish should be? If I could cast at all, would I be fishless at forty? Lefthanded forsooth. I’m as likely to have my lure swiped by a low flying pig on the backcast as I am to cast lefthanded without ending up in Kelso A&E with a triple Optimist in my lug.
I had, of course, been thinking the exact same thing myself and duly dismissed the whole concept out of hand as being impossible. Half an hour of flailing away right-handed however convinced me that there was virtue in experimentation and with my heart in my mouth and both eyes firmly closed against the inevitable, I changed hands, heaved and flung.
Immediately the line went taut. I opened my eyes to see in the distance my fly winking at me from a bush on the far bank. It is a testament to modern technology that given even half a chance your Kevlar-graphite-space-age-lightasafeather-super-rod will, notwithstanding the rank incompetent on the thick end, nonetheless hurl a lure further than anyone might reasonably expect. And the cute Sage that the Editor had loaned me was no exception. I gave the flea a bit of a yank and it duly fell into the stream and floated off as fleas are supposed to, given a decent chance. Brimming with new-found confidence therefore and quite suddenly casting better left-handed than ever I have right, I fished the pool down without incident and wondered what to do next.
“Hev ye took owt then?” came the roar from the bank. “Ye man’s had ’us fust, ye ken. And ’us second for the matter of tha’. I dinna doot he’s inna ‘us thud be noo. Yin’s like a bishop in a bordello, wi’a grin ye couldn’a gie off wi’ a chisel. Ye’ve no had a touch then?” I shook my head. “Fish ’er doon agin then. It’s your turn mind.”
I don’t think the buddha was a fisherman.
So I did, and then I plodded back up the bank to the hut for lunch. Gordy was right about one thing. You couldn’t have got the smile off Jonathan’s face with anything short of surgery. After a score or more years of drought, he had finally cracked it. And how. He’d caught his first fish at about 11.00am; a nice fresh eight-pounder. On the basis that when one fish takes, others might also be in the mood, he was herded back into the river before he had finished giving proper thanks and capering about the bank, whereupon he promptly caught another one. Not content with that he had caught two more before midday and was in the process of returning his fifth of the morning as I arrived at the scene of the disaster. Whereupon, naturally, he proceeded to explain to me, in very considerable detail, exactly what the answer was and exactly where he had been going wrong all these seasons past, and exactly how I should get on and do the same. I smiled and nodded and ate sausage rolls and tried not to burst into tears.
