In bed with Mr Crabtree

Although there's an element of "Ooeer Mrs!" in the title, this blog post is as upright and moral as one might rightly expect from a "man of the cloth."

The thing is, you know you've chosen to be Vicar of the right church when after the service a member of your congregation comes up to you with a package and says "I found this in a second hand booksellers and wondered if you'd like it", and procedes to unwrap and present to you an excellent condition 1959 edition of "Mr Crabtree goes fishing". Roger, who gave me the book,  (pictured below with a crucian carp) is a recent convert, not to Christianity (he's been a Christian for a couple of decades), but to angling, having been introduced to the sport through his son.

I was doubly delighted, as one of the great omissions in my angling library is a copy of "Crabtree". The truth of the matter is that, at 44 years of age, I'm the immediate post-Crabtree generation, although I did own a similar book by Bernad Venables entitled the "Piccolo Book of Fishing" when I was a boy, which used the same cartoon format, but with a young adult acting as the mentor to a child angler, as opposed to the eponymous pipe smoking father of "Peter" in the original.

And so, on Sunday night, I settled into bed, nursing a throat infection that had made my Sunday sermons sound as if they'd been preached by the offspring of either Darth Vadar or Barry White (and that probably hadn't been helped by Saturday's spinning session in freezing conditions!) and settled down to read. Ironically, following my weekend blank, and in view of the fact that in the 30 odd years that I've been fishing January has been a singularly disapointing month in fishing terms (my first ever pike, caught in January 1982 being the exception to the rule),  I was interested to read just a couple of pages into the book that "The Crabtrees have decided to start their fishing year in January. They could not do better ..." - looks like Bernard Venables and his cartoon creations know something I don't.

I suspect that it'll take a while before it's sensible for me to fish again, and so it may have to wait another year before I see if any of the Crabtree's January optimism has rubbed off on me. Until then I'll have the consolation that I now have one of the "classics" on my bookshelves for those moments when armchair angling has to suffice.