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.