On the art of studying to be quiet

 

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

 

If I had a pound for every time a non angling friend or acquaintance had asked me "why do you go fishing?" I'd almost have enough money to buy an Edward Barder rod ...... almost, but not quite. It's a question born of incomprehension in the mind of the person unfortunate enough to never have been afflicted by a passion for angling and all things piscatorial. Often before the angler has even gathered his or her thoughts to answer the question, the questioner (perhaps fearing a lengthy treatise) interposes their own answer which normally runs along the lines of "well, I guess it's a good way to get away from the wife/pressures of work/modern world" (delete as appropriate) with the implicit assumption that the motivation to fish is born of a desire to escape. However, as someone who has fished for over 35 years, I would refute such a charge, and would contend that we fish not to escape but to engage. To engage with a mental puzzle, to engage with the natural environment and to engage with an underwater adversary that doubles up as the subject of our admiration. Like the angler of WB Yeats's poem (and I believe Zane Gray wrote something similar) there's a "fire in our heads" that compels us to go. It's less about what we're trying to escape, more about what we seek.

 

 

For sure, the gentle art carries us to places of sublime natural beauty, but for the fisher the environment represents less a passive attempt to retreat from the ugliness and grime of urban living, and more a desire to actively insert oneself into nature, not to merely view the scene, but rather to become a part of it, a player in some great drama that traces its origins to primeval times, the ages old battle of wits between hunter and hunted.

 

 

 

For a number of years my affections and attention were split between my love of angling and of football, but while I thoroughly enjoyed my two decades of chasing an air inflated sphere, initially as a striker or winger and, as age and passing years dictated, eventually as a full back, when I finally hung up my boots there was no real sense of regret, no deep seated pang of sadness, but if I were ever to face the prospect of being unable to fish I suspect I would find myself far less sanguine. Some addictions run deep, and are immune to any therapy.

 

I am captivated by everything about the business of pursuing the capture of fish. The tackle (my penchant is for vintage) and techniques, the rich vein of literature that surrounds the piscatorial art, the great cloud of witnesses from the past: Walton, Sheringham, Martin, BB, Bernard Venables et al, the sight of a red tipped quill bobbing in the water's surface film,  the vivid turquoise flash of a kingfisher on the wing, and the beauty, nobility and character of the quarry itself.

 

Izaak Walton once famously said that "We may say of angling as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries: "Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did"; and so, if I might be judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling."

and, impertinent though it may appear, if I may be the judge of Walton's aphorism, then I without reservation hold his observation to be unerringly true. Walton also had it that  "Rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element are made for wise men to contemplate, and for fools to pass by without consideration", and with this too, I unreservedly concur.
There is within my head a constant fire ...

 

 











A Fenland affair!

So, here's the question: is it possible to fall in love at first sight, and is two dates enough "to know"? I speak not of women or romance, but of places. Is the angling equivalent of not much more than a "fleeting glance" at a pretty girl, enough to give rise to talk of a serious attachment?

I have only twice fished the Fens, but have to confess to having had my heart captivated by their wild, untameable beauty and their "big sky" moodiness; the painting that sits at the top of this page, a painting by the clergyman artist (and sometime angler) Daniel Cozens of a Fenland scene captures majestically the almost foreboding impressiveness and the sense of space. Like a Hemmingway essay, the real stuff of the Fens is found in the spaces, the detail in the sparseness.

 

For me, an angler for whom the majority of my fishing has been conducted on managed (and often quite manicured ) lakes, a part of the attractiveness is the feeling of leaving civilisation and entering a place that's altogether wilder, nature that hasn't been overly "bent into shape", although there is, of course, a degree of engineered artificiality about these watery environments and their origins in the brilliant mind of Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden and his band of 17th century navvies of the waterways.

 

 

My first foray into Fenland piking was in November of 2009, when, with my two brothers, Andy and Tim, I enjoyed a day's guided fishing with local expert Mark Barrett (seen above netting a fish for Tim). The weather on this occasion was unusually benevolent, with no fierce wind whipping across the vast, unsheltered flatness and the results in terms of fish captured were pleasing to say the least. Tim managed a brace with the largest around 15 pounds, Andy landed four pike and a small zander, with his biggest pike weighing in at a "close but no cigar" 19 pounds and 14 ounces (see below), and although the biggest of my brace of pike was only a scraper double I was fortunate enough to catch my largest ever zander. (also pictured)

 

 

 

It was to be seven years until I returned, this time to fish a different drain in the company of friends from the UK Christian Anglers Group. On my second visit the weather had a more hostile feel, cold and  with periodic rain, but, just as the menacing moorland of Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" is as much of a "character" as the novel's protagonists, so too the cold and damp and the whistling wind seemed to possess an appropriateness that added to the sense of "place". I was pleased to maintain my one hundred percent predatorial catch rate, but it was a close run thing, and the fish was less the tooth laden leviathan of every angler's dreams and more the "young pup of a pike" that DH Lawrence describes in one of his poems.

 

 

And so, as did my teenage crush on the pop star Wendy James of Transvision Vamp fame, the infatuation continues to exist mostly in my mind and my dreams (with Wendy James it was, of course, entirely in my mind, although a friend of mine once met her, and still almost three decades later has a photo of them stood together, his arm round her shoulder, her face looking slightly uncomfortable, his triumphant), but the dream will be realised again next year, when at the very backend of the river season a party of friends from Christian Anglers will brave the elements and seek the legendary water-wolves that roam the watery arterial incisions that bisect the miles of fields given over to the agriculture that forms the bedrock of the struggling local economy, and as I sit or stand, shoulders hunched against the cold, eyes fixed on my pike bung, I'll fall in love all over again.