One of my favourite poems is called "Adlestrop". At just four verses it hardly qualifies as an epic and, other than a train stopping at a station on a June day and a blackbird singing, nothing happens. Its significance lies in the date of its composition. Written in 1917, it describes a moment of poignant normality, a normality that seems incongruous in the light of the War taking place elsewhere in Europe at that time and the underlying and unspoken threat with which the poem's context is pregnant was sadly to be realised- its author was not to survive the war. A poem in which very little happens, but what little does happen does so beautifully. My favourite novel, Marilyn Robinson's "Gilead", is similar. It has little in the way of plot, no twists, turns or shocks but exists as a masterpiece of description. Perhaps my obsession with pursuing perch makes my literary tastes unsurprising - in my fishing too, very little happens but does so surrounded by beauty; I sit and wait, reposition my bait, trickle in loose feed, wait some more, light a cigar, take a sip of coffee, time passes slowly and occasionally the reverie is broken by my perch bob living up to its name and agitatedly bobbing before disappearing and inducing from me a reaction. Today was one such day.
Initially, the weather was as might be expected in early February, with the air cold and the boney fingers of trees still denuded of their summer foliage clawing at the grey sky but as the morning drew on the wan sky was transformed from smoky grey to duck egg blue as the temperature incrementally rose to a pleasantly mild nine degrees. My tactics for the day could hardly have been simpler- red maggots fished under a sarkandas reed float and positioned close to the cover provided by the roots of a tree that had at some time in the past encroached into the lake's margins. A miniscule perch and a barely bigger roach were the reward for my first two casts, but thereafter the fishing took on a more leisurely aspect with bites being more few and far between than fast and furious, leaving plenty of time for conversation with my fishing partner David and for me to give my mind permission to wander in a manner that would have drawn approval from Walton who famously described angling as "the contemplative man's recreation." The American essayist, philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson advocated that one should "adopt the pace of nature" observing that "her secret is patience" - I don't know if he was angler, but the quote leads me to think he might well have been, and if he wasn't he would have made a rather splendid one.
Periodically my float dipped and disappeared but the hoped for perch failed to materialise in any sizeable form, but half a dozen small but feisty carp proved a pleasant diversion along with a similar number of juvenile perch and modestly proportioned roach. David in the next swim along caught double the number of fish but half the number of carp before we decided that the large perch were unlikely to make an appearance, and packed up for home following a pleasant morning characterised largely by soul nourishing inactivity
The fish had been unremarkable in size and modest in number, but as I shouldered my tackle bag and reached for my bucket and rod to take my leave of the lake, as in the poem, a songbird sang only this time the avian troubadour wasn't a blackbird but a friendly robin who, for the price of a few maggots, had chosen to keep me company throughout the session. In such small things is happiness found and I re-entered the busyness of the "real world" content with my lot and at peace with myself and the natural world that I'd had the privilege of immersing myself in for a few unhurried hours. If my middle years have taught me anything it's that contentment is a vastly underrated state of mind.
