I recently heard a writer in an interview use the phrase "nostalgia falsifies", and I guess we all have a tendency to don "rose tinted spectacles" and remember the past as it never really was, but not all memories are false and our minds are not always playing tricks on us. There is a neutrality expressed in the truth with which LP Hartley opens one of his novels: "The past is a foreign country- they do things differently there." Sometimes better, sometimes not, but invariably differently.
My fishing these days consciously harkens back to bygone times as a consequence of the pleasure I've discovered in recent years through using vintage rods and reels for almost all of my fish bothering activities. Life expectancy may have been shorter, social attitudes may have been more intemperate, working conditions less refined, "health and safety" unheard of, and TB and polio still a present threat, but they certainly knew how to make glorious fishing tackle "back in the day." Pride of place in my collection goes to my cane rods, which includes an almost 70 year old marvel of whole and split cane made by the famous Allcocks company, and a particularly aesthetically pleasing float rod by Aspindales replete with an exuberant abundance of intermediate whippings. Sadly, neither manufacturer still exists, Allcocks were acquired by Norris Shakespeare back in the 1960's and Aspindales have followed the path many other businesses reliant on craft, guile, and hard earned skill have trodden into oblivion, courtesy of the modern obsession with functionality and utilitarian efficiency.
However, it is not only rods made from cane that have captured my affection, as the majority of my vintage rods are made of glass fibre and originate from the late 1960's and early 70's. Not only do these rods have the advantages for the collector of being cheaper to purchase and virtually indestructible in usage, for me they also provide a tangible connection to my earliest angling experiences. Born in the late 60's and raised in the 70's, by the time I began fishing in 1981 there were few cane rods to be seen on the bank, although I do recall one elderly gentleman who used to fish our local lake with split cane rods, and was a dab hand at extracting good numbers of the lake's tench population. This was the early carbon fibre era, but for those of us solely reliant on pocket money, birthdays, and Christmas to fuel our fishing addiction, graphite was beyond our financial means, and we cut our angling teeth on glass fibre.
The two absolute favourites among my personal arsenal of glass rods are a 13 foot Rodrill float rod and an 11 foot ET Barlow specimen rod. Both are unpretentious no-nonsense rods devoid of frills, that would have been standard fayre in the rod holdall of the the average adult angler of their period, while being the envy of the army of small boys to be found wielding 6 foot solid glass Winfield spinning rods round any lake in the 1970's.
Again, I suspect that early adolescent and childhood connections, in part, account for their favoured position among my glass fibre collection. For a start, there's a geographical link. Although I've lived in the Midlands for nearly 13 years now, I'm from the South East and have never forgotten the fact. My boyhood and teenage years were spent in Reading in Berkshire, I studied (I use the term very loosely) for my degree in London, and the first few years of my married life were spent in North London, and I still consider myself a Southerner adrift in the East Midlands. Rodrill were a North London company, while Barlow hailed from Thames Ditton, a suburban village on the outskirts of London in Surrey. A further link with my childhood comes from the fact that for several years the rod I most coveted in my local tackle shop was an ET Barlow Vortex rod which had taken its design cues from the Bruce and Walker rods of the era, with their lustrous glass, "fake" intermediate whippings, and iconic cartoon perch that formed the brand logo for Vortex rods. My Barlow rod has the logo, but is a model devoid of the "fake" whippings.
The Rodrill match rod has accounted for everything from small perch, roach and rudd up to near double figure carp, while the Barlow rod has been employed on several occasions in pursuit of pike, although to date has never been tested by anything more substantial than jacks of 2 or 3 pounds in weight.
I have no doubt that in most situations a modern carbon fibre rod would be more efficient (and certainly lighter to hold), but for me that misses the point. In some strange mystical sense, my Rodrill and Barlow rods transport me back to a point in my own history, a time when footballers were still allowed to engage in a full blooded tackle and as long as the ball had been vaguely in the vicinity of the felled player within the previous sixty seconds the referee was unlikely to remove a card from his pocket, to the days of rented televisions, an era when being given 10 pence to spend at the sweet shop ensured a veritable feast of sugary confections, and to the time when I was awkwardly charting the transition from child to teenager. I seem to recall that there were lots of things that didn't make sense to me back then, as my hormones transported me on the journey from short trousers to spots and the (mostly unsuccessful) pursuit of girls, but none of that seemed to matter when I was sat on a folding stool with a glass fibre rod in my hand and all of the confusion fell away as every part of my being focused its intent gaze on the orange tip of my float.
Perhaps the interviewed writer was right- maybe nostalgia does "falsify", but if my vintage glass rods are a part of the delusion, I really don't mind, and I'll continue to wilfully labour under its falsification, a 20th Century boy in a 21st Century world.
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