When life and work take on a claustrophobic feel, and the pressures of the everyday start weighing heavily, there are two remedies that I find efficacious. The first is that I turn to the Old Testament book of Psalms, and find a sense of peace in those inspired poetic records of how the Psalmists navigated life's trying times and were held by God in their struggles, while the second is that I grab a fishing rod and escape to quiet places and still waters to refresh my soul. The last Zoom meeting of the day finished at 5:00pm, and I duly grabbed an old Rodrill float rod, a net and a bag of bits and headed for a very small pond of probably less than a quarter of an acre, surrounded by overhanging trees, and full of rudd, roach, and carp for a couple of hours of restorative soul-refreshing angling.
I had been joined by my friend and fellow vintage tackle enthusiast, Roger, and soon we were dropping our lightly shotted floats into the margins and enjoying the stillness of the early evening. Our target fish were the gloriously golden rudd that inhabit the pond, although there was an inevitability that carp would, from time to time, seek to muscle in on the loose feed and provide a sterner test for our ancient rods and reels.
The occasional frog popped up to satisfy his curiosity, briefly staring bog-eyed at the two grown men fishing the type of pond more normally associated with young boys wielding cane poles and bent-pin hooks or jam jars on strings, before popping back beneath the water's surface, while the breeze carried the pleasing aroma of wet grass and damp earth on the air.
In the event the hoped for rudd failed to materialise, and it was a steady stream of bully-boy carp that occupied our attention and bent the rods into the shape of their fighting curve. Before long we were both catching steadily, Roger's vintage weapons of choice for the evening being an old glass Pegley Davis float rod matched with an un-named centre pin reel, while I had decided to take the fixed spool option and had paired the Rodrill with a sweet little CAP style Mitchell 304.
In keeping with the capricious and unpredictable nature of the weather in recent weeks, we enjoyed spells of bright sunshine punctuated by less welcome overcast skies, scudding clouds, and diluvial deluges of brief but ferocious intensity.
The soakings failed to dampen our spirits, and fishing side by side we chatted, caught up with each other's family news, and speculated as to the reasons that the hoped-for rudd were conspicuously absent. Every few minutes the conversation would be punctuated by the dipping of a float and an upward sweep of the rod as one or other of us bent into an indignant carp.
Eventually I managed to hook a fish which, by virtue of its lack of a spirited struggle, gave away the fact that it wasn't a carp, and I swung to hand the only rudd that was to grace us with its presence. We both admired it's golden sheen, worthy of a place in any jeweler's shop window, before slipping it gently back into the pond whose banks form the boundaries of its watery world.
A few more carp and we decided to call it a day. It had been a charming evening, which despite the regular catching of carp had taken on the unhurried feel that characterises a good fishing trip. Time felt as if it had slowly collected rather than passed with any pace or purpose.
There had been something Crabtree-esque about the evening's gentle and unhurried unfolding, accentuated by the atmosphere of the quiet pond where it had been spent, and as we packed up, I in my 50's and Roger just turned 60, it was hard to tell if we were the eponymous pipe smoking hero of the iconic Venables cartoons or young Peter. As I get older it strikes me that the secret of truly being contented as a man resides, at least in part, in the ability to never lose sight of the boy within.
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