Coronavirus, or Covid19 to employ the inappropriately jaunty sounding moniker beloved of journalists and media types, had put paid to a long planned and much anticipated fishing weekend that my brothers and I had arranged, and on what should have been the second evening of our fraternal fishing adventure I found myself lounging prone on the sofa, glass of wine in hand, with my mind meandering like a slow paced river, and improvising around philosophical themes with an angling root.
I have recently reread "For all those left behind", written by John Andrews of "Andrews of Arcadia" fame, a hauntingly beautiful account of his adult re-conversion to fishing, a pastime that he'd earlier shared in his childhood and youth with his father, a book which above all else is a deeply personal exploration of bereavement and loss, and of how we hold people and events in our memories. Perhaps it was a consequence of his exquisitely penned recollections of his father, that caused a long-lost memory to reactivate itself in my brain; the memory of stream caught brown trout, cooked in the kitchen of a small suburban town house in Reading.
My father is not an angler. Fishing began for me and my two brothers in the summer of 1981, a summer of scorching hot weather and an ill fated royal wedding, and was entirely a decision of our own volition. There was no family history of angling (although I suspect that some of the gypsy forbears on my father's side of the family - my father is rightly proud of his Romany roots - knew a thing or two about poaching), but we lived five minutes walk away from a tree and rhododendron fringed lake of about 8-10 acres, which was gloriously and incongruously set in the middle of a housing estate, and the three of us had long been drawn to the lake as a place of beauty, excitement and adventure. There was, I now realise, an inevitability that the siren appeal of angling would eventually call out and ensnare us.
We fished almost every day of that summer holiday, our first as fishermen, and by the end of six weeks of solid fishing, I had caught one perch, Andy half a dozen and Tim was yet to catch. To label such a catch rate as "abysmal" would be to deal in understatement, but we were happy; self-taught and constantly learning we devoured fishing books and magazines and were canny enough to realise that there would come a time when the theory we were imbibing would be caught up by our practice and results, as indeed proved to be the case. We fished all through the winter, protected against the chill by inadequate thin anoraks, knitted gloves and Dunlop wellies, and by the following summer had made enough progress for all three of us to be selected to fish for a junior team in a match fishing league.
Our father sometimes accompanied us to "the Lake" (it had a name but to us brothers it was only ever referred to, and still is, as "the Lake"), and although he didn't fish he took a keen interest. Possibly it was a result of his being a science teacher who had always been fascinated by what he would term "pond life", or maybe just a father spotting an opportunity to spend some time with sons whose passions differed from his own. As our obsession grew, so did the desire to try new venues and sometimes he'd not only play the role of taxi driver, but he (and sometimes our mother, too) would pack a folding chair and sit and watch us fish, he often accompanied by a book (almost always on some theological theme), our mother with a ball of wool and a couple of knitting needles, as we (by now competent anglers) swung roach and rudd to hand or landed tench. Even without the sentimentalising effect of nostalgic reminiscence these were happy days.
The family idyll was ended by the onset in earnest of adolescence. As hormones careered around our teenage bodies boundaries were pushed, new urges and experiences explored and our youthful drinking, smoking, pierced ears and late night scrapes erected barriers in what had previously been a harmonious existence. There were arguments, tears, acts of rebellion and a sense of mutual incomprehension between generations. We remained under the same roof, but often at a distance. But there were moments of affection and rapprochement, one of which brings me back to the memory of stream caught brown trout, cooked in the kitchen of our small suburban town house in Reading.
I have no particular fondness for trout. I concede to the native brown trout its natural beauty, I detest the artificial beauty of the American import rainbow (the piscene equivalent of a plain girl wearing too much make-up), and although as a species they have drawn sublime poetry from Rupert Brook and witty, eliptical observations from John Gierach, I find it hard to respect a quarry so easy to catch that it necessitated the invention of fly fishing to make their capture a challenge. However, my prejudices in respect of trout are incidental to this tale.
One of my best friends throughout my teenage period had a father more emotionally equipped to deal with the maelstrom that is adolescence than my own, and I spent most of my weekends for several years staying over at this friend's house. We chased the same girls (he usually won, and in fact is now married to one of our mutual pursuits!), went to the same parties and I rode pillion on his motorbike. His father was a businessman, endlessly pursuing new opportunities- a builder, a retailer, always restlessly searching for a new project, and so it was that he took an interest in a farming, camping and livery business in Cornwall, and I was invited to join the family for a weekend staying at the potential new business opportunity. Through the farm ran a stream, narrow enough to leap across, its banks tree lined and festooned with vegetation. The die was cast, and my friend and I took telescopic rods, bait boxes of maggots and worms and a handful of floats, split shot and hooks and spent a couple of hours each day trotting the stream. Our reward was a plentiful supply of small brown trout, resplendent in their spotted beauty, the largest of which we summarily knocked on the head and popped in a cooler to take back up with us to Reading.
Which brings the story full circle to my relationship, then strained, with my father and a brief moment of shared mutual affection.
"I'll cook those for you, Jon" my father offered, and he set to work in the kitchen, coating the trout with flour and egg yolk, seasoning them with herbs and popping them into a frying pan. We ate them together, reminding ourselves of what it was like to enjoy each other's company, for a while forgetting the ongoing conflict between teenage hedonism and my father's more conservative worldview. A moment of communion and re-connection.
Many years have past since that day, I am older today than my father was then, our father/son relationship has long since been repaired, and I too have been a father of teenagers. My father never became an angler, and my own son now fishes with me just a couple of times a year. Despite catching his first fish at the age of just three, his relationship with fishing has been sporadic, and although a competent fisherman who enjoys using a centre pin, the bug has never bitten hard with him and I know that he accompanies me primarily to humour his old dad, rather than out of any irresistible urge to fish, and I in turn am grateful for his gracious condescension.
Whether it's Cat Stevens dispensing seemingly dispassionate life lessons to a son, Mike Rutherford wishing that he and his father had connected on a deeper level in "the living years", or Bruce Springstein recalling sitting on his father's lap in a "big old Buick" and being told "son, this is your home town", the relationship between fathers and sons is a staple for melancholic reflection.
For me, those reflections require recovering the memory of a dated looking 1980's kitchen and a plate of small brown trout, and resolving, as I move through my middle years and he his twilight ones, to phone my father more often for a chat while we both still inhabit the living years.
I have recently reread "For all those left behind", written by John Andrews of "Andrews of Arcadia" fame, a hauntingly beautiful account of his adult re-conversion to fishing, a pastime that he'd earlier shared in his childhood and youth with his father, a book which above all else is a deeply personal exploration of bereavement and loss, and of how we hold people and events in our memories. Perhaps it was a consequence of his exquisitely penned recollections of his father, that caused a long-lost memory to reactivate itself in my brain; the memory of stream caught brown trout, cooked in the kitchen of a small suburban town house in Reading.
My father is not an angler. Fishing began for me and my two brothers in the summer of 1981, a summer of scorching hot weather and an ill fated royal wedding, and was entirely a decision of our own volition. There was no family history of angling (although I suspect that some of the gypsy forbears on my father's side of the family - my father is rightly proud of his Romany roots - knew a thing or two about poaching), but we lived five minutes walk away from a tree and rhododendron fringed lake of about 8-10 acres, which was gloriously and incongruously set in the middle of a housing estate, and the three of us had long been drawn to the lake as a place of beauty, excitement and adventure. There was, I now realise, an inevitability that the siren appeal of angling would eventually call out and ensnare us.
We fished almost every day of that summer holiday, our first as fishermen, and by the end of six weeks of solid fishing, I had caught one perch, Andy half a dozen and Tim was yet to catch. To label such a catch rate as "abysmal" would be to deal in understatement, but we were happy; self-taught and constantly learning we devoured fishing books and magazines and were canny enough to realise that there would come a time when the theory we were imbibing would be caught up by our practice and results, as indeed proved to be the case. We fished all through the winter, protected against the chill by inadequate thin anoraks, knitted gloves and Dunlop wellies, and by the following summer had made enough progress for all three of us to be selected to fish for a junior team in a match fishing league.
Our father sometimes accompanied us to "the Lake" (it had a name but to us brothers it was only ever referred to, and still is, as "the Lake"), and although he didn't fish he took a keen interest. Possibly it was a result of his being a science teacher who had always been fascinated by what he would term "pond life", or maybe just a father spotting an opportunity to spend some time with sons whose passions differed from his own. As our obsession grew, so did the desire to try new venues and sometimes he'd not only play the role of taxi driver, but he (and sometimes our mother, too) would pack a folding chair and sit and watch us fish, he often accompanied by a book (almost always on some theological theme), our mother with a ball of wool and a couple of knitting needles, as we (by now competent anglers) swung roach and rudd to hand or landed tench. Even without the sentimentalising effect of nostalgic reminiscence these were happy days.
The family idyll was ended by the onset in earnest of adolescence. As hormones careered around our teenage bodies boundaries were pushed, new urges and experiences explored and our youthful drinking, smoking, pierced ears and late night scrapes erected barriers in what had previously been a harmonious existence. There were arguments, tears, acts of rebellion and a sense of mutual incomprehension between generations. We remained under the same roof, but often at a distance. But there were moments of affection and rapprochement, one of which brings me back to the memory of stream caught brown trout, cooked in the kitchen of our small suburban town house in Reading.
I have no particular fondness for trout. I concede to the native brown trout its natural beauty, I detest the artificial beauty of the American import rainbow (the piscene equivalent of a plain girl wearing too much make-up), and although as a species they have drawn sublime poetry from Rupert Brook and witty, eliptical observations from John Gierach, I find it hard to respect a quarry so easy to catch that it necessitated the invention of fly fishing to make their capture a challenge. However, my prejudices in respect of trout are incidental to this tale.
One of my best friends throughout my teenage period had a father more emotionally equipped to deal with the maelstrom that is adolescence than my own, and I spent most of my weekends for several years staying over at this friend's house. We chased the same girls (he usually won, and in fact is now married to one of our mutual pursuits!), went to the same parties and I rode pillion on his motorbike. His father was a businessman, endlessly pursuing new opportunities- a builder, a retailer, always restlessly searching for a new project, and so it was that he took an interest in a farming, camping and livery business in Cornwall, and I was invited to join the family for a weekend staying at the potential new business opportunity. Through the farm ran a stream, narrow enough to leap across, its banks tree lined and festooned with vegetation. The die was cast, and my friend and I took telescopic rods, bait boxes of maggots and worms and a handful of floats, split shot and hooks and spent a couple of hours each day trotting the stream. Our reward was a plentiful supply of small brown trout, resplendent in their spotted beauty, the largest of which we summarily knocked on the head and popped in a cooler to take back up with us to Reading.
Which brings the story full circle to my relationship, then strained, with my father and a brief moment of shared mutual affection.
"I'll cook those for you, Jon" my father offered, and he set to work in the kitchen, coating the trout with flour and egg yolk, seasoning them with herbs and popping them into a frying pan. We ate them together, reminding ourselves of what it was like to enjoy each other's company, for a while forgetting the ongoing conflict between teenage hedonism and my father's more conservative worldview. A moment of communion and re-connection.
Many years have past since that day, I am older today than my father was then, our father/son relationship has long since been repaired, and I too have been a father of teenagers. My father never became an angler, and my own son now fishes with me just a couple of times a year. Despite catching his first fish at the age of just three, his relationship with fishing has been sporadic, and although a competent fisherman who enjoys using a centre pin, the bug has never bitten hard with him and I know that he accompanies me primarily to humour his old dad, rather than out of any irresistible urge to fish, and I in turn am grateful for his gracious condescension.
Whether it's Cat Stevens dispensing seemingly dispassionate life lessons to a son, Mike Rutherford wishing that he and his father had connected on a deeper level in "the living years", or Bruce Springstein recalling sitting on his father's lap in a "big old Buick" and being told "son, this is your home town", the relationship between fathers and sons is a staple for melancholic reflection.
For me, those reflections require recovering the memory of a dated looking 1980's kitchen and a plate of small brown trout, and resolving, as I move through my middle years and he his twilight ones, to phone my father more often for a chat while we both still inhabit the living years.
