I am still waiting to find out what it is. Life marches on; my solitary life in the house lasted a matter of months. There was soon a woman with a swelling belly, followed by the patter of tiny feet and then some more. But, to quote an old colleague, ‘Nothing Last Forever’. Things fall apart and hearts break, and it is some years since I left that house. Driving past it last year, I noticed the new owner had uprooted those five feral and rather useless trees. Maybe their job had already been done. But last autumn I drove out of London, with my youngest son, for a few hours’ fishing. We sat holding our rods on the bank of the Aylesbury arm of the Grand Union Canal. The Perch began biting. My son hooked a fine-looking half-pounder. Then while waiting for my float to bob I heard something drop on the ground beside me. Looking down I saw a Damson. I picked it up and popped it in my mouth. The taste was like it was the first time. Looking up, there was a tree heavy with fruit begging to be plucked. Somehow I had not noticed it when we first arrived. I filled my bag and that evening a glorious crumble was made with them. The Damsons have not given up on me yet.
This spring, as the blossoms on all those feral Damson trees across the Vale will be bursting into flower, I will be flying to Damascus, where I will be leading a performance by The 17. The performance will be of Score 328: SURROUND. It will be performed by 100 local members of The 17; each of them positioned 50 metres apart along the 5 kilometres of Damascus’ ancient but still standing city walls.
Maybe it is not too late for that conversion.
Postscript: And a rather strange one. I bought the house from an old sailor; he had told me that once he had retired and his wife had to put up with him all the year round, they were finished – she realised they had nothing in common. He also told me how he had bought the house from a comedian he had never heard of, and based on his dealings with this comedian he was one of the least humorous men he had ever met. The name of this not very famous or funny comedian was Peter Cook. It seemed that this Peter Cook’s previous marriage had failed due to his heavy drinking and his new young wife was going to save him from his wayward ways by imprisoning him in the small farmhouse on a hill with no ready access to the Soho drinking dens where he had practised his wayward ways. It seems she failed in her attempts. A Peter Cook biography came out while I was living in the house. I was keen to see what mention was made of it in the book. But hardly any was. There was a photo of him in the garden with one of the Damson trees in the background, but it was a mere stripling at the time of the photo being taken. I wonder if Peter Cook ever ate one of the Damsons from those trees, or if he had any sort of conversion on a road to Damascus or anywhere else?
Postscript to the Postscript: I have just read the Peter Cook Wikipedia page to see if it mentioned him living in the farmhouse in question. But there is no mention of it. What I did notice is that he died at the same age as I am now, due to severe liver damage. At least I have not as yet been converted to the bottle. Maybe in time.
How to Catch Trout
Charles Rangeley-Wilson
The short of it:
• find your passion
• learn to feel the flow of a river
• learn to read where the trout are
• learn that a short cast is better than a long one
• learn how drag is everything
• learn that one fly is better than twenty
• learn to go slow and sit still
And the long of it:
Ireland gave me my first trout. I went there every summer in my teens, to stay with a pal of mine – Simon – at his mother’s and my godmother’s house near Caherdaniel in Co. Kerry. The first year we took the train from Padding-ton, bikes in the goods van, ‘London Calling’ on the tape deck. I seem to recall Milford Haven ablaze, an orange firmament dancing on the underside of clouds as we set sail.
Maybe it always looked like that. The ferry smelt of sick and bleach but it was exciting just to be crossing the waters. I didn’t sleep much and woke early to watch the green, rolling pastures of the Cork estuary slide slowly by. The seventy-mile bike ride from Cork to the far end of Kerry – past the highest pub in Ireland where chickens roamed the bar – took us a full day and my arse was sore at the end of it. But I was used to cycling then and at the far end we cycled a whole lot more. Rods over handlebars we pounded the Ring of Kerry tarmac from Waterville to Sneem and back again, and though we fished more or less every day, for a long time that first summer we caught absolutely nothing – though our enthusiasm was undimmed. Days rock-hopping Lamb’s Head, evenings at the disco in Casey’s Cove: all this added up to an idyllic summer in my book, fish or no fish. But I remember the very first finned creature – a flounder – hooked off Derrynane. Simon reeled it in, jumped up and down with joy, lit a cigarette, made a victory sign and hit it on the head. We ate it and it didn’t taste of much, other than success, but after that fishing seemed easy.
We got better at our sport and soon pollack and wrasse were caught. Simon was never happier than when he was sitting on a rock, fag in gob, doing his best to look like Terry Hall, waiting for one of those marine beasties to pull his string. Something else pulled me, though, down the road to a stream that drained Eagles Hill, the valley ending in rock and cloud out of which spilled a mercurial, frothy torrent. It fell quickly down the steep hill, past an ancient hill-fort to Castlecove, where, for the last few hundred yards before it hit the sea, the stream slowed enough to allow a bit of weed to grow on the engine blocks that made a riffle under the bridge of the N70. The river turned a long corner around the back of some kind of junk yard or bus depot, and a few of the old lumps of iron no longer needed or able to power western Kerry’s wheezy old buses had rolled down that bank into the Castlecove river. In those last few lazy pools, which no one else ever fished and no one ever stopped me from fishing, were enormous brown trout. Some went to 8 oz. I didn’t know how to cast a fly then and wouldn’t have been able to anyway – the place was a thicket of gorse and overgrown trees that turned the deepest pools into blackened caves of possibility. I had a short, green spinning rod that I’d built in the school hobby-room and a croaky old Invicta fixed-spool reel. I used a worm – no floats or lead – flicked upstream and drifted back towards me. I watched the line for takes. They came thick and fast. The river, like most Irish rivers I have since fished, was full of trout. Sometimes several small fish would grapple with the same outsized lob-worm. And sometimes a whopper would slide out from the drowned roots of the streamside trees or from behind a crank-case, to engulf it whole. I still remember the first. It jumped clear of the water and danced like crazy on the end of the line and was just so damn pretty. I fell in love with trout then and, locked inside ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, I’ve been fishing for them ever since.
I wonder then if the best way of describing the how is to start at the beginning with the why: if at the beginning of the how there is a passion – encompassing all the associated meanings of that word: desire, compulsion, infatuation – once found it will guide the rest of the discovery. With passion in your tackle bag the how will ultimately take care of itself. Which is not to say, of course, that it is impossible to light the way, or that there aren’t simple directions worth taking.
So why catch a trout? Fishers love to play that onefish-ever-after game: which fish – you’ve only got one – would you chase for the rest of your days to the exclusion of all others? I’ve thought about it often enough now to know there’s nothing to think about any more. The answer is the brown trout. The indigenous British and Irish trout, the same fish no matter where you find it, though it can look so different from one river to the next, the Victorians, who were a little incontinent with their taxonomic classifications, named a zillion different species. They’re all crammed into one now: Salmo trutta. But in appearance the brown trout can vary so vastly you can understand why the stovepipehatters got so lyrical.
From Loch Leven brown trout are silver, small-headed with a peppering of black spots, the slightest iridescence of a purple haze along each flank. From the River Itchen they are deep, short, heavy-shouldered, the silver has blended with butter, the black spots have swelled and along each flank, like