New Year's Eve perching.

Often it's the poets who say it best. Here's what I mean:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds.

I come into the presence of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water

and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world

and am free.

All that I was feeling as I trudged through the wet grass and cloying mud to the Club Lake for my final session of 2021 on the year's final day, put eloquently into words by the American poet Wendell Berry, someone who has never met me, much less knows of me. Such is the power of the poet's pen.

It had been a pleasant family Christmas, restful and happy, but I was still feeling the weight of the year that had preceded it, the Lockdowns and restrictions, the isolation and shrunk-small world that working from home brings, the various waves of Covid, pressures at work and so much more sitting on my shoulders, but in the five minutes that it takes to tramp from the car park to the lake I felt the weight begin to lift. As I tackled up, I admired the winter trees that fringe the lake, the gnarled and twisted fingers of their denuded branches clawing at the unseasonably mild air as they dream of once more being adorned with the pastel colours of their springtime livery.

The target fish were perch, the bait red maggots, and the realistic ambition a nice mixed bag of fish, with the chance but no guarantee of a good sized perch amongst the mix.

I had elected an old ET Barlow's Vortex glass fibre Avon as my weapon of choice, paired with an even more ancient Allcocks Aerial centre pin and chose a swim with some sparse wintry bushes overhanging the water at the margin's edge. Three red maggots underneath a Norfolk reed waggler and impaled on a size 16 hook were lowered next to the bushes' branches, loose maggots were fed and the waiting game began. In truth, the wait was neither long nor onerous and after a few minutes and a couple of missed bites a tiny perch was being swung unceremoniously to hand, the first of a procession of small perch, roach and rudd that obliged me as the swim began to build.

Unusually for me, I was fishing alone, the session being an impromptu post-breakfast decision, but having failed to persuade any friends to accompany me, I managed to bribe a robin to keep me company at the cost of a few red maggots every so often, the chubby red breasted compatriot perching sentinel-like on the branches behind me for the entire duration of my stay. Once more the float quivered and submerged and this time the resistance was more sustained, and after a spirited tussle a decent perch was being drawn over the net. The fish wasn't of sufficient size to justify subjecting it to the indignity of the scales and weigh sling, but looked to be about a pound and a half, a pleasing perch in any angler's estimation.

A few more small perch, roach and rudd followed, along with four carp, each of which ploughed up and down the swim before being landed, and all of which were probably a couple of pounds or so in weight, before I once again found myself connected to a reasonable perch, which proved to be a little smaller than the first fish, but certainly a fish in excess of a pound and possessed of all the bravura swagger and bristling bully boy tendencies associated with this most beautiful of freshwater fish species.

This was to be the last fish of note, and after a couple more perch of insubstantial size I packed up in an unhurried manner, the two hours spent by still waters having had the necessary calming effect, drawing me into the grace of the world and its Creator, and rendering my spirit free.

Whatever unknowns 2022 may throw at me (and for sure there will be some), of this I remain convinced: angling in pleasing environs will be, as it has been to me for over four decades, a balm to heal the soul. I really must go more often next year.

Angling Anemoia

 

I suffer from anemoia. This confession need spread no alarm- the condition is neither contagious nor life threatening. In fact, you've probably never heard of it. "Anemoia" is one of those words that exists and has an established meaning, but is rarely to be found in common vernacular usage. The Dictionary defines it as "nostalgia for a time you've never known", which pretty much describes my approach to angling. I was converted to the gentle art in 1981, and so my formative angling years were in the twighlight of the glass fibre era and the early days of carbon as the mass produced norm for fishing rods. Very occasionally one would see an old chap sat atop a willow basket wielding a cane rod, but such sightings were rare.

These days, I choose to fish almost exclusively with rods of cane or older examples of glass fibre, most of which predate my earliest forays into the world of fishing. The reason is, in part, aesthetic. There is something intrinsically alluring about a craftsman-built cane rod, whether restored to a lustrous varnish finish or bearing the noble scars and patina of over half a century's use, something attractive about handmade floats crafted from quill or reed, and something reassuring about the solidity of an ancient fixed spool reel or the machined perfection of a venerable old centre pin.

Occasionally I question why I have elected to pursue this particular fork in the angling road, but the conclusion I always return to is that the answer to the question goes beyond (although includes) the aesthetic considerations, and is largely accounted for by anemoia. Put simply, I long for a simpler time. I am not blind to the fact that the "simpler time" I yearn for was a time when healthcare was less developed, life expectancy shorter, life for minority groups harder, and we were still slowly uncoupling ourselves from a morally dubious exploitative Empire, but notwithstanding all of that, there's a simplicity in the England of Mr Crabtree and Peter which enchants and calls to me with siren voice. An England less detached from its rural roots than its 21st Century counterpart, an England in which children still roamed wild (but not feral), climbing trees, collecting newts from ponds, chasing hoops down hills, playing football in the street, and not imprisoned in their bedrooms oppressed by screens, phones, social media and existential doubts about their self -worth.

Sir Isaac Newton wrote that "Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things", and he was a man who knew a thing or two about things. Born in the late 1960's, I am aware that I'm (to quote Marc Bolan) a "20th Century boy" in a 21st Century world, and my heart at times yearns curiously for the years before I was, but when wielding a cane rod and centre pin reel both of which are older than I am, I find myself in some small way transported back in time to a time before me, a time when I suspect time itself seemed to move more slowly, as indeed it does while fishing.

I may be a deluded romantic and my anemoia an affliction, it may even be that I'm guilty of remembering the past as it never really was, but the best of it is that, as far as I can tell, the only cure for said affliction is to go fishing, and such a prescription can only be a good thing.