"How" questions are generally easier to answer than "why" questions, which probably explains the preponderance of books that seek to instruct the angler, replete with photos of rigs and knots and diagrams of shotting patterns, but also why so few are written that delve into the existential mystery of what it is that propels us to the water's edge with angling intent.
Recent circumstances (busyness at work and the impending wedding of my daughter) have conspired to keep me away from the lakes, canals and rivers for a number of weeks, and afforded me the opportunity to ponder the seemingly inexorable pull that the river bank or lakeside exerts over me.
Much has been made by some of the proposition that the angling urge is inherent, an ingrained memory deep in the (usually male) psyche passed down through the generations from the days when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, a kind of evolutionary replicator that our DNA has never quite been able to shake off despite the comfort of our modern, first-world sanitised lives. Others theorise that it's precisely because our lives are so sanitised and domesticated now, that we need to create spaces for adventure and excuses for a return to the wild, and that angling is one such form of retreat from the madness of the modern world.
I suspect a modicum of truth in the former, and much in the latter.
For me, it's an impossibility to reduce my love of angling to a single factor, or an overarching premise. Even when I'm unable to actually fish (as in recent weeks), I find myself engaging with angling related activity in a variety of ways: I read, write and dream about fishing. I have just placed an order for some more handmade floats and another bamboo float tube, last week I rewarded myself after mowing the lawn by sorting through my tackle and tidying it (an unnecessary task as I am, by nature, a "neat freak" and it was already comprehensively sorted, pedantically neat and very tidy, none of which prevented the process from taking a thoroughly enjoyable hour).
I also suffer from the twin urges to hoard and to collect, followed periodically by the expiation of guilt offered by a "clear out", when the number of rods and reels begins to exceed the allotted spaces in garage and house that exist as the result of protracted matrimonial negotiations. Several friends have been glad of these purges, and now posses rods, reels and sundry angling ephemera as a result. The collecting bug has worsened since I fell in love with the aesthetic pleasures offered by using vintage and antique tackle, and plans for further purchases are never far from my mind.
Angling literature, art, history and lore also play a part in my enchantment with pleasures piscatorial, but in my attempts to understand my hopeless addiction (for which I believe there to be no cure, the only available relief being that of a temporary nature brought about by actually fishing) I am drawn back to the fact that I am an incurable romantic, with an idealised view of the countryside and of nature and a desire to constantly insert myself into the drama of the unfolding seasons and natural world through the enchanting medium of fishing.
In this respect I am, of course, a dilettante, labouring under a similar delusion and self deception as Henry David Thoreau, the 19th Century author and faux outdoorsman who created for himself a wilderness experience on the edge of civilisation and made a living (and his name) by writing about it as if it were the real thing.
There is no real wilderness in rural Leicestershire, but there is beauty and as I pull the brim of my Huckleberry Finn hat lower and reach in my creel for a cigar, eyes squinting at the protruding orange dot of my float I can pretend, in the knowledge that my passion harms no-one and- most of the time- leaves even the fish untroubled.
