"All by myself ..."

It's a rare thing these days for me to fish without company (I'm blessed with an excellent circle of fishing friends), a rarer thing still for me to make an impromptu and unplanned sortie to the water's edge, but this afternoon I did both.

It was all courtesy of my wife's suggestion that I spend the afternoon fishing (she and our two grown up children were set on a trip to IKEA to feast their eyes on meatballs and gorge on flat-pack furniture ... or have I got that the wrong way round?). My wife's spontaneous offer was met by an equally unplanned gesture from our daughter- "hey, here's a tenner, have it as part of an early birthday present" (I turn 51 at the end of this week), and so in the time that it takes to pack a car, buy two tins of sweetcorn, and drive to the lake I found myself at one of my favourite fishing haunts.

The weather was pleasantly mild and warm without being unpleasantly hot, and as my eyes took in the prettiness of the lake and my ears were tunefully assaulted by the twittering of birds, I set about the first of the afternoon's puzzles: which float to use?

I elected for a 2BB Norfolk reed waggler, the work of floatmaker Ian Lewis, mixed some groundbait, plumbed the depth and dropped the aforementioned float, along with a size 18 hook baited with a grain of sweetcorn into the margins.

It wasn't long before the float was darting beneath the water's surface with pleasing regularity, but it took a while, and an adjustment of the single number 6 "telltale" shot, to get the timing of the strike right, and even then I probably only connected with one in every five, the culprits proving to be modestly sized, but stunningly  attractive roach, with a silvery sheen that would not have disgraced an upmarket jeweller's window display..

Despite the rapidity and regularity of bites, the afternoon passed in leisurely fashion, time seeming to collect, to the accompaniment of a symphony of birdsong, the procession of uniformly sized roach being punctuated by the occasional visit of an equally pristine but larger example of their kind.

The float dipped and submerged once more, but this time the strike met with an altogether more strident response, and for what must have been close to 10 minutes I engaged in a fraught game of tug o'war with what was clearly an indignant carp. After a couple of abortive attempts I successfully drew a long and lean ghost common over the rim of the net.

After admiring and returning the exotically hued carp, I fished on for another half an hour which produced 2 or 3 more roach, but a voice inside my head was telling me that "enough was enough", and I couldn't escape the suspicion that to linger would be to spoil the magical spell that the lake had cast over me. It had been a near perfect afternoon, and by my calculation "near perfect" is "good enough with interest."

I bade the lake farewell, and returned to a world no more real, but much fuller of responsibilities, knowing that it would not be long before the lake's siren voice drew me back, hopelessly yet happily enchanted as I am. Like someone else once confessed "I am haunted by water."