caught by the river

New Site

2008-08-24T23:08:00.001+01:00

Caught by the River can now by found here: http://caughtbytheriver.net

This, is Soul...

2008-07-08T20:42:00.010+01:00

So I am sitting outside the Italia, minding my own one afternoon , checking the shoes, checking the shirts, when a text arrives on my phone from Signor Chuvalli.
I have known Signor Chuvalli since Jesus was breaking bread for the disciples and if there is one thing this boy knows about it is music. He has put me onto more good stuff than Maradona has scored goals. So when he writes that I have to hear the new Erykah Badu and Al Green albums, I’m down the shop, swift as a greyhound.
Now this girl Badu I remember from about a million years ago when that Nu Soul thing came up. In fact I heard that tune of hers On and On the other day and I got to say it was mighty groovy. But this album, Amerika, Jesus, this is something else. I mean I’m reading all these reviews lately about this guy being innovative and that band breaking new musical ground but believe me they ain’t close to what this girl is doing with this album.
All the time it is playing it’s like the ghosts of the past are drifting in front of my very eyes, like Sly and The Tower of Power and George Clinton and Eddie Kendricks and Bootsy and Stevie and solo Curtis, all that great heavy '70s soul gear, but the great thing is that Erykah is right in there herself at the centre of it all directing the musical traffic. This ain’t pastiche; this is the past put through the future. This music is captivating and hypnotic and honest (she even sings about getting old and her ass getting bigger, that’s how straight this lady is with you) and its hip and its hip hop and its r’n’b and its beautiful and funky as hell. Its sloppy and carefree, and its about Amerika but it ain’t, and there’s even tracks on there which came about in jam sessions and she hasn’t had time to finish the lyrics but what the hell put it on there anyway, and that there is the spirit of this great album rolled up in one.
Funny, ain’t it? Everyone is looking towards this one and or that one for the real deal and suddenly it shows up from a source you had forgotten all about. Tell you what. Buy a copy. If you don’t like it, I will give you your de niro back. I’m serious That’s how good this album is. The fact that I will be abroad and uncontactable all summer will in no way affect this agreement………

I now put on the Al Green album. My sincere apologies. I don’t put on the Al Green album, I put on the Reverend Al Green album because this man is reverent and to be revered because that stuff he did in the 70s, that cool amazing Memphis sound he and Willie Mitchell came up with, those songs which break your heart the second he opens his voice, well that sound is one of the all time great sounds in music - up there with anything you care to mention.
Then Al played around a lot, got burnt, literally, found God, went off and became a Minster, started making Gospel albums, and a lot of good stuff in there as well.
But that period 1970 – 1977, the man was faultless. Now he has gone back and found the same groove, the same sound. And it’s amazing. You could put at least five of the songs on this album on one of his ‘70s LP’s and you wouldn’t spot the join.
He’s got it all back, the coo-ing backing singers, (both male and female,) the restrained bass and drums which sound like God tapping his fingers on your window sill, the quick organ licks, the funky bass lines, but above all he is singing like he did when he started out, his voice is fresh and clean and finding all kinds of little peaks and troughs, it’s soothing, sexy and salacious, swift, sullen and superb, and that’s because the songs here are quality, demanding and receiving the best out of him. There’s even one song where he takes out that beautiful descending guitar figure he used to love so much and he dusts it off and he starts singing around it and the hairs on your neck stand and applaud. .
Okay, the middle of the album sags, got to say that. They don’t keep up the pace but round about eighth or ninth track they wake up and get the whole thing back on course. When the album ends my main thought on the matter is this - God bless Al Green, I mean it, God bless him. You too, when you hear this music.

Paolo Hewitt

Letter From Arcadia

2008-07-06T06:47:00.002+01:00

click here for the latest LETTER FROM ARCADIA, a regular correspondence between angling's two most original contemporary writers...

Back In The Briney You Go, My Beauty

2008-07-05T03:30:00.005+01:00

Though it's July, the mayflies are still rising to the surface of the river in some places and the trout are rising for the mayflies. It's a lovely time of year to be strolling along the bank, with everything in flower and the swallows skimming the water. But the recent new moon meant that, down by the sea, the tides were big, bringing the bass in, and suddenly I couldn't think about the river any more.

I am sitting on a rock on the Dorset coast, scribbling this into my notebook while I wait for the tide to turn from the ebb. When it does, I shall pick up my rod and start casting. The sky is full of well-spaced white clouds, the sun is warm, the breeze is soft from the north-east and the sea calm. Not ideal conditions for bass, who prefer a bit of swirl and chop; but come high tide, an hour before sunset, I sense the potential for a bent rod.

I have always been enthusiastic about the sea. This year my urge to migrate to the coast began in early spring, though I didn't actually cast until the full moon in May, traditionally the time when the bass first move inshore in large numbers. I went in the evening to one of my favourite stretches of rocky coastline and walked under the cliffs for a mile or so, looking for any activity along the shoreline. Gulls swooping on a shoal of small fish, or mackerel on a splashy hunt often indicate the presence of bass, which will strike into the mackerel from below, or ambush the small fry from between sunken boulders.

I began fishing at the first likely looking place, close to a kelp-covered reef. But after a dozen unresponsive casts with my favourite bass lure, a flock of gulls began wheeling around a rocky outcrop, a few hundred yards to my left and I hurried towards the spot.

The whirl of excited seabirds spiralled up and away as I hopped suddenly onto a rock next to them, yet, though the water was clear and comparatively calm, the clouded evening light wasn't strong enough for me to see what had attracted them. There were a few little splashes between the incoming waves that I took to be panicking tiddlers, perhaps sand eels or whitebait, and I cast over them immediately. My lure was designed to look and behave like an edgy prey fish, skipping across the surface to attract any predator in the vicinity. I felt it was the most obvious method for that situation, but despite 20 minutes of long searching casts, nothing even swirled at me. I switched lures, snipping off the floating plug and retying with a heavy silver spoon that would flicker alluringly through the depths.

I cast five times straight out from the rocks, then once alongside them, letting the spoon sink almost to the bottom before beginning the retrieve. But I reeled in only a yard of line before I felt a resistance so solid that I was convinced I'd snagged a boulder. I gradually increased pressure and the rod jerked back a bit, then lurched forward as something realised it had been nabbed. The reel made a lovely screech as the fish dashed out to sea, but it turned after a short distance and rather disconcertingly headed straight back towards the rocks, getting between two half-submerged boulders and making me wince as I felt the line chaffing against them. I lowered the rod and worked the fish gently but steadily towards me.

I wondered initially whether it was a pollack, but the longer it tussled with me the more I recognised the tail-swipes of a bass. Then I saw the big spiky dorsal cutting through a wave and in a few moments I had piloted the fish along a channel in the rocks and brought it safely ashore - a lovely silver five-pounder, my first bass of the year.

Being the first, it went back into the briny after a photograph. Catch and release is, anyway, a common practice nowadays among responsible bass anglers. Bass, incredibly, are not yet a protected species. If we don't conserve them they'll go the way of the cod - and the dodo.

Chris Yates

from todays Telegraph

Pleasures Of June

2008-07-02T22:28:00.004+01:00

A Saturday afternoon on the river Cam with Robert Macfarlane and friends
Terry Reid 'Mayfly'
Al Green 'Lay It Down'
Glastonbury
Richard Price 'Lush Life'
Jay Z's intro tape at Glastonbury
Neil Diamond at the O2 (perfect mix of quality and utter cheese)
Dennis Wilson 'Pacific Ocean Blue'
Robert Macfarlane 'The Wild Places'
Roger Deakin 'Waterlog'
Fullers Organic Honey Dew
Youngs Kew Brew
Mountain Of One "Brown Piano" Remake by Studio (off Studio Yearbook 2 on Information - proper balearic revival!)
Five Dials
Six Bottles
Iain Sinclair on the Olympics and the supposed regeneration of the East End
M83 "Saturday = Youth"
the new Beck single
the trailer for Hellboy 2

Caught By The Reaper

2008-07-02T15:20:00.005+01:00

Nick Sanderson April 22, 1961 - June 8, 2008

We lost a mate recently. Below is a remembrance from John Williams, an old school friend of Nicks, followed by the trailer for a film on the FA Cup that Nick was making with Paul Kelly. It's Nick talking and it'll make you smile;

One Sunday during the long hot summer of 1977, when we were sixteen years old, Nick and I went to find Peter Gabriel’s house. We were in school together at the time, a boys’ boarding school in Bristol. We’d known each other for a couple of years then, since Nick arrived in the summer term of 1975. I’d already been there two terms and met no one who seemed to have any interest in the one thing that was keeping me sane: rock’n’roll. This new kid with the blonde hair in a weird fringe, though, he was well into it.

Actually calling what Nick was into back then ‘rock’n’roll’ might be a bit of a stretch. He loved Genesis, he told me. His curious haircut was the remnant of an experiment in which he’d aped Peter Gabriel’s reverse Mohican, cutting a vertical segment out of the centre of his fringe. I’d just recently started listening to Genesis, I said, I had a tape of their new double album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Nick was utterly stoked, as we didn’t say back then. And much of the next few months was spent sat in my so-called study – a room I shared with three other kids - listening to this mysterious recording over and over. Nick told me about the other stuff he liked, Van Der Graaf Generator and Gentle Giant. I lobbied for Mott The Hoople and John Cale. He told me he played the drums, and he had an older brother who’d been at our school but had run away and been expelled. Some time later Nick ran way too, I can’t remember the details now, did he last a couple of days or just till dinner? I’m pretty sure he ended up at his parents’ place, near Amersham

In general, though, Nick coped pretty well with school. He soon had a gang around him He had that quality then, that he continued to have through the time I knew him, which meant people always wanted to be around him. It was only partly that he was funny, which he certainly was, but it was more that he was himself in a way that few of us are. He didn’t care what people thought of him, and as a result people loved him. Nick was just a completely original person and that originality fed whoever was in his circle.

Strangely, considering that Nick was probably most sociable person I ever met, his ambition back then was to become a lighthouse keeper, inspired by a Van Der Graaf Generator track called a Plague of Lighthouse Keepers, or something like that. At fourteen he went to see the school careers master and asked him to find out how one went about entering such an occupation. The careers master was delighted by the challenge, surrounded as he was by the sons of chartered accountants who didn’t need anyone to tell them that they were going to be chartered accountants too, and soon got Nick an application form. Nick filled it in, sent it off, and was mortified to receive a reply telling him he had to be twenty-one before he could be considered. Which really only left one option, career wise.

At first the knowledge that Nick played the drums was a bit imaginary: he didn’t turn up at school with a kit. It was only when I went to stay with him in Amersham, during the holidays, that I realised how completely a part of Nick the drums were. Right away it was obvious, even at fourteen, that this wasn’t a passing teenage craze: this was what Nick did.

After the first year or so I didn’t see as much of Nick. We were still good friends but he had gathered a posse around him, people who took life a little less seriously than I did, people he could have a laugh with, develop in-jokes and routines and a satiric, surreal private world, all the things you’d see in Earl Brutus twenty years later. And then his brother Sim moved to Bristol with some friends and Nick started to hang out at their flat, playing music and getting into teenage stuff. Our musical tastes too started to drift apart. Punk came along and I embraced it wholeheartedly, tried to convert Nick, who was reluctant, seduced as he was for a while by the muso charms of jazz rock. It was only when I played him Marquee Moon that he started to weaken.

So that Sunday afternoon in the long hot punk rock summer of 77 was not exactly typical. Why did we go in search of PG, the former Genesis figurehead who’d just released his first solo album? Well I’ve never known boredom quite as intense as that we experienced on Sunday afternoons in a 1970s boarding school. So Nick came up with the plan. His enthusiasm for Genesis was still bordering on the obsessional and he’d discovered that Peter Gabriel was living outside Bath, somewhere near a place called Solsbury Hill (it’s possible, of course, that he simply listened to the song Solsbury Hill and took it from there). So why didn’t we go and find his house, he suggested? Well, why not indeed?

We took a train to Bath. Found a bus that took us out to the nearby village of Batheaston and walked towards Solsbury Hill. After a little while we saw a house on our left that looked promising. On the front door that was a note that said ‘Ant - Gone to play tennis back around 3 - Peter.’ Ah. We rang on the door just to make sure. No reply. Nick led the way round the side of the house to the garden. There was a lawn and there was a patio door that led into the living room of the house, and it was open. We walked in. And so for the first and last time in my life I found myself an uninvited guest in a stranger’s house.

The living room was full of records and tapes and music stuff. That was as far as I got. I surveyed his tape collection and was chuffed to see that he had Marquee Moon in his collection, but chickened out of going any further into the house. Nick was more adventurous, went off to explore. I suspect he took some small souvenir. I know he wrote down Gabriel’s phone number because the following week he phoned up and spoke to an unsurprisingly perturbed Mr. Gabriel. I’m not sure what Nick was hoping for - an invitation to join Gabriel’s new band maybe? But looking back I think the significance of the trip for both of us was to prove to ourselves that these people we admired really existed, lived in the same world as us, so that maybe one day we too could live in that world of people who made music and wrote books, and not in the world of the children of chartered accountants.

We both left school in the summer of 78, and for the next few years we saw each other intermittently. We shared a flat in London during the winter of 1981/2 .Then Nick joined Clock DVA and moved to Sheffield, his career as a professional musician properly under way. It took me a few more years to make any kind of mark as a writer but I got there in the end.

Our meetings became more and more sporadic. We saw a bit of each other round the turn of the nineties in when I lived in Kensal Rise: our lives had gone in different directions, if sometimes parallel ones. But while I didn’t see that much of Nick it was always a comfort and an inspiration to know that he was out there being himself, following his path. The last time I saw him he told me about his new band Earl Brutus, in which he was to come out from behind the drums. I regret very much that I never saw them play. On one level this was because I moved back to my hometown of Cardiff soon after, but really I was happy just to know they existed. Likewise I doubt very much that Nick read any of my books but I remember him coming to my first book launch and I could see how happy he was that I too was on this path of - I can’t think of a way of putting this that isn’t clichéd or sentimental, so here goes – following our dreams. What I’m trying to say is that knowing Nick was out there made me feel better, feel stronger.

And now I have a son who’s sixteen, the age Nick and I were on our housebreaking adventure, and he plays the guitar like Nick used to play the drums, like it’s an extension of him. And I wonder if he’s going to follow the same path, the path of most resistance. And I both hope and fear that he will. And I wish very much that he could have met Nick. Now he never will, but I do believe that Nick’s spirit will still be out there, and may it guide his footsteps, and may we all of us strive to take some part of the joy Nick so naturally took in this precious life of ours.

John Williams

Mojo obituary

Normal Service Will Be Resumed

2008-06-24T20:00:00.008+01:00

Apologies for the irregularity of the posts over the last ten days or so. We have been working away on going over to a website 'proper' - the plan was to have been up on the 16th - but it's proving to be a bigger job than we thought. Now Glastonbury is upon us and not much is gonna happen before mid next week. So, for those of you who appreciate these things, here's a picture of Jakub and his cracking start to the new season. A beautiful female Tench weighing in at 8.8, caught many hours in to a very long session at Osterley Park;

(Wendy took the photo)

Wild China

2008-06-23T18:26:00.003+01:00

One of Caught By The River's favourite writers (and an all round top bloke to boot) is on the BBC tonight and the following three Monday nights. Robert Macfarlane's exploration of China can be heard on Radio 3 tonight at 11pm - will be on listen again tomorrow if yr out and about though... essential listening!

"In Wild China nature and travel writer Robert Macfarlane takes four journeys in Beijing and beyond to find what remains of wild China as the country industrialises at an astonishing pace.

His travels see him take a dip with the ice swimmers of Lake Houhai and explore an un-restored section of the Great Wall where nature is doing what the Mongols never did, by colonising the great man-made fence.

Robert also undertakes a mountain pilgrimage to one of the most dazzling wild places in China – the high peak of Minya Konka."

Click here to hear...

Andrews of Arcadia

2008-06-19T07:27:00.005+01:00

ladies and gentlemen

the hunting horn has been sounded on the heath and the mist has
cleared onto another season of coarse fishing. to celebrate this
glorious occasion i have a small number of john richardson 'specials'
- floats to the uninitiated - remaining and for sale on the stall as
well as the usual array of rods, reels and other oddities. from
baitdroppers to blue duns, from centrepins to silk lines you know
where to go when its a thursday. alas, we are still waiting for the
opening of square pie but in the meantime you can splash out on a st
john bacon sarnie - possibly the greatest bacon sandwich of its time.

i will only excuse those of you going to the riverbank and in the
meantime may a fat chub fill your net.

john andrews

andrews of arcadia
vintage fishing tackle for the soul
spitalfields antiques market
commercial street
london E1
(opposite the ten bells public house)
thursdays 7am - 3pm
07980 274 383
johneandrews@btinternet.com

Country Got Soul

2008-06-18T15:44:00.007+01:00

Our good friends at the record label '1965'(a fine vintage) continue doing what it is they do best - releasing cool records, flicking the finger, smiling for God's sake - by releasing a new record by Larry John Wilson. His first in many years. It's great too. Really good.

Here are the liner notes and below that there's a link to a website that's showing a film relating to the making of the record. Worth a look.

In June of 2007, Jeb Loy Nichols, Jake Housh, and I met up with Larry Jon Wilson in Perdido Key, Florida to do some recording. Larry Jon knew the area well and when he spoke of it in the months prior to the session, it sounded fantastic and lush. The Spanish named the land, meaning “lost key”, when it was founded in the late 1600s. I’m not sure when Larry Jon found himself there for the first time, but he knows the area like a native. And though the days I spent there may not be “lost”, they’re certainly fuzzy.

Throughout the next seven days, Larry Jon recorded about twenty songs. A man-out-of-time, he told stories about hitch-hiking, hustling pool, being a father, gambling, drinking, women, and friendships, focusing mostly on those he shared with Townes Van Zandt and Mickey Newbury. As Jeb and I poked Larry Jon for stories, Jake was quick enough to roll tape when the narratives turned to songs. Larry Jon never gave us any indication when things were about to begin. He would pick up his guitar, crack open a corner of memory, and play without concern that it was being captured. Often times, at the song’s end, he seemed surprised by himself, like he was channeling some feral piece of his past. Many of these songs he wrote, and the ones he didn’t have now been officially “Wilson-ized”. Only the song “Shoulders” was performed twice; the rest of the album is all first and only takes.

This may not be the best way to make records. There was no order, no schedule, no plan. But we pushed a microphone in front of a man with a guitar and now we have a record. Nobody told Larry Jon what songs to sing (not that it would have mattered if we did). Nothing here is showbiz; there’s no “production”, no glitter. And so, these songs sound like music, like Life with a big “L”, like Larry Jon Wilson and no one else.

Jerry DeCicca

go watch the film

Bossa-Filmes

2008-06-18T07:23:00.003+01:00

Jeff

Realise you'll probably be off fishing, but thought you might like to share this. It's a new blog dedicated to old brazilian music videos, and there's some great stuff on there already.

Bosse Filmes

Best wishes

Kevin Pearce

Letter From Arcadia

2008-06-18T06:59:00.005+01:00

click here for the latest LETTER FROM ARCADIA, a regular correspondence between angling's two most original contemporary writers...

Gone Fishing

2008-06-16T02:34:00.000+01:00

Wishing you all a glorious 16th.

Back soon......

2008-06-15T06:37:00.001+01:00

on my behalf, your brothers in the resistance wish you all a memorable june 16th.
tight lips
dp

Just Two More Days Now...

2008-06-14T10:12:00.000+01:00

Anticipation

2008-06-13T11:51:00.002+01:00

Drawn Blanks

2008-06-13T04:59:00.006+01:00

Galleries

Alice Oswald; Dart.

2008-06-12T11:10:00.006+01:00

David Wheatley finds Alice Oswald's river flows smoothly between Hughesian myth and Larkinesque realism, in Dart.

Like Langston Hughes, Alice Oswald has known rivers. After three years recording conversations with people who live and work on the Dart in Devon, she has produced a remarkable homage to it and them, called simply Dart. The poems of Oswald's 1996 debut The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile were full of well-trimmed lyric borders, reflecting her love of gardening, but no proof against the invading power of water, disrupting our human arrangements and losing itself in itself: "the very integer / and shape of water disappears in water".

From its burbling beginnings in Cranmere Pool all the way to the sea, Dart is an attempt to give an outline to that disappearing shape, exploring the balance between the river as wild force of nature and biddable resource. But rivers can be many things simultaneously. Heraclitus thought we couldn't step in the same river twice; Wordsworth saw in the river Duddon not flux but continuity, "what was, and is, and will abide". Most of the time, Eliot writes in "The Dry Salvages", the river is "unhonoured" and "unpropitiated", without ever ceasing to be the "strong brown god" of myth, "sullen, untamed and intractable".

Dart opens with a scene of primal beginnings. An old man of the river lumbers into the poem like Edward Thomas's Lob, and Oswald's constantly shifting metrics take one of their sudden forward surges:

What I love is one foot in front of another. South-south-west and down the contours. I go slipping between Black Ridge and White Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor where echoes can't get out

listen

a

lark

spinning

around

one

note

splitting

and

mending

it

and I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bark, a foal of a river

Oswald prefaces Dart with a list of people she's spoken to about the river, but despite this and marginal notes telling us who says what, "all voices should be read as the river's mutterings". Among the local deities muttering with the river's tongue is the King of the Oakwoods, "who had to be sacrificed to a goddess", a pattern the river repeats on later victims like local bogeyman, Jan Coo, and an unfortunate canoeist. Dart is "old Devonian for oak", and Oswald underlines its sacred associations by mutating "Flamen Dialis", the priest of Zeus, into "Flumen Dialis", his river. The substratum of mythic violence is very Hughesian, and like the river of Ted Hughes's 1983 sequence, River, the Dart can "wash itself of all deaths", though after a drowning Oswald follows the dead man's last thoughts with a respectfully blank page ("silence").

"The water is my only neighbourhood," Sean O'Brien wrote in Downriver, and there is scarcely a line of Dart that does not squelch with riverine ooze. Oswald's delight in the liquid textures of language show how much she has absorbed from the most onomatopoeic of all writers, Joyce. As Tom Paulin has reminded us in a recent essay, water was always central to Joyce's aesthetic. In Ulysses Stephen Dedalus is described as "distrusting aquacities of thought and language", while Mr Bloom is an inveterate "waterlover, drawer of water" and "watercarrier". Hydrophilia wins out in Anna Livia Plurabelle, which Joyce told Arthur Power was "an attempt to subordinate words to the rhythm of water", "the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of" the Liffey. And not just the Liffey: he worked in Oswald's river too, when Anna Livia runs "like a lech to be off like a dart".

Oswald finds a match for Mr Bloom's descriptive rhapsodies in her water abstractor, verifying his calibration records and monitoring for "colour and turbidity". People are forever sifting the Dart or trying to harness its power: tin-extractors, millers washing their wool and making dyes, dairy workers using the water to cool their milk, not to mention its ecosystem of "round streamlined creatures born into vanishing".

Like Wisdom Hely's sandwich-board men in Ulysses, Dart gives the alphabet human form when a swimmer spells out what she is doing by visualising her body as an S, W and M. Also Joycean, and Hopkinsesque, is Oswald's delight in the water music of the Dart's "foundry for sounds", "jabber of pidgin-river", and the springy Devonian of words like "bivvering", "slammicking" and "shrammed".

Not all the Dart is equally inviting for swimmers. Eliot doesn't go into detail about the colour of his "strong brown god", but Oswald properly includes a sewage worker, describing "a rush, a sploosh of sewage, twenty thousand cubic metres being pumped in", overlaying her "sloosh" with the "splash" of all that shit getting dumped in it. From the polluted present she returns to a time "when oak trees were men" and "water was still water", retelling the story of Brutus, grandson of Aeneas, setting sail from Troy for the Dart (a tale that also turns up in David Jones's The Anathemata, a book whose mythic method has much in common with Oswald's).

The river's classical past survives in the names of boats ("Oceanides Atlanta Proserpina Minerva"), combining with the accounts of fishermen, boatbuilders and oyster gatherers to freight every passing tide with memory, "a whole millennium going by in the form of a wave". Joyce's Anna Livia is careworn and weary by the time she reaches the sea, and the Dart exacts its human toll too, with its old river pilots groaning about their arthritis but unrepentant ("tell me another job where you can see the whole sunrise every morning"). In the poem's last lines 20 seals accompany the Dart out into the sea, and Oswald faithfully records its final Protean transformation:

With their grandmother mouths, with their dog-soft eyes, asking

who's this moving in the dark? Me.

This is me, anonymous, water's soliloquy,

all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus,

whoever that is, the shepherd of the seals,

driving my many selves from cave to cave . . .

This is a heartening book for all sorts of reasons. Oswald shows that poetry need not choose between Hughesian deep myth and Larkinesque social realism. Dart frequently combines the two, moving in the same sentence from religious invocation to marketing jabber ("may He pull you out at Littlehempston, at the pumphouse, which is my patch, the world's largest operational Sirofloc plant"). She shows, post-New Generation, that wry ironies and streetwise demotic do not exhaust the avaliable range of tonal and thematic possibilities. She offers, in a word, what too much contemporary poetry forbids itself: ambition.

Oswald joins Ciaran Carson, Iain Sinclair, Hughes and ultimately Joyce himself as one of the great celebrants of the genius loci, the spirit of place, or what the Irish call dinnseanchas, lovingly elaborated topographical lore. According to Stephen Dedalus, Epictetus was "an old gentleman who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water". Oswald has soul in riverfuls.

· David Wheatley is co-editor of Metre magazine.

This article originally ran in http://books.guardian.co.uk/Saturday July 13, 2002

Five Days and Counting...

2008-06-11T10:33:00.005+01:00

Crow and Goose quill floats by John Richardson

Letters From Arcadia

2008-06-11T10:13:00.001+01:00

click here for the latest LETTER FROM ARCADIA, a regular correspondence between angling's two most original contemporary writers...

From Cabaret Voltaire to Curlews

2008-06-10T11:13:00.006+01:00

Chris Watson picks his favourite bird song;

New Order’s Bernard Sumner once explained the inspiration behind his songs: “It’s all about birds isn’t it?” He wasn’t talking about the song thrush or semipalmated sandpiper. It’s difficult to imagine the inspirational but hugely lazy Manc picking up some binoculars and trekking through the woods. But some pop songs really do deal with the feathered mass.
Edwyn Collins has hymned both the blackcap and black-headed gull in his songs. Bert Jansch named an album Avocet - after the elegant pied wading bird of the RSPB logo. Noble, the guitarist with British Sea Power, gave the name The Great Skua to his soaring instrumental on the band’s recent album Do You Like Rock Music? (The great skua, of course, is a ferocious seabird also known as the bonxie and robber bird). But no musician has moved from rock to birdlife quite as impressively Chris Watson. He was once part of the Sheffield avant-dance group Cabaret Voltaire, but Watson has long since moved on to become one of the world’s foremost wildlife sound recordists. In an excellent free birdwatching supplement from The Guardian and Observer, Watson has selected his 10 favourite bird songs:

click here

When Watson talks about the spectral in-flight ‘drumming’ of the snipe and the gorgeous song of the ubiquitous blackbird, it’s perhaps clear this is a man who has surveyed all rock can offer - and found it wanting beside the wonder of the avian world. Anyone who has witnessed the courtship dance of the Slavonian grebe will know that here is display, drama and vocalisation to shame anything you get in the concert hall. With its fierce red eye and outrageous mustard-yellow tufts, the Slav grebe could’ve been the template for Bowie’s Aladdin Sane period. But the grebe didn’t have to daub on red slap or resort to hair dye - and, as far we know, Bowie hasn’t performed while walking on water (or, indeed, learnt to fly).
Read Chris Watson on the melancholy minimalism of the golden plover or the swallow’s “freeform jazz” and it will perhaps become further clear why musicians from Billy Fury to Elbow’s Guy Garvey have been smitten by the music that fills our skies - all around us, unamplified, astonishing.

Roy Wilkinson

Island Life

2008-06-09T12:04:00.001+01:00

Ended up last week on Lundy. 12 miles out into the Bristol Channel, nearer to north Devon than my native South Wales coast, Lundy is a 3 and a half mile long granite lump and was always somewhere that my Dad went on booze cruises back in the day with my Uncle Dennis and assorted pisshead mates. This was back when much of Wales was still dry on a Sunday. The pub on the island, the Marisco Tavern, adhered to no such rules. The only real problem was that for 7 hours of sailing time to get there you got just 2 hours of shore leave. Weirdly, last week when we went, the daytripping twitchers on the boat didn't seem to have the same desperate rush to get up the hill and into the tavern as we did. Their loss. This scan is from the island magazine from back in the 70s. It sums the place up - very England In Particular, very The Wild Places, very very beautiful.

Lundy - hell of a way to go for a pint. (RT)

Seven Days and Counting..

2008-06-09T05:29:00.002+01:00

Andrews of Arcadia

Caught By The Reaper

2008-06-06T14:30:00.008+01:00

Jimmy McGriff, April 3, 1936 - May 24, 2008.

The death of Jimy McGriff this week comes as particularly sad news to those of us who grew up in the 1960s believing that the sound of the Hammond organ was an indispensable element of life's soundtrack. McGriff's passing completes a clean sweep of the decade's big five, following the deaths of Richard "Groove" Holmes in 1991, Brother Jack McDuff in 2001,Big John Patton in 2002 and the most famous of them all,Jimmy Smith, in 2005. (Hard-core Hammond fans might add the names of Roosevelt "Baby Face" Willette, who died as long ago as 1971, and the most original of the lot, Larry Young, who departed in 1978.)
McGriff was the one whose records implanted themselves most deeply in the hearts of soul and R&B fans, not least because you could dance to them. His early hits, notably "All About My Girl" and "I Got a Woman", were issued in the UK on the impeccably hip Sue label, which Guy Stevens -- the disc jockey at the hugely influential Scene club as well as Sue's visionary A&R man -- made a byword for good taste among mods in the early '60s.

Another Sue release, recorded in 1963, was the double-sided "The Last Minute Pts 1 and 2", a deliriously funky piece of work on which McGriff plays both organ and piano. Forty five years later, its relentless chugging groove still makes it sound like the signature tune for the late-night radio show of your dreams.

Richard Williams.

Ten Days and Counting.....

2008-06-06T08:54:00.003+01:00

Avon Calling by John Richardson, The Two Terriers Press

Eleven Days and Counting...

2008-06-05T08:25:00.005+01:00

Andrews of Arcadia, Antique Fishing Tackle & Books, Spitalfields Antique Market, London E1. Thursdays 7.30 - 3pm

Twelve Days and Counting....

2008-06-04T07:21:00.004+01:00

dear jeff

the 16th june. so much has been written about it. below are sheringham's words on the matter and a few other snapshots from arcadia including a john richardson highgate ponds tench float to be used on the very morning.

j

Letters From Arcadia

2008-06-03T19:06:00.001+01:00

click here for the latest LETTER FROM ARCADIA, a regular correspondence between angling's two most original contemporary writers...

Caught By The Reaper

2008-06-03T06:12:00.004+01:00

I've got a story I really want to tell,
About Bo Diddley at the O-K Corral,
Now, Bo Diddley didn't stand no mess,
He wore a gun on his hip and a rose on his chest,

Bo Diddley, December 30, 1928 - June 2, 2008

14 Days and Counting....

2008-06-02T08:32:00.002+01:00

Paul Cook hand-made floats

Notes From Walnut Tree Farm

2008-05-31T14:59:00.006+01:00

"For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakin kept notebooks in which he wrote his daily thoughts, impressions, feelings and observations. Discursive, personal and often impassioned, they reveal the way he saw the world. This book collects the best of these writings, capturing Roger's restless curiosity about the natural and human worlds."

Amazing what you find when you're surfing the net, putting all those things you're meant to be doing off for another hour or two. Due to be published in October this year, "Notes From Walnut Tree Farm" is a posthumous collection of previously unpublished writings from the patron saint of Caught By The River, Roger Deakin.

We're already planning the next skive off work to read it... (RT)

Pleasures Of...

2008-05-30T12:10:00.007+01:00

May

The Shield season 6 on DVD
the Santogold LP
Paul Weller "22 Dreams"
John Head "Crocodiles"
Big Tench
Nuisance Carp
George Plember
350 Miles (An Essex Journey)
Electribe 101 "Talking With Myself" (Knuckles mix)
Cherry Ghost getting an Ivor
Bill Drummond and Chris Watson saying yes
Rocket Science
any song by The Honeys
"Eels with Strings Live At Town Hall"
Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 4
Seth Morgan 'Homeboy'
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss at Wembley Arena
David Kynaston "A World To Build (Austerity Britain 1945 - 48)"
Otter Bright on handpump at The Dog & Duck
opening night at Quo Vadis
Youth Group "Two Sides"
George Orwell "Shooting An Elephant" and other essays
Porno For Pyros "Pets"

The Pleasures Of......May

2008-05-29T08:20:00.010+01:00

By Robert Macfarlane;

"Well now, what have been the multiple pleasures of May? May for me is the month of outdoor swimming: the first time in each year when it's warm enough to swim rather than just to plunge in, screech, and haul out. The month when the lidos open in Cambridge (on Jesus Green and in Emmanuel College). So I spent a weekend in Norfolk, swimming salt (on Holkham Beach, with a wintry bite still to the water, and my two-year-old son hanging round my neck like a sea-monkey) and swimming fresh (a pool in the River Stiffkey under an old hump-backed bridge, just deep enough that I could swim breaststroke and not brush the bottom, and the current just strong enough that I could swim against it and stay in exactly the same place. When I found it, the pool was guarded by a swan, who only ceded it to me, with a hiss, after I asked him six times if he'd mind me swimming
I've also planned a 2-mile river swim from Grantchester to Cambridge, down the River Cam, for a couple of weeks' time. There'll be swimmers from all over the country, and other people manning the support craft (aka punts and kayaks filled with warm clothes and whisky-filled hipflasks). We'll be swimming through the stretch that Virginia Woolf said smelt of 'mint and mud'. Hoping for a hot day, and that the pike of The Cam don't mistake me for a bream.

And I've read Wild Swim, by Kate Rew and Dominick Tyler, which is kind of a gazetteer to some of the best outdoor swims in Britain, but also a passport of a kind into the magical world of wild swimming. I'm biased, I guess, because I wrote the introduction to the book. But then I wrote the introduction because I really liked the book.

Finally, terrestrially, I had an Andy-Goldsworthy-inspired reverie in which I spent an hour or two trying to work out if it would be possible to organise a thirty of my students to pick five or six thousand of the tens of thousands of daisies that have flowered on a vast lawn near my office, and then line all the blossoms up into a sine-wavey curve that would run the length of the lawn. That's how hard academics have to work at this time of year."

Robert Macfarlane has a good attitude. He is a true adventurer and a great writer. We highly reccomend his books, "Mountains
Of The Mind" and "The Wild Places" (out now in hardback, paperback in July) and thank him massively for this contribution.

Lost Lake Found

2008-05-28T12:11:00.003+01:00

Jeff,

Heaven knows where to start about the weekend I've just had, but I suppose the start's a pretty good place.

It was the place I first learnt to fish back in the late 70's, a hidden little pond, formerly a victorian glass dump in the middle of the marsh sandwiched between the Linconshire coast and the Wolds a few miles inland, just off a B road in the middle of nowhere.

My memories of the place are still some of my fondest; keep nets full of roach, perch and the occasional decent bream, fishing sound-tracked by Eric Riddell's steam fairground organ (Eric, a friend of my old mans, ran a steam museum a few hundred yards up the road), the chorus of wood pigeons, coots & moorhens and the utter wildness of the place. With hindsight I was spoilt. I spent most summer weekends at this place between 79-83 yet, even on the most balmy of days, we were rarely troubled by fellow anglers.

I often fished with my older next door neighbour, David 'Didds' Lycett, a rather rotund lad with a penchant for oxford bags, Brutus shirts & polyveldt shoes yet, even at 13, he had an amazing knowledge and aptitude for catching fish. He was was with me when I caught my first pike from an old drain in Ingoldmells, he helped me land my first carp from a pit just outside Addlethorpe & he taught me how to tempt wary roach from tiny cuts using light pole tackle. We spent days at this place catching and learning to love all angling had to offer.

In 1983 my folks moved about 30 miles inland and I lost touch with the place, instead my fishing came courtesy of the rivers & drains around Lincoln, yet as I drifted in and out of angling over the next 20 years I still often remembered this place I loved and learnt to fish. Often I would drift back recalling the catches, but mostly it would simply be a case of remembering the happy times I spent there with my old man and Didds.

In the past twenty years I'd made the odd intentional detour on days out to the coast to look at the place. After I left in '83 I'd heard rumours it had been bought up by an angling club, but by the early 90's the former entrance was blocked by the planting of a line of conifers suggesting that whoever now owned the place had no intention of continuing to run it as a fishery.

Yet, despite the dreaming and feeling that someday I needed to return, it never happened, that is, until this weekend.

Circumstance & fate meant I was within 10 miles of the place, in a caravan with my folks and the kids, and so I decided, after all these years, to return.

I really didn't know what to expect. Ordnance Survey confirmed the place was still there, but beyond that my expectations were muted. To be honest, I'd have been happy to simply see the pond again.

And so I set out, full of nerves, both about what I'd find and simply getting in there. I made 4 passes in the car, worried about the couple of houses that sat on the opposite side of the road, before deciding to park a mile or so away the other end of bridleway.

Armed only with a rod and Barbour pockets stuffed with a reel, a pack of hooks, a couple of floats & weights and a tin of corn I darted in under the conifers to be faced with a wall off twisted ivy, willow and bramble. It really was a case of crawling on hands & knees passing the odd familiar old tree before I came out and was able to view the pond which was sat, still as ever, sporting a huge floating raft of tree blossom.

Ostensibly the place hadn't changed, yet having obviously being unmanaged for the past 20 years or so former swims and paths had been consumed by the gradual creep of willow, nettle & reeds. On first inspection the place, although the absolute picture of the 'lost lake', looked unfishable. Yet, the old path around the lake was still vaguely navigable and I found my way around to one corner, still shaded by a recognisible pair of incongruous Scots Pine trees, from which I was able to fish.

A couple of handfuls of corn later and I was fishing. I've never felt such joy; nostaligia, without doubt, yet I was overjoyed to find the place still alive with fish after all these, neglected, years.

Ater an hour or so of my grain of corn being plucked by a succession of tiddlers (I was cursing I hadn't come armed with a pint of maggots), the float slowly slid under in a manner indicating something a bit bigger. A strike and I knew it was somthing a bit more substantial. An obliging bream of around 2lbs was happy to be beached (I'd come light, without a landing net). A second came a few minutes later followed by a decent-ish roach.

I'm glad I caught yet it really didn't matter. I'd returned to fish my memories and was simply happy to find the place still there, full of fish and even more untouched than I'd left it. Somehow I now feel complete; I'd be happy now never to return, although no doubt I surely will. Maybe next time I'll try and find an easier way in.

Steve

ACA Bulletin

2008-05-27T17:50:00.002+01:00

Two weeks into the ACA's 60th Anniversary Auction, the bids are now starting to roll in. Please take a moment to have a look at some of the wonderful lots and use the simple on-line form if you want to make a bid yourself. The more money we can raise the more we can do to fight those who harm our fishing. As in previous messages, we would be grateful if you let as many people as you can know about it -(auction)- even if they might bid higher than you!

Legal News
The insurers of a Powys farmer have agreed to pay compensation to two angling clubs for polluting a stretch of the River Camlad in June 2005. Despite a previous warning from the Environment Agency, slurry from Lynwood Farm near Churchstoke was released into the Caebitra Brook, itself an important spawning and nursery stream for trout, before making its way into the River Camlad. The pollution caused a fish kill of trout, grayling and bullheads, as well as wiping out invertebrate populations - a crucial source of food for the surviving fish. The civil case was brought against the farmer by the ACA on behalf of two angling clubs whose waters were affected, the Pheasant Tail Flyfishers and the Camlad Fly Fishers. According to the EA, it is likely that fish numbers in this once healthy river will take several years to recover. Despite this, the Agency failed to bring a criminal prosecution for the pollution.

Progress has also been made on the River Derwent in Derbyshire, where a mine- tailings lagoon containing waste contaminated with heavy metals burst in January 2007. An EA fisheries scientist produced a report soon after the event suggesting that action was needed to minimise the damage caused and that there should be proper investigation and monitoring of the heavy metals in the sediment deposited in the river. Despite this, the EA has carried out very few of the recommendations of its own report. The limited and flawed sampling that has taken place has forced the ACA to instruct its own expert on behalf of the member clubs affected. Initial results demonstrate that the levels of heavy metals in inverabrate samples - particularly lead - are high. We are awaiting the trial remediation work, which is probably going to take place in June - almost 18 months after the pollution.

Elsewhere, following pressure from the ACA and the Pickering Fishery Association, the EA has confirmed that funding has been secured to carry out a 12 month programme of continuous water quality monitoring to assess the impact of Costa and Willowdene fish farms and Pickering sewage treatment works on Costa Beck in North Yorkshire.

Finally on the legal front, representatives from the ACA, WWF and RSPB met this week to discuss the potential for using legal tools to press for proper implementation of the Water Framework Directive. Please watch this space....

Annual Report Misprint
The latest Annual Report should have arrived with members this week. We would, however, like to point out an error on the 'Your Membership' section on page 51, which states that there is a proxy voting form enclosed regarding a proposed amendment to the rules of the ACA. This paragraph was printed in error: there will be no proposed amendment to the rules at the AGM and any such changes will be proposed in the autumn when more detailed information about angling unity will be available. Our apologies for any confusion this may have caused.

Our work is only possible because of the support and generosity of our members. Thank you to all those who support us - please encourage all your friends to join up now!

With best wishes from everyone at the ACA

Letters From Arcadia

2008-05-26T16:36:00.002+01:00

click here for the latest LETTER FROM ARCADIA, a regular correspondence between angling's two most original contemporary writers...

Lush Life

2008-05-26T14:37:00.007+01:00

Found out this morning that one of my favorite writers, Richard Price, has a new novel just out in the States.

Reasons I love Richard Price; his books, "The Wanderers" - '50's teenage street life in The Bronx as soundtracked by Dion DiMucci. Made into a great film by Philip Kaufman. Plus, "Clockers", 80's NJ projects and the crack life, set to a ghetto soundtrack. Awesome book and a pretty good film by Spike Lee. Writing for 'The Wire'; a couple of killer episodes in series' three & four.

I trawled the web for reviews of the book and the word is good. This write up, below, is taken from the Rocky Mountain News website and is written by Clayton Moore;

(pic by Sara Krulwich)

Richard Price and the Lush Life;

The more things change, the more they stay the same - even in the evolving heart of Manhattan.

That's just one of the lessons to be learned in Lush Life, Richard Price's caustic fable of murder, injustice and culture clashes in the urban jungles of the Lower East Side.

Like the misanthropes who populate his novels, including his newest, Price remains just below the surface world. Not only is he responsible for celebrated screenwriting from The Color of Money to HBO's The Wire, he's had a very respectable career as a novelist, fictionalizing his Bronx adolescence in The Wanderers and crafting the crack opera Clockers into a modern crime classic. More recent novels Freedomland and Samaritan found him waxing poetic on racial tensions in America, using New Jersey as his microcosm.

I interviewed the author not long ago and found Price even more fascinated with his new backdrop, a place he likens to an overabundant garden. "I don't want to sound like the United Nations, but this place is a riot of people," he said. "It's as close to Byzantium as you could ask for."

Here's the pitch on the new novel: During a drunken evening on the town, three lads are confronted by a pair of brazen but unsteady assailants. Eric Cash, 35, is a glossy representative of the new inhabitants of a very old neighborhood. He brays to the world that he's a multihyphenate artistic sort but has spent the past few years skimming the take as maitre d' at upscale restaurants.

Fellow hipster Steve Boulware is so dead drunk that he has to be propped up between Cash and handsome young bartender Ike Marcus. When someone sticks a gun in his face, Ike goes off, telling his murderers, "Not tonight, my man."

Bang, he's dead, and the offenders are gone before his last heartbeat.

At least that's Eric's version of events, one which jaundiced homicide detective Matty Clark and his ambitious partner, Yolanda Bello, find to be less than clear-cut, especially as conflicting facts come spilling out. Cash swears he called 911, but his cell phone is a blank, not to mention he once owned a gun whose current whereabouts are unknown. A pair of "eyewits" claims there were no assailants and that the trio turned on each other.

Not only is Eric not getting much sympathy from the cops, he and his ilk don't sway much sympathy from the ethnic pioneers - the entrenched populations of Chinese, blacks, Latinos and Orthodox Jews - around whom these new immigrants revolve like asteroids in a terminal orbit. Given enough momentum, there's bound to be a confrontation sooner or later, which comes as a surprise to guys like Eric.

"Bunch of middle-aged, talentless artistes complaining about the very people who made them rich," scoffs Eric's boss, old-school restaurateur Harry Steele. "Sitting there saying they have a right to perfect peace and quiet in their own neighborhood . . . No. You don't. This is New York."

And there's Price's real subject in all its dilapidated glory: an island of contradictions that still represents both wasteland and Promised Land to its denizens, depending on where they're standing at the time. The false resurrection of urban renewal, the bleak cells of the jail known as "The Tombs," the punk boutiques and overpriced party spaces are all painted accurately and populated with well-realized characters. Along the way, Price also captures the paradoxes that plague each character and, in doing so, makes them an integral part of his complicated landscape.

Matty Clark's ferocious drive to find the answers in Ike's murder stand in stark contrast to his role as failed father to children he refers to as "the big one" and "the other one." Yolanda butters up Eric, trying to get him to spill his guts, and then turns viciously on him with murderous accusations.

Against Eric's melodramatic version of events, the icy back story of gang shooters interlaced with Clark's brooding investigation seems almost mundane by comparison.

All of this is unsentimental stuff, portrayed with unflinching bluntness and infused with Price's watermark: the blistering and deeply convincing dialogue that makes a reader believe he's eavesdropping on another reality.

The funny thing is that everyone in the book - be it the new bohemians populating the city's cafes, the cops delving into a commonplace crime, the project orphans trying to scrape some dignity or the surviving victims of this accidental trespass - has his own act, complete with a mask firmly in place at all times.

But the consequences of their inadvertent collisions are all too real. Just ask Eric, who ends up with nobody on his side, facing the music in ways he couldn't have imagined. "The people of this city are rubberneckers," he thinks, "and I'm the car crash."

This is Price's urban realism stripped to its most basic, and his prose is at its leanest and meanest in years. While wryly satirizing the newly gentrified atmosphere of Lower Manhattan in a post 9-11 world, Price also pays tribute to its complicated history and capably fashions a very typical crime drama.

This story might be the proverbial car crash, but just like a real one, good luck trying to avert your eyes.

Clayton Moore. (check his blog, 'Bang')

Alan Sillitoe

2008-05-24T06:30:00.006+01:00

from The Guardian

words; John Crace, Photo; Eamonn McCabe

There's a great story about Alan Sillitoe that's always done the rounds. He's hanging out in Mallorca in the late 50s, writing six or seven unpublished novels, when he asks fellow expat Robert Graves to do him a favour and read his latest effort. The distinguished writer duly obliges and offers Sillitoe five terse words of advice. Stick to what you know. Bish-bosh, Sillitoe mines his Nottingham roots and launches his career with Saturday Night, Sunday Morning - one of the defining books of the postwar era.

Like many great stories, though, it's not quite true. "I had actually written a number of short stories based in Nottingham before Robert made that suggestion," Sillitoe laughs, "and when he did I just thought, 'Bugger this, what does he know? Why should I take any notice of him just because he's old and famous?' It was only two years later, when I was sitting under an olive tree working on The Adventures of Arthur Seaton [the book that would become Saturday Night, Sunday Morning] that I decided to pour in some of the incidents from the short stories to give the narrative more life."

But what the hell? The first version is so much neater, so let's go with that. "If anyone should be able to edit their own life it's a writer," he says. "So I'm happy to rewrite my history. Anything to make the story more fun and interesting." It's the kind of advice that creative writing students at Ruskin College might well be hearing a great deal more of in the near future now that Sillitoe has been asked to give guest lectures at the Oxford college. And it will be strictly lecturing, he is quick to point out. "I don't have the time to go help knock students' unpublished novels into shape."

Still driven

Sillitoe was 80 in March, but his only concession to growing older has been to give up smoking, and even then he's reserving the right to take it up again. He kicks-starts each day with the 15-minute exercise regime of press ups and jumps he learned in the RAF more than 60 years ago - "Why on earth would I want to stop?" - and he still works with much the same intensity he always has. At an age when most people are winding down, he's still driven by the inner voice that tells him that a day not spent writing is a day wasted.

These days he can remember the titles of other people's books rather better than his own. There again, with more than 50 novels, plays and collections of poetry to his name, it would be probably more surprising if he could. Even so, he's playing it safe at the moment and the manuscript of his current novel is lying, untitled, on the desk of his west London flat. He's not happy with it yet and has set himself a deadline of the end of the year to finish it; nor is he prepared to say too much about it beyond that it's set in Nottingham in the present day. But it's clearly in some sort of shape as it's type-written and he always writes the first few drafts by hand - not out of some sentimental attachment to the past but out of practical necessity. "I need to write at the same speed I can think," he says. "By hand, I write at 22 words per minute, while I type - [another hangover from his RAF training] at 90 words per minute. Which is far too quick."

He's big on such details. Sillitoe trained as a wireless operator in the war and still practises taking Morse code every day. He's got a machine that generates code on his desk, and at night sometimes scans the airwaves: "There's far less traffic than there used to be, but you can find it if you look. There's a French station that broadcasts a poetry magazine in Morse. It starts slowly every Monday and speeds up towards the end of the week; I guess it's their way of keeping wireless operators in training in case the computer system collapses. For me, it's just a kind of therapy."

Sillitoe readily admits that it's an unusual way to pass the time, but he's never been that bothered about what others might think. However, he does worry about what he has to pass on to Ruskin students. "I've really only got one story," he shrugs, "and that's mine; I'm not sure that I can tell anyone else how to write. About 20 years ago an American university asked me to fill out a 50-page questionnaire on the creative process. I didn't know what to say and was tempted to write any old crap and sign it Virginia Woolf. Then I thought, fuck it, that's just childish, so I didn't bother. I can't make those kind of generalisations."

But he can make practical suggestions. His first is to read everything you can. The second is to read yet more. He spent five years in the early 50s devouring anything he could get his hands on, from Plato and Aristophanes up to Mailer and Salinger. "How else are you going to get a feeling for language?" he says. "And besides, you don't want to waste years writing War and Peace only to find it's already been written." For Sillitoe, these five years were a way of filling in the gaps in a formal education that had ended when he was 14; so there's a touching symmetry that towards the end of his career - even he would have to concede that - he's chosen Ruskin, a college dedicated to giving working-class adults a second bite at education, as the place to pass on what he's learned.

Fear and chaos

Sillitoe was born in Nottingham in 1928. His father worked in the local Raleigh bicycle factory. Money was tight, and his home life was both chaotic and frightening, with Sillitoe often left as a helpless spectator while his father beat up his mother. His only line of escape was to withdraw within himself.

"I was sent to the local infants school, staffed by pale, etiolated female teachers whose boyfriends had all been slaughtered on the Somme," he recalls, "and each day one of them would read out loud to us from the King James Bible. I don't think anything much sank in, but I just loved listening to the sound of the words."

In a characteristically un-PC turn of phrase, he adds that his mother then got him into a school for "subnormal" children. "She'd heard that the kids who went there got much better food than at other schools," he smiles, "and she wanted to make sure I got plenty to eat. Eventually, though, it dawned on everyone that I wasn't actually learning very much and I was moved to a junior boys school."

Imagined worlds

Here lessons were mainly spelling and tables tests. He loved it. "It was somehow quite beautiful," he says. "I loved the clarity of it, the knowing that something was either right or wrong. Getting things right meant that your brain was working."

It also gave him one of the few measures of control in a childhood that was otherwise chaotic, and once he could read and spell he was free to explore the imagined worlds of Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard as well as start creating his own. He had his first run-in with the censors at 12. "My mother found a story I had written in a notebook about my cousins being caught thieving after they deserted from the army, and she ripped it up and told me I shouldn't be writing that kind of stuff." Was he pissed off about this? "Well, yes, but it was a comparatively gentle act of censorship in comparison with what was to follow with the film script and play of Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, where I had to make the abortion unsuccessful. The authorities hated the new generation of working-class realism, but they couldn't stop it."

It was his grandmother who spotted that Sillitoe was bright, and at her suggestion he sat the 11-plus for Nottingham high school. And failed it. Twice. "Not many writers can claim that honour," he adds proudly. So instead of going to the grammar school, he went off to the local secondary knowing that his education was going to finish when he was 14. "It didn't feel like that big a deal," he shrugs. "It's what happened and I wasn't that disappointed. Besides, there was a war on and all I really wanted to do was join the RAF."

Sense of regret

There were a few years before he was old enough to do that, and when he was 14 he was taken on at the Raleigh factory and enjoyed the feeling of having money of his own. His father told him he was mad when he signed up with the Air Training Corps at 17 - "you could enlist with them a year earlier than with the RAF" - but all he wanted to do was become a navigator and drop bombs on Germany.

The war ended before he got his chance, and he admits feeling ambivalent on hearing the fighting was over. "I'm fairly sure I'd have been one of those who were killed if it had continued. But I couldn't help feeling a sense of regret at having missed out on something important." What he did get was a two-year posting to Malaya, and it was on his return to England in 1948 that his life changed.

He'd been planning to join the Canadian air force - "you could earn twice as much over there" - and he'd travelled up to Liverpool for his final medical ("they wanted to check you were in the same shape as when you signed up") before getting discharged from the RAF. Instead of getting a clean bill of health, he was told he had TB - "some bastard must have coughed over me" - and he was packed off to the RAF hospital in Wiltshire for nine months before being sent home on a pension of £5 per week.

The money gave him the freedom to do exactly what he wanted. And, with the American poet, Ruth Fainlight, who would later become his wife, he upped sticks for the south of France. "I was just desperate to get away from England," he says. "Everything was so grey, so hard. There was still rationing in England and I can remember passing through Paris en route to Menton and being amazed by all the food on sale in the shops."

On the move

He didn't last long in France. But then he didn't last that long in any one particular place, as he and Fainlight were forever on the move, finding cheaper places to stay and meeting new friends. The only constant was reading and writing, and in 1959 Sillitoe finally hit gold with Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. He found it slightly odd to find himself lumped in with the Angry Young Men group of writers as he'd spent most of the previous nine years sunning himself abroad, but otherwise fame left him somewhat unfazed.

"I was doing what I wanted," he insists, "and nothing was going to get in the way of that. A Hollywood studio offered me £50,000 to write a film script after the success of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and I thought about it for a bit and then told them to fuck off. I even moved to Tangiers when the film came out as I didn't want to get caught up in all the hype."

Sillitoe has been writing and moving with the same restless energy ever since. And there's little sign of him letting up. So what final piece of advice would he offer wannabe writers? He thinks for a moment. "Make as much time for yourself as you can," he says eventually. "Go on the dole, pretend to go off sick from work, steal or borrow off of your parents; anything that will buy you time."

"I'm not sure we can suggest that kind of thing in the Guardian," I reply.

"OK," he demurs. "Then just tell them to use their imagination."

It sounds as good a place to start as any. And to end.

Curriculum vitae

Age: 80

Job: Writer, guest lecturer, Ruskin College

Selected books: Saturday Night, Sunday Morning; The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; A Man of His Time

Likes: taking Morse code, reading

Dislikes: present Labour government. 'I've voted Labour all my life but I couldn't bring myself to do so this time. They are incompetent and want too much control. I abstained instead.'

Married with two children

(CBTR thanks to Mathew Clayton)

Raising Sand Live

2008-05-23T09:46:00.007+01:00

For a while back there, I worried that I was alone last year in wishing that Robert Plant would knit off the Zeppelin reunion and get himself out on the road with Alison Krauss and T Bone Burnett. On the evidence of a gig I recently witnessed, I very much doubt I was. For two hours, a sold out, 12,000 capacity Wembley Arena was somehow made to feel like an intimate club while one of the biggest rock ‘n’ roll stars on the planet was humbled by his fellow players to the point of adoring silence. Plant & Krauss’s “Raising Sand” album, released towards the end of last year, was one of those unexpected curveball records, the ones that take you entirely by stealth, the ones that come along once every few years and take up permanent residence on your stereo. A selection of covers produced by T Bone Burnett (described by Plant onstage as “a man who has produced so many beautiful records, overseen soundtracks and done lots of drugs”), “Raising Sand” is the kind of record that people who’ve been in the game for years (check Prince, Bowie, The Stones…) just don’t seem to make – and, really, why would they bother? It’s a record imbibed with bright eyed passion, a fire even. As a set of covers, mainly obscure, it mines the very coal face of Americana, of early rock ‘n’ roll, of the blues, of country. Really, you can't imagine the bank manager thinking that the Mothership is being dusted off for a global jaunt then hearing about this record and sparking up a fat Cuban in celebration.

So, six months after the release and the record is taken on the road in the face of legions of angry Zeppelin fans, feeling like they’ve been robbed of their birthright by Plant’s decision to explore a very different set of waters. That's quite a lot of stoney faced rockers with a large chip on the shoulder about what they're denied. You can imagine the rehearsals for the gigs and the old Tony Soprano maxim coming to the band's minds “You’d better come heavy or don’t come at all.” The point at which the band lay waste to Zep’s “Black Dog”, with an overdriven, squalling fiddle taking the place of the guitar solo, you sense that the band have risen to the challenge of appeasing Plant’s core fanbase and then decided to see if they can fuck with their heads a little. The music is a perfect storm of noise – bluegrass, pure country, four-piece harmonies, fiddle solos that sound like Jimmy Page going crackers at the Grand Ole Opry. At points, it’s pure New Orleans voodoo up there – I mean, there are two dudes in the band who look like Dr John which can only add a pure menacing Gris Gris effect. The Black Lodge nightclub in Twin Peaks also springs to mind, the kind of band you might witness in a spooky, dusty off-the-beaten track kind of clubhouse. When playing the Townes Van Zanzt song “Nothing”, Plant describes the lyrics as “a profound piece of pain”, then proceeds to go at it with the full force vocal onslaught you’d normally see reserved for galloping hair metal music. This - you think - this is special.

What’s really most surprising about the pairing is how much Plant’s voice is an eerily symbiotic foil to Krauss’s and vice versa. It’s also touching to see how respectful he is of her voice. A four song section where Krauss takes the lead produces the most jaw dropping moment, the “Oh Brother Where Are Thou” stand-out “Down To The River To Pray”, performed accapella with a 3 piece back up, including Plant, who keeps a safe minimal distance, huddled round one microphone with two band members, lost in the moment. This really couldn’t be any further from hammering out “Kashmir” at Knebworth if it tried. Add to that “The Battle Of Evermore” which manages to fuse a deep soul country soul to the late ‘60’s folk rock movement, with Krauss taking on Sandy Denny’s backing vocal and you’ve just witnessed something pretty magical.

The rumours abound that with this tour out of the way, Zeppelin will get back on the road and show the current generation how it’s really done, that Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones are waiting in the wings with a dry towel and a pocket full of cheques for amounts that could eradicate world hunger. More encouraging for me though was the recent interview with Plant & Krauss where they talked about continuing this project, possibly with an album of songs written by them and the current band, exploring fully the sound they're creating. Call me old fashioned (I mean pre-Zeppelin, pre-rock 'n' roll old fashioned) but that really is something to get excited about…

Robin Turner

Guilt Free Beer

2008-05-21T09:47:00.008+01:00

Been a while since we've posted a 'Caught By The Liver' so here goes...

Much as I try to live my life as eco-consciously as possible, annoyingly there's always a concession to be made when it comes to beer, and trying to work out the air miles (beer miles?) that a bottle of Little Creatures Pale has clocked up on it's way over from Western Australia or an Anchor Steam has notched up whilst winging it's hoppy way from San Fran is enough to turn anyone to drink (well, that's my excuse anyway). So, tipping the balance back ever so slightly and helping the planet pint by pint is Adnam' new East Green beer.

Housed in an innovative lightweight bottle, proudly Carbon Neutral (they offset any emissions made in the bottling process) & pesticide free, East Green is another great beer to add to the Southwold brewery's small but perfectly formed list, a 4.3% golden ale that made for a very fine Saturday afternoon 'take the edge off last night' drink. To paraphrase the great man Tom Sheehan, "very quaffable". If you happen to be in Southwold, Adnams deliver all their beer by horse and cart round the town, so the only emission there is likely to be a little equine methane. (RT)

Currently available in Tesco or online from Adnams

Pistol Shrimp & Water Song

2008-05-21T05:19:00.012+01:00

WATER SONG

This is a exciting and immersive composition based on recordings by Chris Watson, who is arguably Britain's leading wildlife sound recordist.

Water Song captures the rhythmic beat of individual drops seeping through cracks and dripping off stalactites in the glow worms caves of Waitomo in New Zealand, the chattering gurgle of a mountain stream, to the underwater snap, crackle and pop of Pistol Shrimps, the percussive patter of raindrops tumbling down a drainpipe, the immersive surge of waves across a beach on the Galapagos islands, the powerful creaks and groans inside Vatnajokull, a vast glacier in Icelandic and the almost deafening roar of a waterfall.

Alongside this unique composition, Chris explains what first attracted him to the sounds of water, and how this fascination has developed. He describes some of his recording techniques, the astonishing diversity and quality of sounds he has captured and the emotional experience of tuning in to this watery world; from immersive and tranquil rhythms to deafening and terrifying sounds. It's "the music of another medium", he says.

Over the years, Chris has become increasingly fascinated by the quality, depth and diversity of sounds produced by water - from single drops, to rivulets, brooks and streams, ice sheets and glaciers to oceans and waterfalls.

Listen here

Those were the words of BBC Radio 4, where Water Song was first broadcast in 2006. I first heard it when it was repeated last year and I've been meaning to post this link ever since. I love listening to it, I listen to this and Roger Deakin's "Cigarette On The Waveney" a lot. Particularly on rainy days. I think, the reason I haven't posted it earlier is because I wanted to find out a bit more about the man who made it. The BBC blurb is alright, it tells you that he is an intersting fella who thinks a bit differently but I thought I'd try and find out more. So, one night, a few months ago, it was a Monday, I remember, I'm watching TV with my kids. We are watching a recording of the previous nights David Attenborough adventure and as the end credits roll, I see Chris Watson listed as sound recordist. That reminds me, go find out more, the Water Song guy. Credits finish and we turn over to the telly proper, BBC 1, Bill Oddie in a boat, on a lake. He isn't alone, he's got a guy with him who is putting microphones under the water. I knew that was Chris, it had to be, it was "one of those things".

A couple of weeks later and I'm talking to a friend of mine who works with the band Sigur Ros. He gives me a DVD copy of a film that they have made. I read the credits and there's Chris again. So, I bring this up with Paul, my mate, and he tells me that "yes, Chris contributed a recording of glaciers colliding". This guy is interesting, I said. "He is. You know he was in Cabaret Voltaire don't you?" Paul said. "This gets better" I replied.

Cabaret Voltaire formed in Sheffield in 1972. There were three of them until Chris left in 1982. I would have seen Chris on stage, performing with them at the Sandpiper club in Nottingham in 1978. I've only just remembered that. The Cabs, as we called them, were great.They recorded for Rough Trade and Factory. These days they get called "electro pioneers" . I'd not heard anything like them before. They were into Burroughs and Ballard and The Stooges and Delia Derbyshire (I'm guessing here). "Sound" was very interesting to them.

So, that was a surprise. Even bigger surprises were to come a couple of months later.

Chris is on the wish list for our book, our anthology of writing on rivers. Of course he is. I get his phone number and give him a call. We talk. I hurriedly try to explain who I am and why I'm calling; "blog, book, interview, fishing, rivers...". "Sounds interesting" he says, sounds like he means it too. "Do you know of a film maker called Hugh Miles? I did the sound on a series of programmes for him a while back". Surely not. 'A Passion For Angling', it was called". Next we are on to Roger Deakin. I explain that our book is gonna be the same format as RD's "Wildwood". Chris knew Roger. He did the sound recording for the great Radio 4 broadcasts, 'The House' and 'The Garden' (also, see post of 28 December) and my favourite, 'Cigarette On The Waveney'.......

So, Chris is a hopeful for the book but didn't have time to meet for an interview as he was just off to The Cairngorms for Springwatch. But talking to him really lifted my spirits. This guy who has been involved in our Holy Grails made me very happy. That in itself would have been enough, but instead the week got dafter...... but more on that later. (JB)

Chris Watson website

Letters From Arcadia

2008-05-20T09:07:00.004+01:00

click here for the latest LETTER FROM ARCADIA, a regular correspondence between angling's two most original contemporary writers...

Thought For The Week

2008-05-18T14:51:00.005+01:00

I like this quote. It was given to the writer Sean O' Hagen by the psychologist and author Adam Phillips, when he asked him what would be the single thing that might make us more content in our ever accelerating culture.....

"We need to find the time to daydream and be bored, and to see that, too, as a part of our creativity. We need, as it were, to find the time to waste time without worrying about the consequences".

(I came across it in Seans piece on My Bloody Valentine in todays Observer Music Monthly.)

ACA Bulletin

2008-05-17T05:10:00.003+01:00

Starting today, the ACA is launching its special 60th anniversary fund raising auction. Over 140 fantastic lots, generously donated by our supporters, are now available for you to bid for via our website and there are full details in our latest Annual Report, which will be with you in the next week. There are some fantastic items in several categories - guided fishing trips with high profile anglers, coarse and game fishing all over the UK, coarse and game tackle, art and literature. Much of the fishing on offer is on private rivers and lakes giving you the chance to fish waters that would not be available otherwise. Guide prices range from £10 to £900 so there should be something for everyone. Please remember this auction is to raise funds to help us to continue to fight those who damage our fishing, it's not a bargain hunt!

The auction operates on a sealed bid basis, ending July 16th. If you see something from the catalogue of lots that interests you, you can bid the maximum you would be prepared to pay for that lot. If your bid is the highest on the closing date (July 16th) you win that lot but you only have to pay £5 more than the next highest bid, rather than the full amount of your original bid. If two maximum bids are the same, the first bidder wins, so get in quick! You can make bids directly through the form on the website or by posting the form from the Annual Report back to us.

Please send this e-mail to as many anglers as you can to publicise the auction far and wide.

Good luck and happy bidding!

About the ACA.......

In 1948, backed by funds of just £200, a new pollution fighting body fought its very first case in Britain and won! Known then as the Anglers' Co-operative Association, it was a pioneering organisation founded by John Eastwood, after whom we have named our current headquarters in Leominster, Herefordshire.

Three years later, the newly-formed ACA forced a city corporation to spend £1.8m - worth £30 million at today's prices - on a new sewage works to prevent pollution. John Eastwood showed remarkable vision and determination by using the common law to stop pollution and to win compensation for anglers when it occurred.

Since that daring start, the ACA has brought thousands of cases to a successful conclusion, recovering millions of pounds for those affected by pollution. We are a powerful deterrent and we make a real difference to the quality of watercourses and lakes in the UK. Anyone who enjoys aquatic wildlife benefits from our work, as ultimately do all of us who drink tap water!

In 1994, the Anglers' Co-operative Association changed its name to the Anglers' Conservation Association to reflect more accurately the valuable work it does conserving and protecting our rivers, lakes and streams.

Today's ACA, with its highly professional staff, takes on all polluters and others who would damage fisheries from the largest multinational corporations to one-man fly-tipping operations.

If necessary, the ACA will pursue cases all the way to the House of Lords. In its entire history, the ACA has only lost three cases - a record second to none. Such is its reputation that most cases are settled out of court, with defendants being made to pay compensation to enable polluted waters to be cleaned up, restocked and restored.

Today, no stream, river or lake can be completely free from the threat of pollution or other harm. No organisation fights that threat as single-mindedly or effectively as the ACA.

If you want to support us, please click here to join up

Same Old Faces, Same Old Faces

2008-05-16T07:45:00.007+01:00

We've had a great response to Mark Hodkinson's piece on Barry Hines ("German Bight", May 7th), including this great clip sent in by Steve Philips. Congratulations are due to Steve for landing his first carp in six years with a 14lb common from an Oxfordshire estate lake, yesterday. I should add that Steve is neither crap nor obsessed with gudgeon, and that for most of those six years, his gear was impounded due to being caught in the crossfire of the Bedford vs. Bedford war.

Numero Group - A Small Gesture.

2008-05-15T06:17:00.015+01:00

Over recent months I’ve become a big fan of Alan Furst's entertainments. The series of stories set in and around the Second World War, Paris and what was known as middle Europe. They’re wonderfully romantic romps, filled with subterfuge, solitude, sabotage and espionage. Small people with big ideas, fighting back against the fascist threat, specifically, and the authoritarianism of the Russians, additionally. Unexpected bravery of everyday people. Stateless souls making small gestures.
One of the great things about Furst’s books is the attention to detail. His obvious passion for and knowledge of the era. He can picture him curled up, ploughing through another history of Rumanian diplomacy, soaking up the detail. And this all comes through in the writing. The oh so casual deliberateness of the references. A Joseph Roth mention here and there. The nod to Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy. A wink in the direction of Sartre and Camus. I like that sort of thing. I like colour. I’m the sort of person who might freeze frame a film to study what’s on someone’s bookshelves or what records are piled up here and there.
I don’t know if this is specific, but I always sense Furst's characters place special significance on small objects. The monogrammed hankie. The cigarette case salvaged from a fire. The leather bound book rescued while running from a room. That these objects evoke special things, people, moments. Like the old story of the deck of cards helping a soldier pray or meditate. And I was just thinking that if I grabbed that pile of CDs issued by the Numero Group I would have just about everything I could need to remind me what’s so special about music, and why this life can make you feel about ten mile high and as low as can be.

Since I guess 2004 the Numero Group has been steadily releasing a series of records that are, well, wonderfully romantic. In this they are far from unique. Where the Numero guys excel however is in the attention to detail. They are fans. They are collectors. They are passionate. And they understand that this thing we love is about more than the music. It’s about the feel of things, the look of things, the whole thing. The packaging, the sleeve notes, the little things that make a difference. Looking at the 15 Numero Group CDs on my shelf, they look good to me. If I saw 15 Numero Group CDs on someone’s shelf I would like that person. I would instinctively trust that person.
So what makes the Numero releases so special? Apart from the contagious zeal of missionaries and visionaries, well, there’s the context. The Numero folk, they’ve been running a series called Eccentric Soul. For that alone you have to love them. They have single handedly reclaimed the word eccentric. Freeing eccentricity from the world of whimsy and restoring the meaning of irregularity and off-centre. Left field. These eccentric soul stories are tales of chancers, lovers, dreamers, schemers, back in ‘60s/’70s America. But it’s a timeless tale, like the music. And then there’s the Cult Cargo series, giving a glimpse into how music is refracted as it travels the globe, and how each twist, each variation, adds something unique. Funk, calypso, reggae, soul. Whatever. To hell with purity. A creed the Numero guys firmly believe in. Their catalogue has some wonderful deviations beyond the funk and soul into folk, power pop, and what not. And yet if I was to pick a favourite it would have to be Glory Road by Fern Jones, a gorgeous slab of salvaged ‘50s gospel, hillbilly, rockabilly, swing, what you will. It’s the sort of thing I’ve been listening to a lot lately.

Looking at that row of 15 Numero Group CDs it’s hard to think of any other modern equivalents where things look so consistently right. I can’t recall collecting quite so avidly a label’s releases. And yet there are just 15 CDs in that row, ad that begs a question? What happened? What changed? Why the break? Why the change of heart? Why the end of a habit? Well, events drastically change lives. That comes up a lot in Alan Furst’s stories. Other things change as a result. That’s the way things are. Then when things like that happen, other things become more important, and matter all the more. Small gestures. Like someone unexpectedly saying thank you.
Once I wrote a few words, a pitifully few lines, about Fern Jones' Glory Road, and her daughter got in touch to say thanks for writing about mum’s music. I thought that was lovely. It was also absurd. But it was a lovely gesture, and it got me thinking. We don’t say thank you often enough. I should have been the one saying thank you. To Fern’s family and particularly to the guys in the Numero Group; Tom Lunt, Rob Sevier, Ken Shipley and whoever is involved with the label. A huge thank you for making available rough and ready music which one hardly dared dream existed. Thank you for putting out these salvaged sounds in a form that is so beautifully right. It means a lot. Sitting looking at that line of CDs. Playing those CDs.
And, yeah, soon life will take another twist and turn, things will look up, and I’ll go out and get the rest of the Numero Group CDs, visit their website and take out a subscription. I need them. I want someone to look at my shelf and know I’m someone that’s gonna be alright. Because bad people do not get Eccentric Soul music. They don’t understand the beauty of those little CDs. What’s gone into them. The stories that they tell. The small gestures that have been made. The small gestures that matter so much.

Kevin Pearce, May 2008

The Outside Of Everything

Lost Youth

2008-05-14T10:10:00.007+01:00

Don't know if you've seen today's Guardian and the article on George Plemper's newly found photos of south east London in the '70s. For me, it was like seeing ghosts.

Here's a link to more of the photos,I hope.

Kevin Pearce

The Outside Of Everything

Chords By The River

2008-05-13T15:28:00.006+01:00

This CD was kindly compiled for us by the Don, an amazing collection of bankside music and the first in our occasional series, Chords By The River.
Talking of Don, he's just had a brilliant documentary, 'The Blues Dance', on Radio 4. The programme tells the story of the Blues Dance or Jamaican private club in Britain. Crowds gathered to listen and dance to heavy bass lines of reggae, pumped out from huge speakers. The first wave of West Indian immigrants set up informal basement parties in West London, but the phenomenon would later gain prominence across the UK. You can listen to it here

Caught By The Reaper

2008-05-12T04:48:00.004+01:00

Fred J. Taylor, 1919 - May 8, 2008

By Keith Elliott, from Fishing Lines, The Independent

Everyone seems to have a Fred J Taylor story. My favourite one concerning the great man happened on a cold, wet winter's day, the sort of day when sensible fishers sit in front of a fire and think: "Glad I didn't go out today!"

Fred, however, had been fishing since dawn. He had hoped the driving rain and biting wind would ease. No such luck. It just got colder and rained harder. Fred had forgotten his umbrella, so he sat it out in weather that seemed to have travelled all the way from Siberia just to make his life unpleasant. And he wasn't catching anything.

His companion, the redoubtable Richard Walker, seemed impervious to the cold. Not Fred, despite the extra layers of flesh that nature had generously equipped him with. As the raindrops turned to sleet, Fred turned to Walker and said: "I'll be glad when I've had enough of this!"

Tells you a lot about the bloody-mindedness of fishermen in general and the humour of Fred in particular. His Friar Tuck looks, smiling face and ability not to take the world too seriously made him a favoured companion of the best anglers in the land. Walker, Peter Stone, Fred Buller, Bernard Venables, Hugh Falkus: Fred J fished with them all as an equal. Not one (even the crotchety ones) had a bad word to say about Fred.

Note the past tense. He died this week, aged 89. Not toppling off his box on the river bank, as he would have preferred, but in a hospital bed. I visited him not two days before his demise. A columnist for my magazine 'Classic Angling', he was debating what to cover in the next issue.

But Fred always was a prolific writer, a great story-teller. He had 23 books published, from fishing stories and country matters to poetry and ferreting. He wrote columns for 'Shooting Times', 'Saga' magazine and 'The Daily Telegraph'. He starred in the first television series of 'Hearts of the Country'. Not bad for a kid who bunked off for most of his schooldays and went fishing or trapping rabbits.

Thousands of British anglers travel to Canada for its exceptional fishing. That's down to Fred, who pioneered and championed its angling potential at a time when we thought it was all trees and lumberjacks.

He won lots of awards. This year, he picked up an MBE for services to fishing. Typically, he chose not to go to Buckingham Palace, opting for a smaller ceremony with the Lord Lieutenant of Bedfordshire. Nearer his Leighton Buzzard home, you see. He was born there and never really moved away, apart from a short, unsuccessful emigration to Australia (he missed England too much) and enforced spells away during the war. "I came in as a private, got promoted to corporal and came out a private," he said.

A founder member of the Carp Catchers' Club, he fished the legendary Redmire Pool, home of record carp, in its heyday. He played a key role in inventing one of fly-fishing's most important flies, the Dog Nobbler. He popularised using dead fish rather than live ones for pike bait, thereby saving the lives of millions of tiddlers.

For those who took up fishing in the 1950s and '60s, Fred J was one of the gods. He may even have been the best of the lot.

The Damned United

2008-05-11T06:49:00.006+01:00

Tonights South Bank Show (ITV, 10.50) on David Peace's genius book "The Damned United" has got to be worth a look;

The Damned Utd focuses on Clough failing - in the wilderness between Derby and Nottingham. At Leeds he is tortured, haunted, sleepless, entirely alone - without Peter Taylor, who refused to join him - behind enemy lines. His mission seems to be to destroy the soul of his new club. Straight after he arrives he is on the phone trying to sell the icons - Johnny Giles, Norman Hunter - and to bring in his own men. The interior monologues, the detail of the despair, the endless plotting are made up, but all of the events ring true: how Clough took an axe to the desk of his nemesis Revie, how he banned mention of his predecessor's name, burned his infamous dossiers on players and referees; how Clough, the greatest man-manager of them all, the man who made League champions out of little Derby County and would later make European champions out of unfashionable Nottingham Forest, introduced himself to his new Leeds team with these words: 'Gentlemen, I might as well tell you now. You lot may have won all the domestic honours there are and some of the European ones but, as far as I am concerned, the first thing you can do for me is to chuck all your medals and all your caps and all your pots and all your pans into the biggest fucking dustbin you can find, because you've never won any of them fairly. You've done it all by bloody cheating ...'

Letters From Arcadia

2008-05-11T05:55:00.002+01:00

click here for the latest LETTER FROM ARCADIA, a regular correspondence between angling's two most original contemporary writers...

Unfinished Business?

2008-05-09T07:09:00.001+01:00

note left on Tony Wilson's grave, as seen yesterday

thanks to Rofey

The Bard Of Salford.

2008-05-09T06:27:00.005+01:00

Paul Morley, radio 4 documentary on John Cooper Clarke Listen Here

Beasley Street.

Far from crazy pavements -
the taste of silver spoons
A clinical arrangement
on a dirty afternoon
Where the fecal germs of Mr Freud
are rendered obsolete
The legal term is null and void
In the case of Beasley Street

In the cheap seats where murder breeds
Somebody is out of breath
Sleep is a luxury they don't need
- a sneak preview of death
Belladonna is your flower
Manslaughter your meat
Spend a year in a couple of hours
On the edge of Beasley Street

Where the action isn't
That's where it is
State your position
Vacancies exist
In an X-certificate exercise
Ex-servicemen excrete
Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies
In a box on Beasley Street

From the boarding houses and the bedsits
Full of accidents and fleas
Somebody gets it
Where the missing persons freeze
Wearing dead men's overcoats
You can't see their feet
A riff joint shuts - opens up
Right down on Beasley Street

Cars collide, colours clash
disaster movie stuff
For a man with a Fu Manchu moustache
Revenge is not enough
There's a dead canary on a swivel seat
There's a rainbow in the road
Meanwhile on Beasley Street
Silence is the code

Hot beneath the collar
an inspector calls
Where the perishing stink of squalor
impregnates the walls
the rats have all got rickets
they spit through broken teeth
The name of the game is not cricket
Caught out on Beasley Street

The hipster and his hired hat
Drive a borrowed car
Yellow socks and a pink cravat
Nothing La-di-dah
OAP, mother to be
Watch the three-piece suite
When shit-stoppered drains
and crocodile skis
are seen on Beasley Street

The kingdom of the blind
a one-eyed man is king
Beauty problems are redefined
the doorbells do not ring
A lightbulb bursts like a blister
the only form of heat
here a fellow sells his sister
down the river on Beasley Street

The boys are on the wagon
The girls are on the shelf
Their common problem is
that they're not someone else
The dirt blows out
The dust blows in
You can't keep it neat
It's a fully furnished dustbin,
Sixteen Beasley Street

Vince the ageing savage
Betrays no kind of life
but the smell of yesterday's cabbage
and the ghost of last year's wife
through a constant haze
of deodorant sprays
he says retreat
Alsations dog the dirty days
down the middle of Beasley Street

People turn to poison
Quick as lager turns to piss
Sweethearts are physically sick
every time they kiss.
It's a sociologist's paradise
each day repeats
On easy, cheesy, greasy, queasy
beastly Beasley Street

Eyes dead as vicious fish
Look around for laughs
If I could have just one wish
I would be a photograph
on a permanent Monday morning
Get lost or fall asleep
When the yellow cats are yawning
Around the back of Beasley Street

What Has Happened To All The Walkington Ducklings?

2008-05-09T06:08:00.009+01:00

Hey Jeff

The above was a headline in last weeks Beverley Guardian that caught my eye on a bank holiday visit to see my parents. Walkington is a small village in a semi-pretty part of East Yorkshire. I spent my teenage years there before escaping the rural coma and heading to the Big Smoke to achieve my ambitions of finally becoming the low-rent media-yahoo-borderline-alcoholic-with-nagging-drug-problems I had always dreamed of. I have mixed feelings about the place as it's not really home anymore but it's nice to visit sometimes. One ex-girlfriend of mine once described it as "the land of cowshit and four-wheel
drive" which pretty much sums it up I suppose. Anyway, it seems fear and horror is stalking the Walkington village pond. This
year's batch of ducklings are being devoured by some mysterious creature or creatures. Parents are afraid to take the kiddies to the pond to feed the ducks (which seriously cuts down the list of potential leisure activities in the village). Of course there was no other subject being discussed by the dark lords around the bar at the local pub The Barrel on Saturday night. One might immediately suspect Mr Fox but this has been dismissed as the foxes up there are properly wild (not the fried chicken-loving hipsters we are used to down here) and would never venture as far as the pond because of passing traffic and the volumes of people around the centre of the village. Even village godfather and highly accomplished naturalist Ernie Teal is stumped. Some are suggesting a more plausible villain is the Terrapin. After the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle craze of a few years ago it was claimed that unloved and unwanted terrapins were being released into the pond where they have been breeding and adults are quite capable of devouring a ducking apparently. See the attached photo of one sunning himself on Saturday. Local farmer and occasional crab fisherman Rodge 'The Dodge' has taken to baiting crab pots with rotting flesh and putting them out in the pond at night in an attempt to rid the local landmark of the amphibian menace.
However I fear I may have another explanation which has remained a dark and guilty secret of mine for some twenty years. Well, until now that is I suppose.
The year was 1988 and I was a slacking six-former. The second summer of love pretty much passed us by up there away from the bright lights of Shoom and Spectrum and apart from the occasional trip across the M62 to the Hacienda my best friend and I spent most of the summer taking acid and going fishing. One fateful night dead-baiting for pike we caught a frisky 5lb Jack and my friend (who ironically is now a respected marine biologist working in the Pacific monitoring the Japanese fishing fleet) decided it might be a gas to release it into Walkington village pond.
Now I have felt very bad about this for years. A smallish village pond is no place for a noble fish like a pike and I assumed that the poor thing must have expired but my partner in crime (armed with an MSC in marine biology by this time) always claimed it would have thrived on the small fish and large amounts of bread in the pond and, of course, would be totally at the top of the food chain. Could that very same fresh-water wolf from all those years ago be responsible for the violent decimation of the Walkington duck population?
I fear so and that I have created a monster.....

Neil

Tomoland

Making Love In 2003

2008-05-08T12:56:00.003+01:00

This morning I woke up to the sound of the neighbor trimming his tree. I told myself he would stop trimming only if I got out of bed. The tree got smaller and smaller. Soon it was just a stump, and he had to go underground and start trimming the roots, and still I couldn't get up. The roots were gone and he was sawing through the earth and I told myself that when he came out in China, I would get up. It took him all day. I wept and curled and uncurled myself in a way I couldn't control. I was actually writhing in heartache, as if I were a single muscle whose purpose was to mourn. But by the time my neighbor had hit the molten core, I was motionless. I had exhausted myself into a blank stare, a full-body examination of the ceiling. I could feel him pushing up underneath the streets of Shanghai, and to my horror, I felt hunger. The body's expression of hope. As he burst through the ground and into the Chinese air, I sat up. He plowed into the sky, upward through tree leaves and then the clouds. My neighbor sawed into outer space. He cut through the Milky Way, right through the stars and stardust. He went around the universe in a giant circle. And then he landed, with a quiet thud, back in his yard. I lifted the curtain and saw him putting out the sprinkler. It was dusk. If he saw me, I would live. Look up, look up, look up. He raised his eyes, as if it were his own idea, and I waved.

From 'No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July', 2007

Notes:
A broken heart is a troublesome thing at any time of year, but when the trees are bursting into leaf, as Larkin wrote (see our March post), heartache seems evermore a hardy perennial that can withstand the melting beauty of even the sunniest spring day. My foolproof remedy at times like this is to immerse myself in books. These are times when only literature can massage balm into the hard-to-reach places of the human heart, and I am currently finding grateful relief in Miranda July's short stories. The passage above is, I think, one of the best descriptions of unrequited love I have ever read. It makes no difference to the ardent feelings of the narrator of this story, an adult schoolteacher, that it's a fifteen-year-old special needs student that she's in love with, but only a brave writer could pull this off and make it plausible and humane and hilarious. Miranda July, better known perhaps for her debut feature of 2006 'You, Me and Everyone I Know', has one of the most original and surprising fictional voices I've read in a long, long time. It's almost worth suffering heartache just to experience the relief of knowing that someone else out there knows what it's like and can render it so beautifully. Highly recommended.

Love,

Jemma

kitchen sink dramas

German Bight.

2008-05-07T06:30:00.014+01:00

The piece below, written by Mark Hodkinson, is an insightful tribute to the writer Barry Hines.
Mark, in his role as proprieter of Pomona Books has recently republished a couple of Barry's lost titles and this piece is the first draft of the introduction to an anthology he is publishing next year.

Like a lot of folk of around my age, "A Kestrel For A Knave" was one of the books that "got me in to reading". Yes there had been the Famous Five and The Lion, The Witch and the blah blah blah, but "Kes" was real.

Mark kindly sent us this;

I first met Barry Hines about 10 years ago. I'd been sent to interview him by The Times. He asked me to meet him at his writing den, a small office on the campus of Hallam University, Sheffield. I remember being struck by the starkness of the room: a postcard on the wall, a desk containing a pen and a few sheets of paper, and that was about it - no books, no computer, no
telephone. On the floor was a tiny kettle, able to contain just enough water to fill a single mug; I'd never seen one of these before.

Barry wasn't unfriendly but a bit gauche - a word he'd never use, of course. There is angularness about Barry, in his movements and manner, that takes a while to get used to. He doesn't go in for social protocol, asking how you are and whether you've had a pleasant journey. This isn't for affect or to invoke any kind of power-play: he probably just forgets. After a few minutes, it doesn't matter anyway because he has an aura that coalesces kindness with straight-talking. In short, he feels good to be around.

During our conversation he often repeated the word 'wondrous'. A lot of things were wondrous: being able to work as a writer and not down the pit; Barnsley FC's current form; the standard of script-writing on Coronation Street; American crime novels. He sang the word, much like a kid would having just learned it.

Over the years, I kept in touch with Barry. I couldn't resist. He, among a handful of others, had made me want to be a writer in the first place. Every day he is with me, his influence, as I try to emulate the honesty and compassion he brings to his work, in my own. Also, we are brothers, working-class brothers. Although he is a generation older, I know so well the people of his novels because they could be my family. My granddad worked on the railways, my mum and gran in sewing factories. The
grind, the humour, the ups and the downs - it is a common history.

When I set up Pomona a few years ago I asked Barry if I could republish two of his old books - Looks and Smiles and The Price of Coal. At this point, I imagined I might possibly encounter a more anxious and vain Barry Hines: writers can be very fussy and precious about their work. He remained the same Barry I had met in that tiny room. He was flattered by my interest, trusting me with the covers and contract, happy to help in any way.

I was delighted to learn that he had a folder of unpublished work labelled, 'Early poetry, short stories.' It is from this folder that This Artistic Life is drawn. The stories date back many years, some to the late-1960s and early-1970s, when the success of Kes, the book and the film, had elevated Hines to the unexpected position of feted writer.

Much of the work is nostalgic and mentions of 'secondary modern'; recs'; 'two-bob'; '11-plus'; 'silly buggers' and kids saying, 'Soz' when they mean, 'Sorry', feel like a portal to another world. He writes a great deal about the mining industry and two incidents in particular that have stayed with him always - the death of his granddad in a pit accident and the time he was berated by a neighbour for choosing (briefly) to work down a mine.

Tinker Lane, one of the longer pieces, feels like the first draft of an autobiography. In his trademark unadorned style, Hines tells us about the people that lived in his neighbourhood, the scrapes they got into. The writing is effortlessly simple, a sense of time and place and person brought to life within a few short sentences.

The football stories are largely on a similar theme. Another Jimmy Dance, Tottenham Hotspurs and The Turnstile Man effectively feature the same protagonist - an ex-hero returning to his former club with his latest team, now older and slower, facing the ridicule of the crowd. The players - Eddie Royle, Jimmy Dance and Jackie Moon - are, above the colour of their shirt,
brave men running their hearts out, one of a team but alone when they receive the ball. In all his work Hines innately sings the song of the underdog and in these stories he is calling on the reader to consider issues of loyalty and decency.

There are little cameos within the stories that show off both Hines' sharp eye and the power of under-statement. In The Turnstile Man, we learn that the boy's father is estranged from his mother. This merits just a few lines but resonates loudly. Without revealing any more, the reader is left wondering about the family's home life, how the separation occurred, how
they are working things out between them.

A father-son relationship is complex and, again, Hines states this without addressing it head-on. In Another Jimmy Dance the father, exasperated by his son, scolds him and then, a few minutes later, pulls up the lad's hood when it starts to rain. Any parent will recognise this see-saw between anger and love that a child can set in motion.

The poems which intersperse the stories reveal a hitherto unseen side to Hines. Much like his writing, they are succinct, whether playful as in Prudence Dowd or sombre in the sketches about mining and the loss of the communities that formed at pit-heads.

Once, while we were talking about books, Barry mentioned an admiration of the American writer, Bernard Malamud, in particular his novel, The Natural. In Barry's stories, The End of Sammy's Career and Billy Peak he veers from his usual style and touches upon what became known as 'magicrealism', of which Malamud was masterful. The short story lends itself less
well to this approach but it shows Hines' willingness to embrace an idea that was very much in vogue in the late-1960s.

There is, in the very best work, always a moment. That point where head and heart collide. It can be a chord change in a song or a line of dialogue in a play or film that is brilliant and true. This comes, for me, in this book in the short story, Tottenham Hotspurs. The father is telling his young son how to negotiate getting into a football ground. The boy wants to go through the same turnstile as his dad, but is told he can't. He asks why;

''Because that turnstile's for misters,'' his dad says.

In this simple sentence Hines shows us everything: the clarity of his memory; his ear for language; and his ability - perhaps a writer's greatest skill - to take us back there, making us believe whole-heartedly in the story and the storyteller. 'Back there' is a very specific sense of place, in this case to a time when we were kids and our dads took us to football matches and used words like 'misters'.

Many years ago another writer, clearly an insightful soul, congratulated Hines on his 'iron integrity'. This little collection forms an eclectic hotchpotch of stories and poems, some of them nicely formed, others sketchy and whimsical, but that iron integrity is across it all and through Barry Hines, the man, too.

Mark Hodkinson

Pomona

The Tenth Cast

2008-05-06T06:18:00.004+01:00

Last week (April 29th) we had the great honour of being the first place where you could read an extract from Chris Yates forthcoming book "Out Of The Blue". Well, it just got better. Last night Chris's son Will sent through two brilliant illustrations that he has done for the book. I've added them to the post. Go look..

Sweete Themmes! Runne Softly, Till I End My Song.*

2008-05-05T09:08:00.018+01:00

As mentioned here previously Andrew, Robin & I are working on a book. It will be called Caught By The River and it’s a collection of writings on British rivers. We’ll keep you posted on the progress.
With this in mind, the recent publication of "Downstream" , a book by Tom Fort of a journey he made down the river Trent, was of some interest to me. The Trent was “my” river. I was born on it’s banks, a few miles outside of Nottingham and spent a lot of time on it as a kid, either fishing or watching football. Great football. Brian Clough & Peter Taylor football.
Anyway, the Trent means something to me, but sadly not for Tom. He tries his best – he writes very well and if I’m honest, the odds of him finding revelation ain’t great - but ultimately he chose the wrong river. He would have preferred to have written about his local river, the Thames, but “…seriously doubted if I could do anything different from those who had gone before”. He then mentions a book called “Sweet Thames, Run Softly” by someone called Robert Gibbings. I’d heard of neither book nor author but I liked the title so I tracked a copy down. Thank you Tom Fort, it’s a lovely book.

First published in 1940 and illustrated throughout with engravings by the author, it tells the story of a trip he made along the Thames: “…it occurred to me that it might be fun to explore the river Thames, in whose valley I had lived for fifteen years.” “It would be restful, too, for I planned to float down-stream at the river’s own pace, and to look for nothing but what I might see as I moved along , consigning all guide books to the devil…”

It’s observational, anecdotal and opinionated. He was definitely somewhat eccentric and it reads all the better for it. Here’s an extract;

“Now the celandines are sparkling in the marshes, and pools in the still flooded fields shine blue. The redshanks are whistling, the peewits are tumbling, and yellow wagtails trip along the muddy borders of the stream, their breasts as brilliant as the kingcups. The sand-martins, too, whirling like leaves in a gale, advertise their return, while high up among the purple blossoms of the elm-trees the young rooks have already broken their shells. Nearer to earth the poplars wave their catkins, and the willows and sallows regale the years first broods of insect life.

The sap is rising. Each day our world turns further towards the sun. All the energy held in bondage during the winter is being released. To quote an anonymous writer: “Week by week the crops swallow up the wild life of the open countryside, while the woods and hedges draw veil after veil over the doings of the small things which they shelter, and wherever we go a hundred eyes peep and a hundred ears listen, of creatures that we cannot see or hear at all.”

“If we would glimpse behind that veil we must forget those fanatics who think that walking at less than four miles an hour is a sign of laziness or physical decay. Those are the people who, after an excursion into the country, spend their evenings at a cinema because they have seen nothing during the day with which to occupy their thoughts. We must learn to walk slowly, so that we have time to see; we must learn to tread quietly, so that we do not cause alarm; above all, we must think peace.”

All of my reading at present is with our book in mind, looking for ideas or inspirations, contributions or inclusions, so after I finish “My Fishing Days And Ways”, I’m back on to Robert Gibbings for “Coming Down The Wye” and then “Lovely Is The Lee”.
Which means that the new Tim Winton novel will just have to wait (let's hope that it's up there with "The Turning" and therefore worth the wait). (JB)

*SPENSER, Prothalamion

Don't Judge A Brook By It's Cover

2008-05-03T07:33:00.006+01:00

Chris Yates learns that big fish can lurk in the most unexpected places (from today's Telegraph)

After a few seasons watching the habits of freshwater fish, it becomes less of a puzzle guessing where a particular species might lie on a given day.

I find that wild fish move in mysterious ways. If I'm looking for perch, for instance, and the river is running high, I will fish the quiet, deep pools on the inside of bends or below sunken trees. When the river is low and clear and I am hoping for a chub, I'll look for a steady, streamy run between reed or weed beds, where small groups of these black-tailed fish are often visible, holding station, just under the surface. Big, powerful barbel prefer strong, deepish runs, especially if there is a roof over their heads in the form of an overhanging willow. Like roach, dace and bream, these are shoal fish, which makes them easier to locate than the more solitary trout and pike; but whatever species I'm after, if I start hankering after a monster, I have to remind myself that monsters move in mysterious ways. Furthermore, they often inhabit places where even the most experienced angler would never think to look.

I had my eyes opened when I went for a walk along a tiny tributary of the River Loddon - which is a small stream, anyway - looking for wild brown trout. My companion, Edward Barder, who had been exploring the water over the previous few years, pointed out a little scoop in a very ordinary stretch of shallows where, not long previously, he had seen a fish that looked, in that bath-sized pool, like a salmon.

Apart from the overhanging trees, which gave a bit of cover, I would never have imagined it as a likely spot for a big fish. Yet the "salmon" proved to be a tremendous trout. On a mayfly of his own tying, Edward hooked it. After a spectacular battle, he landed it: a wild fish of 5lb 4oz, the sort of creature that most fly-fishers can only dream about.

On the day we were hunting for big fish, we didn't see anything monstrous, but I watched Edward stalk a canny three-pounder, which looked enormous in a bottleneck of a glide beneath an old footbridge. The bridge seemed superfluous, as I could almost have stepped across to the far bank, but the fish obviously appreciated it and would not venture out of its shadow, even when a fat, juicy mayfly floated the merest tail flick away in the sunlight. Edward had to cast his artificial fly from below, trying to get it through the bridge so that it landed lightly on the surface before drifting back downstream.

This may sound straight forward; but the wooden crossbeam was only about two feet above the water and he was up to his armpits in reeds, 30 feet along the bank. It was amazing that he managed it several times - and at each attempt the trout ignored him. Edward gave up in the end and we went on upstream until we came to a little hollow of a pool below a leaning willow. Nothing was visible when we crept up to it, but Edward spotted something beneath the surface just upstream of the tree. It was another good fish, which swayed in the current, showing its neb (its nose) every time it rose to take a mayfly.
Generous as ever, Edward said it was my turn for a cast, even though he had seen the trout first. I crawled through the long grass, but could not get too close because the fish was in a little open glide between reeds, and if I could see him, he could see me. I was using my featherweight cane seven-footer, which has a lovely action, even if I don't. As I extended the line, I realised this was a tricky cast - not as tricky as Edward's under-the-bridge effort, but tricky enough for someone who fishes the fly for only a few days each year. My first attempt sent my fly into the reeds; the next put it into the trailing bough of an alder, upstream of the fish. Finally I got the thing to land almost perfectly. It floated down over the quivering greyish shape in midstream - which didn't rise for it. I was wondering whether I could ever repeat such a good throw, when the fish turned and snatched the fly just before it swept under the willow. The line tightened. I'd got him!

The rod went into a sharp curve as my trout dived, circled and buried itself beneath the leaning tree. I presumed the game was over as soon as it had begun, but steady pressure gradually brought a response and, to my relief, the fish came free, dropping down into the deep pool next to us. I was convinced it was going to launch itself into the dense reeds downstream, but as it circled the pool, Edward said I should keep the pressure as steady as possible while he waited with the net. After a minute or two, as the trout made a slightly slower pass, close to the surface, my gillie leaned forward and scooped him expertly out.
It was a lovely golden 2½lb wildie, with just a few speckles and a broad square tail. He went back in the stream to grow into a five-pounder.

Pleasures Of...

2008-04-29T09:11:00.008+01:00

April

Bon Iver "For Emma, Forever Ago" (4AD)
Paul Kingsnorth "Real England"
The Encyclopedia Of Wales
Death Cab For Cutie "I Will Possess Your Heart"
Ian Vince & Dan Kieran "Three Men In A Float"
Flight Of The Conchords album on Sub Pop
Portishead "Third" (esp "The Rip" - record of the year or too early to declare?) and live at Brixton Academy - amazing
The Stone Roses "Blood On The Turntable"
Erykah Badu "Part One (4th World War)"
Discovering the wonderful words and pictures of Robert Gibbings
The Year Of Magical Thinking
"Meetings With Remarkable Trees" by Thomas Pakenham
"Napolean At Waterloo" by White Hinterland
"The Orphanage"
the original soundtrack recording for "The Sweet Smell Of Success"
'How To Be Idle' Tom Hodgkinson
'The Deepening Pool' Chris Yates
The Dog & Duck, Soho (for its wonderful rotation of great real ales)
The photography of Martin Parr

The Sea Perch

2008-04-29T06:57:00.007+01:00

Hi Jeff,

At last, a piece from my book for CBTR! Hope you approve.(Book - Out of the Blue - to be published early September.)

There was a great sound and music piece on Radio 3 last night by Chris Woods. Listening to the river was a 20 minute description of life on the River Medway. It had some lovely moments. Go to Late Junction's web site; Wed 23rd April. The river piece is about 45 minutes into the 110 minute programme. I've started writing in the Weekend Telegraph again, now I've finished my book. The 1st article should be going in a week on Saturday - I think (in the weekend section). Its about monster brownies on the Lodden. I'd rather write for the weekend Guardian, but they said they weren't sure they had space for fishing related articles - and the Telegraph pay much better!

Hope you're well and enjoying the spring. First swallows arrived a day late here (20th). No cuckoo or nightingale yet. But a red kite and a peregrine flew right over the garden on the day I finished my book. And my old Toyota turned 200000 miles. Good omens, I presume.

All good fishes,

Chris.

TENTH CAST

THE SEA PERCH

A tidal river introduced me to the bass, and though it was a long time ago, and I was only sixteen, the encounter created a little turn in my path that would inevitably lead me to where I am today. Of all the dozens of Piscean species that have fascinated me over the years, only four had actually taken up residence in my dreams; but now, after half a lifetime, the bass has finally joined them.

As I mentioned before, the Latin name for the European sea bass is Decentrachus labrax, which is almost as impressive as the name of the family of fishes to which it belongs: the Serranidae. The Serranidae sound like like a group of beings, half fish, half elf, who probably inhabit the forests of sea kelp around our more remote shorelines. But with each tide they send in their armies of bass to invade the estuaries, advancing upriver, spying out the land, because, one day, they know it will all be sea again.

Isaak Walton, writing in the 17th Century, referred to bass as the sea perch, and this old English name also appeared in my childhood bible, The Observer’s Book of Freshwater Fish. I used to keep this book in the pocket of my school blazer so I could maintain a connection with my preferred reality, using the sacred images in the colour plates to keep me from despair during lessons. Especially maths lessons. The illustration of ‘the Bass or Sea Perch’ – all spectral blue and silver – shared a double page spread with the freshwater perch – all earthy greens and russets. I was familiar with the latter because of the shoals of small ones in the village pond, but, in my beginning, I knew nothing about the former and wondered what it was doing in a book about freshwater species until I read that it could exist as happily in an estuary as in the sea, and, as a juvenile, would ascend miles upstream to feed. So, when I first cast into what I definitely knew to be a tidal river, I fished for bass.

The river was the Blythe in Suffolk, near the harbour, just half a mile from the sea, where Nick and I insisted we be abandoned for the day while our parents explored the nearby town of Southwold. Upstream of us was a broad reedy lagoon which gradually narrowed into the deep straight channel that ran down past us and beyond the timber pilings and black clapboard harbour buildings towards the Wash. The water in front of us was dark and turbulent, with the tide running strongly and the river rapidly reversing. It seemed we had arrived at a propitious moment for surely, as the bible said; great shoals of bass would be riding in on the tidal current.

I told Nick we were bound to catch something, but he stared into the greyish depths and said he didn’t rate our chances. For a start we didn’t have any proper bass bait – no prawns, sand eels or mackerel strip, only bread, which was probably not a favourite item of diet. However, the bible said that ‘… bass are occasionally caught using a shining bait;’ and we had shining baits. In our tackle bags we had a small collection of metal lures which we’d acquired over the years, not for any specific purpose, but because we liked the look of them. Now Nick tied on something in silver and blue while I chose a gold Kilko spoon with red diagonals; and as the Blythe continued to rise we began to fish.

For a while we worked our lures through the quieter water close in, thinking it too wild in midstream, but after a few minutes I made a long cast across river and, after waiting a moment for the spinner to sink, began a slow retieve. I could feel the faint buzzing sensation along the line as the lure came back through the current – and then something pounced making the rod tip shake. For a second I couldn’t believe it was a fish. Perhaps I’d simply hooked a piece of jetsamming driftwood. But then the rod swooped violently over and the reel began to sing a song that I’d never heard before. Until that moment, no fish had ever taken more than a yard or two of line from me, mainly because I used strong tackle and screwed my reel down tight. But because I was fishing an open river with no visible snags, I was using much lighter gear than normal and had wisely slackened the clutch before I cast.

Hearing the continuous screeching, Nick came running over, looked up at the rod and said: ‘Is it really a fish?’
‘Of course it is!’
Then he ran away again, as if the stuation was just too overwhelming, but we’d covered a few yards since we’d started casting and he was only hurrying back to where we’d left the net.

The fish was going with the flow, away from the sea and towards the distant lagoon. It was pointless standing still, trying to stop it, so, with Nick following, I began to run after it, the three of us in a frantic procession that seemed to go on for miles. Despite my assertion that this had to be a bass, there were, of course, other possibilities. Maybe it was a shark! I presumed it was something gigantic, but then a flounder would have felt huge in the tide race.

The fish eventually slowed, turned and surfaced, thirty yards out. We saw a flash of silver before it plunged away again and made another dash into mid-river. It was only a glimpse, but it was enough to confirm its identity and reveal its surprisingly modest size. Nick stood on the high embankment with the net, yet despite the rising river he could never have reached down to the surface. However, a few yards upstream there was an iron ladder fixed to an empty mooring point and he clambered down to water level and waited while I coaxed my fish towards him.

By now, one or two passers-by had stopped to watch the drama, and another angler, who’d been cycling along with a bundle of rods tied to his crossbar, came to offer advice.

‘Got a mullet there, have you?’ he asked.
‘No, it’s a bass.’
’It’s fighting more like a mullet.’

I didn’t like his derisory, local expert tone, but the fish rose again, much nearer than before, and I didn’t need to say more.
‘Blimey! It is a bass!’

It wallowed round towards Nick who eventually reached out and managed to scoop it into the mesh without falling in. To mumurs of appreciation from the assembly, he passed the net up to me and I laid the shining fish down and carefully unhooked it. I was slightly disappointed that it lacked the luminous blue of the original illustration; it seemed almost uniformly silver, although when I looked more closely there were subtle blushings of mauve, green and blue along the back and flecks of pale gold round the head. It was just over twenty inches long and weighed around three pounds – not the giant it had pretended to be, but still, as far as I was concerned, a great fish.

Had it not been my first bass I would have taken it back to the farmhouse where we were staying, but having given me so much already the least I could do was to give it back its freedom. After climbing down the ladder with the fish still in the net, I slipped it out of the mesh and watched it swirl away again into the tide race.

Chris Yates

Real England & Three Men In A Float

2008-04-28T12:18:00.005+01:00

One week and two very different books about the current state of England. Both books, although tonally poles apart, look out over the nation’s landscape and it’s national character to draw conclusions about the state of the country in 2008. The end result, with both Guardian/Ecologist writer Paul Kingsnorth’s ‘Real England’ and ‘Three Men In A Float’ by The Idler magazine’s Dan Kieran & Ian Vince, is a snapshot of 21st century Britain, of it’s people and it’s problems, with just a few ideas for how we can club together to alleviate them thrown in.

‘Real England’ seems at times almost ridiculously bleak in it’s overview. The UK’s small businesses, from pubs to farms to shops, are being steamrollered by multinationals. Our government is in collusion with big business, redrawing the maps of city centres and waterways the length of the country, allowing public access to be compromised in favour of new retail developments or apartment blocks. The book points out how we’ve all ignored the problem for too long, ending up in a perilous state where each city centre can be judged on a scale as to whether it’s a ‘clone town’, a ‘home town’ or a ‘border town’. Walking down most British high streets these days, it doesn’t take a maths genius to do the sums there. Local diversity is out, homogeny is in. Although these points alone aren’t exactly news, Kingsnorth’s exploration of the same changes outside of the cities - in the fields, in rural communities and on the village greens – is what makes the book so riveting. Personally, I’d have thought seeing a few organic British apples in Tescos was tantamount to a victory for the farmer and the consumer – here, it’s blindingly obvious that it’s just another marketing tool for supermarkets and that mass production and uniformity is still the order of the day. ‘Real England’ is the furious, non-conformist sibling of the (also essential) ‘England In Particular’ – whereas the latter celebrates the great things we’ve got left to embrace, Kingsnorth spells out exactly how long we’ll have them for unless something fundamental changes in the way we view our country, how the rapidly changing landscape is a danger much the same as climate change – that England in 50 years time might well be unrecognizable, and maybe not just because of the Mediterranean weather we’re being told to expect. Solutions, as ever, come down to personal choice – we have to want change in order for it to happen – if we want to stop the erosion of our national identity, then it’s still out there, you just have to grasp it before it’s just another piece of history, an irrelevance. A brilliant book.

"Real England: The Battle Against the Bland is a watershed study, a crucially important book; the most significant account of today's England I have read," Nick Groom, The Independent

The premise of ‘Three Men In A Float’ is fantastically simple – three men buy a milk float and attempt to drive ‘end to end’ across England (Lowestoft to Land’s End). Along they way, they must rely on the kindness of strangers in order to get a charge for the float, which runs at 15 mph and manages around 30 miles per 8 hour charge. The idea is to discover the country and the character of the people along the way, to see if there really is such a thing as England out there. The trip, which you could probably do in a day if you put your foot down and munched a load of speed, ends up taking them three weeks. Along the way, you start to see the British people as warm and helpful – their task goes from seemingly impossible to deceptively easy – people genuinely seem to want to help. The concept of slow travel is taken to it’s logical extreme – at one point the float is overtaken by a bee. Whatever they may have lost in speed they gain the enviable position of being able to watch hares or red kites from the luxury of a slow moving, virtually silent milk float, a milkman’s eye view of the countryside as it were.

It’s in watching as the English countryside unfurling itself in slow motion in “Three Men…” that the writers draw much the same conclusions at ‘Real England’ – that the people still care about the uniqueness of the country and that this is a place that we need to work at preserving, one with as delicate an eco-system as any coral reef or polar ice cap, one that we are in danger of altering beyond the point of return.

Me, I’m just waiting for someone to do the same kind of thing with Wales…

Robin Turner

Fish Tales

2008-04-24T19:38:00.006+01:00

The Perch

Chris Yates explores the finer traits of some of Britain's coarse fish.

Radio 4 says, "Writer Tom Fort accompanies Chris to the River Thames and argues that Perch are quintessentially masculine, in spite of what the Victorians wrote".

Listen Here

Caught By The Reaper

2008-04-24T08:09:00.008+01:00

Al Wilson, June 19, 1939 - April 21, 2008

thank you Al, for one of the greatest 45's of all time;

but that's not the whole story. Kent recently reissued his "Searching For The Dolphins" album. It's a real class record and has been a secret far too long.

Produced by Johhny Rivers arranged by Gene Page, songs by Fred Neil and Jimmy Webb, James Burton on guitar, Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knetchel on keys, $16.99 at Dusty Grooves

In The Basement magazine carries a Vinyl Spotlight feature, which look at twenty tracks from LPs not available on CD, and also picks one ‘special’ album to cover in its entirety. Way back in November 1998, in issue #8, the in-depth scrutiny was on all-time top-tenner, SEARCHING FOR THE DOLPHINS by Al Wilson. I summed up by saying “This set deserves like-for-like CD reissue, not least because my vinyl is worn out!” Well, it has taken a little over nine years for my wish to be granted but the wait has been worthwhile. I can wallow in Gene Page’s splendid arrangement of Fred Neil’s The Dolphins, interpreted by the magnificently rich vocals of Al Wilson and lovingly produced by Johnny Rivers for his own Soul City Records in pristine sound quality.

Born in Meridian, MS, in June 1939, Al Wilson settled in California after serving with Uncle Sam, singing in local clubs as a solo performer and working in a line-up of the Jewels, which subsequently became Liberty recording artists, the Rollers. Passing through Johnny “Legs” Harris & the Statesmen and its metamorphosis, the Soul Brothers (as the drummer) Al met up with ex-Motown staffer, Marc Gordon, manager of the Versatiles (who became 5th Dimension). He took that group, along with our man, off to the fledgling Soul City company. Al had to be patient with the label to get his first record released but, after a handful of 45s and chart success with Do What You Gotta Do and The Snake, the stunning “Searching For The Dolphins” album hit the streets.

Do What You Gotta Do, penned by staff-writer, Jim Webb, suited Wilson perfectly, fully demonstrating his qualities as a singer and Webb’s qualities as a songwriter. Many takes on the song have been made, most notably by the Four Tops and Nina Simone, but this version has never been bettered. It closed the first side of the original album, while The Snake opened side two. A remake of an Oscar Brown Jr, number from 1963, it showcases Al’s abilities as a jazzy swinger. The Snake has since achieved surprisingly broad acceptance on the soul scene, been a northern favourite, managed five weeks on the UK pop charts in 1975 where it peaked at #41, and has more recently been used to advertise Lambrini on TV. Elsewhere Al makes By The Time I Get To Phoenix - another Jim Webb composition - his own and delivers a classy Willie Hutch beat-ballad with a strong hook in Who Could Be Lovin’ You (Other Than Me), his first Soul City 45 which has background support from the Blossoms.

The original LP’s eleven titles is augmented by the same number of bonus tracks, which begin with three B-sides, each by Willie Hutch but, with the exception of the stirring ballad, Gettin’ Ready For Tomorrow, probably ill-suited to the overall feel of the LP. We then follow Al’s career from the album’s issue with a further single made for Soul City (topped by a swampy revival of John Fogerty/Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Lodi), before the label closed its doors.

Marc Gordon started the Bell-distributed Carousel imprint, initially as a split-logo but later with ‘stand-alone’ identification. Al’s seven tracks for Carousel from his four singles all feature here, (Billy Page’s Bachelor Man, something of a cabaret-style number, was used for two B-sides.) Despite the appeal of a song like Scott Barnes and Leon Ware’s ballad, You Do The Right Things, Wilson’s Carousel releases marked a fallow period for him (rectified late in 1973 when he hit #10 on the R&B and #1 Pop charts with Jerry Fuller’s song Show And Tell for Rocky Road).

This cd marks the first time the Carousel recordings have been committed to CD and, together with the Soul City bonuses and that long-yearned-for “Searching For The Dolphins” album, Kent have made this old man’s dreams come true.

David Cole

Letters From Arcadia

2008-04-23T17:38:00.001+01:00

click here for the latest LETTER FROM ARCADIA, a regular correspondence between angling's two most original contemporary writers...

Antique Tackle Observer

2008-04-23T08:31:00.001+01:00

antique tackle observer

the national vintage tackle fair

2008-04-23T07:50:00.012+01:00

ladies and gents

thanks very much to you all for the editorial support which you gave to the national vintage fishing tackle fair which took place at the abbey stadium on sunday. the fair was a great success with a strong public turn-out which included 84 year old lloyd brookes who had fished for redditch angling club in the national and whose father had been a driver and gardener for allcocks. lloyd donated a photograph to the fair of the redditch angling club's dinner in 1934 a sit down do which included all the heads of the big redditch tackle manufacturers and members of the '34 national side. john essex, who himself fished the national for leicester in the 1970's has agreed to write a piece on the photo and those in it which will appear in due course. in the meantime here is a copy of the photo. included in the party are albert smith of the redditch firm of that name and next to him with the jug ears is a courteney williams, of allcocks.

the next national vintage fishing tackle fair takes place at the abbey stadium on sunday november 16th and bookings for stalls are now being taken on 07980 274 383 or in writing to:

the national vintage fishing tackle fair
P.O Box 63554
LONDON N6 6UY

best regards

john andrews
organiser

l-r: john essex, lloyd brookes and keith elliott

Letters From Arcadia

2008-04-23T07:11:00.002+01:00

click here for the latest LETTER FROM ARCADIA, a regular correspondence between angling's two most original contemporary writers...

On Fishing

2008-04-22T15:31:00.003+01:00

Man's life is but vain;
For 'tis subject to pain,
And sorrow, and short as a bubble;
'Tis a hodge podge of business
And money, and care,
And care, and money and trouble.
But we'll take no care
When the weather proves fair
Nor will we vex now, though it rain;
We'll banish all sorrow
And sing till to morrow,
And Angle and Angle again.

This is Sir Izaak Walton, reeling against consumerism in 1653, still ringing true today (thanks to Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Idle)

Fish Tales.

2008-04-18T16:17:00.004+01:00

The Trout

Chris Yates explores the finer traits of some of Britain's coarse fish.

Casting a fly on a small chalk stream in the west of England, Chris and expert angler Ronnie Butler consider the mysterious ways of the wild brown trout.

listen here

"Behind, Beyond & Beneath The Concrete City" by Ben Myers

2008-04-14T16:28:00.002+01:00

"I find myself increasingly drawn to nature.

Maybe it is something to do with the aging process, maybe it's something to do with living in the city for over a decade but I find myself seeking out the natural world in the most unlikely places.

I've taken to getting on my bike to seek out bodies of water in the city. City ponds. Paddling pools. The odd stream or canal. When I get there I just sit there for a while, staring at water.

And here where I sit at my desk upstairs in a two-bedroom house that I have to move out of in two weeks I get to observe nature at close quarters too as it slowly steals a piece of the city back for itself.

In the summer and autumn a fox often walks across the roof of the kitchen. Sometimes it passes right by my window - so close I could touch it. But it can't see me, and in this state it is perfectly relaxed, perfectly at ease. Sometimes there are two foxes out there, just mooching about. I love city foxes. I love their tenacity and the fact they adapt their lives around humans. I like the fact they share the same scavenger mentality as I do, where one man's refuse is another's treasure trove.

On Friday I saw two pigeons fucking out there. Pigeons stay partners for life, so it was actually quite touching to see. In fact, I felt like something of an intruder, even though it is me who pays the rent. Also, they were nice clean, well-maintained pigeons, not like the dirty little skanks with one rotten foot you see uptown. Did you know that pigeon shit and piss is so acidic that it rots their feet away? Well, you do now. That's why you see so many one-footed piegons: because they've haven't learnt to increase the trajectory of the urination arc.

The overall bird-life is pretty impressive in SE15. I saw one bird one day that made me jump out my seat: "Christ! What is that?" On closer inspection it turned to be a jay, a common sight in English gardens. Shows how little I know about birds. Now I see the much-malligned jay all the time.

There are a lot of neighbourhood cats out there too. One of them visits me regularly. I let her in the window and she sits on my keyboard, typing with her paws. When she starts drooling I have to eject her. I call her Suzy. She comes and goes and asks for nothing but a bit of attention, far less demanding than most humans.

The most exciting wild-life are the wilds parakeets that live in Peckham. I'll write more about them another time, but there are dozens of them that live in the trees in the cemetery and in the park. They're a brilliant yellow-green colour and they're noisy as all hell. You hear them screeching playfully as they swoop overheard. Legend has it they are descendants of parakeets that once belonged to Jimi Hendrix when he live din London in the late 60s. I really hope that story is true. I intend to investigate it further.

I still one day hope to see a grizzly bear in the bushes or maybe a manatee in the pond in the park. Don't rule it out. There are things happening out there, behind, beyond and beneath the concrete city, things that most of us don't even notice. Nature is very slowly reclaiming the land.

I intend to help it out in any way I can."

Check out Ben's site here

2008-04-12T22:56:00.003+01:00

Wouldn't possibly want to point Caught By The River readers in the direction of nefarious internet folks, but if you happen to be in the direction of The Hype Machine you might want to look up 'The Rip' by Portishead - early contender for Record Of The Year already - sounds like The Green Man Festival being headlined by Neu! - yeah, that good.

Fish Tales.

2008-04-10T16:30:00.007+01:00

listen here

The Pike

Chris Yates explores the finer traits of some of Britain's coarse fish.

The tyrant of the river has traditionally been the subject of much controversy amongst coarse anglers. On the banks of a river in Dorset, Chris and rod maker Edward Barder consider its merits.

Edward Barder Rod Company

Angler's Conservation Association

2008-04-10T11:50:00.007+01:00

The ACA has always been proud to have lost only 3 cases in its 60 year history. Sadly, this record is under threat as a court last week ruled in favour of United Utilities in a case we have been fighting on behalf of The Yorkshire Flyfishers Club and Penrith Anglers. For two days in April 2006 raw sewage spilt from a blocked main sewer at the pipe bridge at Penrith, Cumbria, into the river Eamont (a tributary of the Eden), polluting the water and littering the banks with sewage debris. Although the Environment Agency decided at the time that the pollution was a criminal offence under the Water Resources Act 1991, no prosecution was brought against United Utilities. Naturally, we were shocked by the judgement, which, if allowed to stand, effectively means that the utility will have been allowed to pollute the Eamont with no legal consequences whatsoever. We are currently considering, along with the clubs, the grounds on which to lodge an appeal. This is one of four cases we have been fighting against United Utilities in 2008 - one was settled successfully in February.

Elsewhere, we have settled a claim against a farmer in Powys who polluted the River Camlad, a tributary of The Severn, in June 2005. A release of slurry from his farm caused a fish kill and wiped out invertebrate populations. Acting on behalf of the Pheasant Tail Flyfishers and the Camlad Fly Fishers Club, we secured £2,500 in compensation for loss of amenity, divided between the 2 clubs. Again, the Environment Agency failed to bring a criminal prosecution.

Given yesterday's announcement that Severn Trent Water is facing a record £35.8m fine for deliberately providing false information to the regulator and the fact that Southern Water was fined £20.3m for similar offences earlier this year, we are amazed that the Environment Agency is pressing ahead with 'Operator Self Monitoring' plans which would put water companies in charge of monitoring their own environmental performance. The ACA is very concerned that this will lead to less - rather than better - regulation and has raised this at a senior level in the Agency. We will keep up the pressure. For full details on this and the above cases, please see: ACA

The ACA's AGM will this year be held on Friday 20 June in London. More details, including how to vote on any special resolutions, will be included in the ACA annual report, out in late May.

Finally, last year the ACA raised more than £15,000 in auctions at the ACA Masters, our fundraising dinner and in our Annual Report, thanks to the generosity of many individuals, clubs and companies.
As you might be aware, 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the ACA, something which we would very much like to celebrate with you and all our members. We will this year be rolling all our auctions into one, within a special edition of our Annual Report and via our website.

We would be very grateful for any donations to our 2008 auction. It could be a day or two's fishing, some fishing tackle, a stay in a hotel or anything else you feel appropriate. We are looking for a wide range of lots and therefore low value donations are just as welcome as the more expensive items. If you feel you have anything appropriate to donate, please email Seth Johnson-Marshall at seth@a-c-a.org or contact him on 01568 620 447.

We will announce the start of the bidding in the ACA annual report which will be sent to all members in late May - please keep an eye out for your copy.

Best wishes from all at the ACA.

Submerged Timber & Hidden Snags

2008-04-09T07:26:00.010+01:00

Hey Jeff,

Don't know if you got round to reading 'Another Bloody Love Letter' by Anthony Loyd that I threw your way a while ago so I thought I'd send this extract over.
It really is an amazing book. I remember Anthony from dark days in Ladbroke Grove in the early nineties. He was one of those people you don't really know very well but are seemingly always around on the periphries of life and I often wondered what had happened to him. He was quite an enigmatic figure, Eton educated and an ex-army officer somewhat disaffected with his experiences in Desert Storm. He also had a nasty taste for very hard drugs, he was handsome and very kind and he always struck me as something of a lost soul. you know, one of those people that seems to have something missing in the middle of themselves that will never be filled by a girl or a career or any of that normal stuff (I reckon you and I may have known a few rock stars with similar personality traits) so I suppose in retrospect it's no surprise where he ended up.

One day, by chance, I came across a copy of his first book 'My War Gone By, I Miss It So' and was struck dumb. It seemed he had exchanged the pointless and empty opiate soothed days on the Golborne Road for the all too real horrors of the Balkan conflict and finally found a purpose to his life. Maybe it shocked him into finally finding his voice, he obviously feels drawn to the violence and insanity of humanity at it's worst from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, and the The Congo to mention just a few corners of fucking bloody messes on this planet that he has immersed himself in. He seems to find peace among the violence and brutality that blights the worse parts of the world ( and to be just one tenth as honest as Anthony is I also crave these experiences, sort of terrifying but true) But please note, he is no fried rock and roll war junkie in the great 'Dispatches' Vietnam tradition of Tim Page or Sean Flynn, there's no hippie, faux- glamor in his work, just a beautiful and seething honesty and for the reader it can be a little uncomfortable as it's pretty clear that he finds his only peace and sense of self worth in the world of death, blood and fire. He writes with such amazing clarity and beauty that I am often moved to tears. For example, in the introduction to his second book he describes being somewhere near Al- Anbar, Iraq in 2004..

"Behind him, across the river, a dead young American was soaring up to the sky on the floor of a helicopter fuselage, bloody and dirty inside a bag..

The angry and emotional U.S Army PR then asks Anthony if he "got what he was looking for".
I couldn't help but think of my friend Major Jason Ward of the Royal Marines who was also killed in a pointless and unimaginably brutal way chasing ghosts in this ill conceived and messy war of ours and reading this book made me inconsolable in a very theraputic way, it really helped me grieve.
Anyway, to the point, he also likes to fish. This is from chapter 12 of 'Another Bloody Love Letter'...

"They had every advantage over me. Though the river was expansive, and in places more than twenty feet deep, it was filled with weed beds, submerged timber and hidden snags, obstacles known in their finest detail to the fish, who had little trouble in repeatedly breaking my line. And they seemed to time the onset of their feeding hours to the moment when I had drunk the first half-bottle of wine, so that the sudden disaperence of my glowing float would catch me oil-necked, dreamy and unawares, the force of my late and extravagant strike spilling the glass and flipping me untidily into the back of the boat, on to the bait box and cigarettes, as line, float and hook shot up from the water to wreath around my head. Untangling myself, ever surprised, I would cast again, often fishing through until dawn, escaping with the night and the water, the prospect of just one victory each evening over those mighty fish enough for me to defy sleep.
In this place, indulging in the rare, short era of quiet introspection that followed my return from Sierra Leone, the usual build-up of angst that afflicted me in the absence of war assignments was temporarily but totally allayed. Gone too were the heroin cravings...."

I suppose there are a million reasons why people go fishing and they all make sense.

Hope to see you soon,

Neil

tomoland

The Year Of Magical Thinking

2008-04-08T15:12:00.005+01:00

That night the first snow falls, although only a dusting, no avalanching off the roof of St. James', nothing like my birthday a year ago.
My birthday a year ago when he gave me the last present he would ever give me.
My birthday a year ago when he had twenty-five nights left to live.
On the table in front of the fireplace I notice something out of place in the stack of books nearest the chair in which John sat to read when he woke in the middle of the night. I have deliberately left this stack untouched, not from any shrine-building impulse but because I did not believe that I could afford to think about what he read in the middle of the night. Now someone has placed on top of the stack, balanced precariously, a large illlustrated coffee-table book, 'The Agnelli Gardens at Villar Perosa'. Beneath it is a heavily marked copy of of John Lukacs's 'Five Days in London: May 1940' in which there is a laminated bookmark that reads, in a child's handwriting, 'John, happy reading to you - from John, age 7.' I am puzzled by the bookmark, which under the lamination is dusted with festive pink glitter, then remember: the Creative Artists Agency, as a Christmas project every year, 'adopts' a group of Los Angeles schoolchildren, each of whom in turn makes a keepsake for a designated CAA client.
He would have opened the box from CAA on Christmas night.
He would have stuck the bookmark in whatever book was on top of the stack.
He would have had one hundred and twenty hours left to live.
How would he have chosen to live those one hundred and twenty hours?

Joan Didion, 2005

Notes:
I finally got around to reading Joan Didion's memoir, as urged by several friends, last month on a trip to New York. I made a pilgrimage to Strand Books on Broadway and it was the first book I saw on the table. I spent the next two days reading it, mainly on subways, and had to keep tilting my head back against the seat so the tears wouldn't roll down my face. As an investigation of grief I think the book's power resides in its utter lack of sentimentality. Didion is able to turn an almost dispassionate but exacting eye on the unexpected death of her husband John Gregory Dunne and her personal journey through that loss. Perhaps this skill comes from all her years as a journalist spent turning public spectacle into an intensely private experience for the reader. In this particular book she does the reverse, to stunning effect. Julia and I have tickets to see David Hare's adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking at the National Theatre later this month, but I am almost more excited about watching Didion talk at the subsequent Theatre Platform. I don't usually get giddy at the thought of seeing writers in the flesh. This time I will be agog.

Love
Jemma

kitchen sink dramas

Letters From Arcadia

2008-04-08T14:42:00.002+01:00

click here for the latest LETTER FROM ARCADIA, a regular correspondence between angling's two most original contemporary writers...

Fish Tales.

2008-04-05T06:41:00.006+01:00

Chris Yates and Paul Whitehouse go Carp fishing. Listen here.

Letters From Arcadia

2008-04-03T12:10:00.001+01:00

click here for the latest LETTER FROM ARCADIA, a regular correspondence between angling's two most original contemporary writers...

Pike.

2008-04-03T07:52:00.005+01:00

Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads-
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year's black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date:
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: red fry to them-
Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long
High and dry and dead in the willow-herb-

One jammed past its gills down the other's gullet:
The outside eye stared: as a vice locks-
The same iron in this eye
Though its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them-

Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed,
That rose slowly toward me, watching.

Ted Hughes

thanks to Rachel

Record(s) Of The Week.

2008-04-02T11:18:00.011+01:00

no contest (and it's a good week already), this analog africa release is great. Loving the Theme Time Radio Hour comp too.

This is the most exciting new british music that I've heard in ages - her name is Micachu.
She's been recording her album with Matthew Herbert and it's just ace.
Go here for a piece of pure 21st century soul from Erykah Badu. Not heard the rest of the album yet, but love this tribute to the great J Dilla.

(JB)

The National Vintage Tackle Fair

2008-04-01T10:42:00.000+01:00

Fish Tales on The Radio

2008-03-31T06:55:00.006+01:00

Radio 4, Saturday 5th April at 5.45am

Radio 4 is re running CY's "Fish Tale" series, starting this Saturday with the "Carp fishing with Paul Whitehouse" episode.

There were four made in total and if memory serves, the ones to come are, Perch fishing with Tom Fort (whose latest book "Downstream" has just been published), one on Trout fishing and another featuring master rod builder Edward Barder.

Cake By The River

2008-03-29T10:32:00.006Z

Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake

The best rhubarb to use for this cake is early forced rhubarb for it’s sweet, fragrant flavour and also for it’s incredible, vibrant pink colour.

Forced rhubarb is just coming to the end of its season (I know, sorry, outdoor is now available) and in this country is mostly grown in the ‘Wakefield Triangle’ – an area between Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield. Many years ago, the industry grew in West Yorkshire because they were able to use coal from the local pits to heat the forcing sheds and waste wool from the textile industry as fertiliser. After WW2, there were two hundred growers in the area. Now there are only twelve, who struggle to survive against imported produce.

The method of forcing the vegetable came about by chance in the 19th century when a Chelsea gardener left a chimney pot over a plant. Desperate to reach daylight, the stems quickly grew tall to produce succulent and tender rhubarb.

In the Yorkshire Triangle, the rhubarb plants are started off outside in the cold winter months and then moved into dark sheds where the warmth triggers growth by tricking them into thinking that it’s Spring. The lack of light sends them into overdrive and in a frantic search for light they grow like the clappers in the pitch black sheds.

They grow so fast that they can be heard popping and squeaking as the buds and stems are forced upwards. Within weeks they can be harvested – by hand and by candlelight so as not to disturb them. Must be pretty wierd in those sheds!

175g caster sugar
175g butter
3 eggs
175g self raising flour
200g rhubarb
50g light muscovado sugar

Wash the rhubarb, chop the ends off and cut into 2cm chunks. Arrange the pieces in the bottom of a buttered 20cm round cake tin and cover with the light muscovado sugar.
Beat the butter and caster sugar until fluffy and then add the eggs one at a time. If they start to curdle, add a spoonful of flour with each egg.
Fold in the rest of the flour then transfer to the cake tin, on top of the rhubarb. Bake in a medium oven for about 45 mins and allow to cool in the tin for 10 mins before turning out. The lovely pink rhubarb will be on top and the dark sugar will hopefully be sticky and running down the sides!

Wendy Barrett

Rachel Unthank & The Winterset

2008-03-29T07:29:00.006Z

Caught By The River faves (well, mine anyway - JB) have just announced a UK tour

"Music as tough as it is gentle, as ancient as it is modern, and as coldly desolate as it is achingly intimate.. easily more contemporary and stylish than boys in skinny trousers holding electric guitars like it's 1969...They might not end us being the best-selling British all-girl group of all time, but they're well on their way to being the most charismatic and imaginative."

Paul Morley, The Observer

The Pleasures Of........March

2008-03-28T17:39:00.010Z

aka what dipped our floats this month

Tench, 6lb 8ozs, Osterley Park, Sunday 9th March

Shirley Collins article in Mojo
Gavin & Stacey (very sweet & very funny)
Bo Diddley "I'm A Man" - The Chess Masters 1955 - 1958 (Hip O Select)
'Theme Time Radio Hour' with your host Bob Dylan (Ace Records)
The Black Crowes "The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion"
Neon Neon "Stainless Style" (esp ‘Steal Your Girl’)
Hereford Pale Ale, The Plough And Harrow, The Grand Slam
Nick Cave "Dig, Lazurus, Dig!" (how did Nick Cave write the funniest album of the year?)
Harland Miller
MGMT
recipes off the River Cottage website
"Come Back (Story Of The Reds)"
proper Jamaican Red Stripe on sale in Tesco
"How To Be Free" Tom Hodgkinson (I know this was in Feb, but it should be there every month)
Portishead "Dummy" (still sounds amazing)
Chris Yates "Four Seasons"
Tribute from the St Austell Brewery

Rob Bailey..

2008-03-28T15:22:00.008Z

we like your art...

Rob Bailey is one of the most exciting poster designers in Manchester. He had produced an array of brilliant work for Licktronica - Common's electronic/experimental night. Common (39 - 41 Edge Street, Manchester 4) is currently hosting an exhibition of Rob's designs, including a wall mural. Check it out, it's amazing.

posted by Permafrost on mdmarchive

cheers Rofey

Gorsey Lane, Hightown

2008-03-28T04:40:00.006Z

Last bank holiday, we escaped the traffic by meandering down Gorsey Lane hoping then to drive into Sandy Lane and eventually reach Hightown. However, the lane eventually petered out even though the OS Map would lead you to believe otherwise. It was though the local populace had let the trees and bushes grow over the lane to prevent any interlopers discovering their quiet backwater, around the fields of Moss Farm, which lies about half a mile from Hightown.

Colin 3/9/06

at the river's mouth

Chris Yates, England’s most revered and esoteric angler, chats to Kevin Parr about carp, silver tourists and rocket powered boats.

2008-03-27T06:42:00.006Z

Taken from the archives of The Idler

Photographer, author, editor of Waterlog magazine, but foremost a fisherman, Chris Yates has been described in angling circles as a “legend in his own lunchtime”, not least after the capture of a British record carp some twenty years ago, but his enigmatic and private nature has confused many, who label him eccentric and mildly unapproachable.

This latter attribute perhaps affirmed by his initial response to my request for an interview.

“Are you interested?” I said.
“Not really,” he replied, “I’m not interested in anything that resembles work.”

Fortunately, an Idler interview is far from real work and I soon secured an invitation to his cottage in south Wiltshire, with the promise of a pub lunch, afternoon tea and a damn good chinwag.

And so here I am, sitting on a sofa in the most glorious of clutters that is the study of Chris Yates. By one wall a wood burner, which is lit and toiling, on another a huge bookcase that represents five decades of collated paraphernalia, Chris’ desk and chair on the next wall, and finally my sofa. In between the structure is an organised mess of journals, nets and at least a dozen fishing rods - all hand-made split cane, and all probably decades old.
Chris is a single parent of four, and in the next room are two of his children, both sick and off school, but both seemingly content with my presence. Due to this unforeseen bout of illness the pub-lunch could be out of the equation, but Chris is a tea freak, and the second cup is on its way.

CHRIS YATES: And I forgot to strain this one.

KEVIN PARR: Is that mine?

YATES: Yes, but there’s proper tea-leaves in there, you can see them - of course, I remembered to strain mine…

PARR: As you would.

YATES: You can have some fruitcake - it is your cake.

PARR: No, it’s your cake.

YATES: Well it’s my cake now, but it was yours… I’ll cut a couple more slices…

PARR: If you insist.

YATES: …and you should add that we were going to go to the pub, but as this is now “children’s hospital”, we can’t go and leave the patients. Besides I’m actually quite glad we’re not going to the pub…

PARR: It’s definitely off the agenda?

YATES: I think for the minute it is, well an hour - it’s half past one already and, besides, this is a much nicer atmosphere, here in my study. If we were in the pub there’d be clanking about and thinking about what to eat and all that is too much… trouble. (Laughs) It’s never too much trouble deciding what to drink, though, but when you want to have a quiet chat, it could be a bit distracting with all these people coming in from the fields and the woods saying: “Hello Chris, ya seen any big fish recently?!” (Pause)… No I haven’t. No, I haven’t seen a big fish for over a year. Fishing-wise, it’s been a very bad season.

PARR: Yes, likewise.

YATES: Very few carp in the summer - but I did catch my best salmon.

PARR: (Excited) Did you? Where was that?

YATES: It was on the river Tana, in Finnmark, the most northern salmon river in Europe, which flows into the Arctic Ocean… and that was in August. I was in a boat, a little narrow wooden boat.

PARR: Wow.

YATES: It’s probably the best Atlantic salmon fishing in the world, on the river Tana, it’s simply unbelievable. The river flows through Finnmark - that’s Lapland, but they don’t like being called Laps - they’re “Samis”, and I discovered this after a few black eyes. Using the wrong words out there is just bad news.

Anyway, I was willing to put up with the fact that it was meant to be the best salmon and trout fishing in the world. I thought, yes, I can put up with that if I can get to the grayling. Because I’m not a great fan of salmon and trout.

PARR: No.

YATES: They are pushy sort of fish, always jumping about and being far too flashy and showy.

PARR: Definitely - and they’re a bit thick as well.

YATES: Incredibly thick - because they’re like a cruise missile, with the same amount of intelligence, in that they just keep going, no matter what you throw at them, they keep going. Whereas the carp, the carp is the grandmaster of chess. And a barbel… a barbel is a little strange, but they are mysterious in a way that salmon are not, they don’t seem to have too much intelligence but they move in a different way.

PARR: Absolutely, there is more art in catching a barbel than a salmon.

YATES: Indeed, but back to the summer in the far north, I was going for the grayling - that’s what I really wanted, but there were so many salmon in the river I couldn’t get through them to catch the bloody grayling. Every time I cast out I caught one of these stupid salmon - although I did manage a twenty-one pounder.

PARR: So has no one tapped into this gold mine, and exploited the tourism?

YATES: I think a lot of people have known about it but they keep quiet. Germans, and quite a few Swedes were over there, and erm, Americans. But it’s got to be the most productive salmon fishing in the world now, in fact the world record was caught there - eighty pounds - which is a bloody big salmon.

PARR: That’s the size of your desk!

YATES: Yes. (Laughs) It’s a big silver tourist, but they just don’t appeal, not really, they don’t do anything for me.

PARR: No.

YATES: And they are just tourists, you know, they come up river, look around, and go back off to sea again. Some of them don’t make it on the way back, though. They get bored and just roll up and die - just like real tourists. (Laughs) They’ve got to be on the move all the time - they can’t sit still.

PARR: And they’re not even supposed to feed
in freshwater.

YATES: That’s it, to catch them you just provoke them - that’s all you do.

PARR: But I’m sure they would get a little hungry going up river - in contemplation of what they are about to do, (copulate)

YATES: No, it’s just a conditioned reflex. They see a little thing like a fish flash by and they just snap at it. Maybe like a well fed person going for a little piece of pudding.

PARR: Or a second piece of fruitcake.

YATES: Or maybe even a third piece of fruitcake.
And so yet more fruitcake is consumed.

YATES: (Through a mouthful) But, as we were saying, apart from the salmon fishing and trout fishing in places other than England, it’s been a very poor season. And yet I haven’t really minded. I think, perhaps, I’m going through one of those crises that people go through, every now and then, where suddenly fishing has become slightly less important, because there are all sorts of other things going on.

It’s like you’ve reached a fork in the stream, and you think it looks good one way, but it doesn’t look at all fishy. And yet I might find something a bit unusual, where it’s shadowy and murky, and that’s where I’ve gone - I’ve gone up this little side-stream, which is a backwater in life, and I don’t know where it’s going to lead but I like it, and it’s completely unknown to me, where I am at the moment.

I think it’s the first time in my life where I haven’t actually been fishing regularly for over a year - I haven’t been out that often, and yet I’ve been discovering a lot of new things. It’s as if I’ve discovered - blimey, I can do other things in life, other than fish! (Laughs) It’s exciting.

So, I think that’s what’s happened to me - it could be a mid-life crisis, I’m not sure, though I’ve always been rather dubious of the term. I think it’s just a bloody excuse for someone who’s got bored of one thing and think they are too old to take on something new - I don’t think you’re ever too old to start something new.

PARR: Absolutely.

YATES: I got a phone call earlier from a friend of mine, who writes. He’s one of my contributors. He writes about fishing all over the world - mostly in British Columbia, steelhead fishing. He’s actually a very good carp fisherman. He’s caught some big English carp, and he’s probably one of the best fly fishermen I’ve ever seen.

But anyway, he’s not writing for me in this country any more, he met a sculptress when he was in America last year, and she completely bowled him over. And he’s now living with her, and the exciting part of the story - the interesting part of the story, why I say it’s never too late, is that she is probably 34 or 35 and he is 69 - and he said to me, “It has affected my fishing a little bit, but I’ll let it ride for six or seven months and I’ll be back with a rod again.” But right now he’s got other things on his mind, so it’s never too late. (Laughs) And he’s like a little kid - an adolescent - to talk to, there’s nothing like a young woman to make a fool of an old man, but then that’s not entirely true - there’s nothing like a fish to make a fool of any man. But I suppose a woman is the perfect example of how to make a fool of someone.

PARR: But if he is behaving like a kid, then it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think that it is something mistakenly perceived by certain individuals who themselves are in a rut for so many years, that they forget what’s important. They become zombiefied - get up every day, go to work, come home, dinner at the table, watch a bit of television, go to bed - over and over again. Then Saturday morning, wash the car - Sunday, mow the grass.

YATES: (Interrupts loudly) Saturday afternoon, listen to the football commentary…

PARR: Yes, of course.

YATES: …there are some things that even a really boring person can do to liven up their Saturday.

PARR: And Wednesday nights as well.
(Tonight is the Premiership clash between Southampton and Middlesbrough - live on Radio Solent)

YATES: Oh, and Wednesday nights… Occasionally. But only when Southampton are playing well.

PARR: I’ve got to admit I’m optimistic.

YATES: I think it could be a good evening. I’m going to put some champagne on ice - or at least I would do if I had any champagne.

PARR: You could have a Glenmorange, perhaps…

YATES: Oh yes, a Glenmorange would do. I’ll pour two glasses, but we won’t be drinking them until the end of the match - you might have to stay until 10 o’clock, what with injury time.(Laughs)
It is interesting, though, getting back to this idea of the way people age. I don’t think people do age, actually - I think people perceive that they are ageing, and they imagine that they are ageing, and you’ve only got to see a fisherman - sorry a fisherperson…

PARR: That’s a bit non-PC… (Laughs)

YATES: Sorry, you’ve only got to be an angler
to realise that there is no age involved.

There’s experience, certainly, but age simply doesn’t matter.

Take my old mate Bernard Venables, who did in fact die in the end - which was a big surprise, we all thought he was going to be a hundred - he was still keen on the idea of going fishing on his ninety-fourth birthday, just as he had been on every birthday that I can remember. In fact, we celebrated his ninetieth birthday with a pike fishing trip to the Dorset Stour, and he caught a double figure pike. And he was using a multiplier reel, you know, and casting all bloody day - but he got one, and it wasn’t a great day for fishing, it was a bit cold and he did get a bit cold towards the end, but he was determined that he would get one. And that was his ninetieth birthday. I think that’s a good example to anyone.

PARR: Definitely.

YATES: And he was like a kid. We came back here, and, actually, he was sitting there that day more or less. (Smiles) I, realising he is referring to me, am extremely humbled - Bernard Venables, to the uninitiated, is a godfather of angling - though I don’t think I look ninety. He was sitting where you are sitting - and we were talking about it just like two kids who come rushing in after a day off school… “Wasn’t it great?… Cor… The way that fish went…” and we lost a couple, and we caught a couple and we were damn cold, “get that stove up - come on I’m gonna freeze to death.” All this and he was bloody ninety.

So I don’t think you do get old, though obviously the joints start to ache a little bit, but you’ve just got to fight that and laugh at that and not care or at least not really care…

PARR: (Laughs)

YATES: Well obviously you’ve got to care (Laughs). But it happens to kids as well. Like my little daughter who fell out of the tree yesterday, and she’s suffering more than I am at the moment, with aches and pains, and that’s why she’s got the day off school.

PARR: That was a ruse I never tried - to get the day off school.

YATES: What, falling out of a tree?

PARR: Yes.

YATES: I, er, had a special, secret method - a secret recipe for getting off school, which, fortunately, I have revealed to my boys, so that I now know they can never get away with it - and that was the secret of the vomit. And when it was a very serious day - like a French or maths exam, I used to make up some vomit from sandwich spread, all sorts of paste and things like that, lots of tomatoes and diced up carrots - there was always lots of carrots. And I’d mix it up in a bowl, secretly, when no-one was in, and keep it in a jar somewhere - but you’d have to keep it for a few days so it started to get properly rank - fermenting - and then this is the middle of the night- suddenly you go haring across the landing - bang, bang, bang, bang, making lots of noise in the loo and pull the chain and sit there going:(falsetto) “Oh Mummy - I’ve been sick, oh, sorry I’ve made a bit of a mess on the landing carpet” - (pantomime dame) “Oh God, no - oh you poor thing - go back to bed”. And she’d be scraping it up and scrubbing it down at three in the morning, and I’d have a day off school.

PARR: Superb!

YATES: I only did it three or four times, between the ages of twelve and fifteen, when you hate school more than anything else - it becomes serious then.

PARR: Yes it does.

YATES: So each time I used a different mix, and my mother never twigged, and I got off my French O-level mock, I got off the end of term maths exam, and there was something else - a bully that was waiting for me that day, “I’m gonna get you tomorrow Yates!” - but he never did, he got bored when I didn’t show up.

So the sick saved me, and naturally I went fishing on those days too.

My parents were both teachers, and in the morning I would insist that they went to their respective schools, even though I wasn’t well enough to go to mine. And as soon as they had left the drive I’d be on my bike.

I used to call them “hiding days” - because I would hide from the world, and those days were really important. I think the idea of having a day off, escaping, while everyone else was busy - poor bastards, and there you are with a day off, and you’ve got a fishing rod and a pond and no-one knows you’re there. You have the whole world to yourself; in fact it was as if you owned the world because it was only you there. I know it couldn’t last and the next day you’d be behaving like a sprat with all the other sprats getting washed out with the morning tide and washed back again with the evening tide, but you knew that some days you could behave like a fish other than a sprat and avoid the tide and go out to sea and do something adventurous. Go somewhere else.

At this point Chris was summoned next door to the children’s ward, where the patients required food and drink. I took advantage of this opportunity and nipped outside for a cigarette and a nose around the garden.

The Yates’ residence is certainly idyllic. Set against a steep wooded bank on one side of a valley, that offered views of classic Southern downland, grazed by sheep and quartered regularly by buzzards. The garden itself was kept as a cottage garden should be - low maintenance naturalization. Overgrown, strewn with discarded toys and fashioned wooden weapons (the bow and arrow, I later discovered, was one of Chris’ efforts), with a worryingly unprotected well near the front door, and no apparent boundaries with the countryside.
It was refreshing to see well trodden paths cutting into the trees behind the house, Chris’s children certainly made the most of their spacious habitat, and didn’t need “Tekken 2″ or “Pokemon” in order to stretch their own imaginations.

Cigarette finished, I returned to the study to the sound of the kettle boiling yet again…

PARR: During the Seventies, when you spent half of your life fishing at Redmire pool. Did you think to yourself: “My goal is to catch the biggest carp ever”, or did it just happen like that?

YATES: No, No. At that time, the fishing at Redmire, which was probably the best carp fishing in the world was restricted to ten people who were allowed to fish it. It was incredible that I managed to worm my way in. Actually it was a pretty low trick I played to get in, but I won’t tell that story now, I’ll save it for another day.

PARR: A sequel, perhaps?

YATES: But anyway, I was one of ten, and we fished it in rotation. So three anglers would fish it for a week, and you would have to wait for two weeks before you were there again. And then there was the bloke that ran the syndicate, Jack Hilton, who was the tenth man and he could fish whenever he liked - which of course meant, you never saw him. Because he had that absolute freedom, he never went, and because I only had one week in three, I always went. And I would fish from Sunday to Sunday, for seven weeks every summer, until the beginning of November. When the leaves fell, I wasn’t interested - that wasn’t carp fishing for me. So I lived at Redmire for 7 or 8 weeks, every year for seven years.

PARR: And that would be your priority? You wouldn’t let a work deadline encroach your fishing time?

(At the time Chris Yates was a photographer of some note - the majority of his work designing album and book covers)

YATES: (Slightly shocked) No. No. No. I would phone people up, a new client maybe, and they would come around and really love my work, and I would have to say to them - “Before we talk about jobs, there is something you should know - I am a photographer, but before that and above that, I am a fisherman, that comes first.” Some of them would look aghast, and say, “we can’t do business then - we’re wasting one another’s time,” and off they’d go. But the good one’s would say, “That’s great - you can come and tell me some fishing stories between jobs.”

But I’d always say that - first I’m a fisherman - then I’m a photographer.

And then I’d be offered a new job and clients would say, “Look, you’ve got a three week deadline on this.”

And I’d say, “Well I’m off to Redmire tomorrow.”
“Redmire? Ahhhh…”

There was no argument. They would just say, “Will you have time when you come back - to read the novel and do the cover?”

“Yes… there’s bound to be time…”

So, yes, Redmire did become my second home - actually my first home, the one with bricks was my second home. And I think I got to know it better than anyone else, I just loved being there.

PARR: Did you feel less pressure than other people actually to catch fish?

YATES: Definitely. I didn’t need to be fishing; I just needed to be at that place. But other people, who had proper jobs and less time, felt the need to catch fish. They had to make it worth their while, whereas I didn’t care.

And to make it worth their while, they were always talking of the monster fish. I was happy to talk about the monster, but I think I was the only one not really concerned about catching the record, because that was just a dream. And while I was happy for that dream to swim around my head, I wasn’t that keen on making it a reality, because I so enjoyed absorbing myself in the very special atmosphere of Redmire - it was a magical place.
The others, though, were very keen to catch the record and become the new Dick Walker, who had held the record since 1952, so it was odd when I broke the record - smashed it to pieces - because I was the one who perhaps least wanted it. Of course I did want it when it ended up in my net, and I saw it - I was thrilled - it was a huge event in my life, but it didn’t change the way I thought about fishing.

PARR: It was also a fish that caused controversy because the British record fish committee refused to acknowledge it - I was young at the time, though, so I can’t remember why.

YATES: Oh, it was stupid - totally absurd. It was so laughable. The reason it wasn’t accepted was due to confusion some years before over a record roach, that wasn’t a roach - it was a rudd. They are difficult to identify if you don’t know what to look for - if you’re not a fisherman they look just
the same.

So they made this rule- rule 4b (Laughs) - and they wouldn’t accept anything that wasn’t absolutely kosher - they decreed that a record had to be witnessed by a committee member.

I had five separate witnesses, photographs - we were all experienced carp fishermen. And finally I said, why should we worry about rule 4b, or was it 3b, about confusion of species. - Is this a gudgeon (laughs)? There was only gudgeon in redmire other than carp, so of course it was a bloody carp, and anyway this was a secret location, we weren’t allowed to take outsiders in - which was great. The world was not allowed to encroach on Redmire, so they couldn’t have come in anyway. Unless, perhaps, they were in a sack, and we smuggled them in. (Laughs)

So I’m sorry but you have to accept it. There it is. There I am with it. Here are my witness statements, to say that I have caught it. Here are the scales, and it weighed 511/2 lbs.

And because the British Record Fish Committee were so bloody-minded, because we hadn’t adhered to their particular rule, they rejected it, and as a result everyone gave up on them. So Dick Walker, the previous record holder, who was incidentally delighted that I had beaten his fish, more so because I had caught it on a split cane rod that he had made in 1952 - particularly poetic. Anyway he created a new record fish collective, that was more representative of the time, and that became the one people took more notice of.

PARR: And now at last the record lists have united.

YATES: Yes, finally. Fifteen years or so later, and at last I got my prize, anything I wanted from a Barbour catalogue. And if it hadn’t been such a good prize I would have thrown it back at them, but I thought bugger it, I may as well get a new coat. (Laughs)

The pub is now definitely out - last orders are long gone, but Chris offers to cook me lunch which he prepares. His speciality, no less. Of course the kettle is soon whistling again, and I have a few minutes to myself in Chris’s study. The bookcase is hard to ignore. There are two main themes in Chris’s library - fishing, obviously, and modern poetry, of which there are countless examples. There are more than just books to investigate, however. A scattering of photographs, all seemingly personal to Chris, various trinkets and scraps of scrawled thought, a pile of fishing reels, some over eighty years old, and a packet of dried beans which form the ammunition for Chris’s blowpipe.

What is clear, however, is that this array of memories and accoutrements is arranged for no one’s benefit other than that of their owner. This is no public museum, but a writer’s workplace and inspiration - not that this writer would object to the occasional snooper.

PARR: So after the leaves fell in autumn - what would you do?

YATES: As a child - when the fishing stopped, we would find other things to do with water. Making boats, building dams, splashing around, but not in the winter. In my teenage years, we used to build rocket boats, through the winter we would be designing them, and then during the closed season, when we went out to spot fish, we would round off the day, by having a little regatta.

PARR: So what were the boats made from?

YATES: Carpet tubes - packed with sodium chlorate & sugar, and we fixed fins to them- so they looked like sharks. Some of them would be doing thirty or forty miles an hour, bouncing along the lake- bom, bom, bom and then BANG!! They would explode, and of course because they were made from carpet tubes, they would always either blow up or burn up, and all our hard work would be gone. We sometimes put passengers in them too, normally freshwater mussels, but once we had a toad as a pilot, and I’m afraid he probably didn’t survive the experience. But we wanted something that would last, something that we could re-use. So we considered developing an electric motor. A friend got hold of an oxyacetylene cylinder, we sawed the end off it, and we decided to test it in my parents’ garden.

So we dug a hole, filled it with sodium chlorate and sugar, and fixed a long fuse, which ran behind a bank in the garden. We surrounded the launch site with bits of old iron-mongery, to absorb any big flash, and there was also a garden roller and a windshield from an old scooter I had. Then we lit the fuse, which made a lovely noise, a soft roar, and flames leapt from it, we were thinking, “this is gonna be good.” But suddenly it stopped, and I thought, “eh?”. There must have been five pounds of rocket mixture in the cylinder and it had only been going for a few seconds. What had gone wrong?

Then there was a fizzing sound, like someone struggling with the top of a warm bottle of beer, and all of a sudden the most fantastic explosion, which shook the garden. The garden roller, which must have weighed a few hundred pounds just went high into the air over a laburnum tree and landed on my neighbours lawn with a dirty thud. The windshield simply disappeared, and the top of the cylinder vanished through a red streak into the ionosphere and came down miles away. There were bits of earth and turf coming out of the sky for a long time afterwards, and the bang was so loud it registered 1.8 on the Richter scale at Greenwich.

PARR: (Laughing) Bloody hell!

YATES: And the Home Office came round the next day, and we were in serious, serious trouble. So after that we decided to stop building rocket boats and go back to passive fishing.

PARR: That is a good story.

YATES: And if you don’t believe me, then you can check the police records. I was originally charged with “causing an explosion with intent”, which wasn’t fair, we were being creative, not destructive. But eventually it was lessened to “illegal manufacture of an explosive mixture”, for which I got twenty pounds costs and a two year conditional discharge.

I must add that this was a long time ago, when I was young and irresponsible.

LUNCHTIME

It’s a little late for lunch, having gone three, but I’m not complaining. A bottle of wine is opened and Yates’ speciality fish dish is certainly worth waiting for. An old family recipe, I’m told, that Chris actually invented about a year ago.

We talk on, but a little more personally. Since that first telephone call a friendship has begun to develop, but the topics of conversation have generally revolved around Chris. So I talk about myself a little, and Chris listens, before discussing subjects sensitive to him. That his marriage suffered due to his angling obsession, he is in no doubt, though he remains philosophical. He knew deep down that every time he reached for his rods he was chinking away at his wife’s resolve, and yet he couldn’t not go. Fishing is an affliction, for which there is no cure. If you resist the urge, then you are worse off, for your eyes close to a mirage of bobbing floats and rippled water until you go quite mad. So you just keep going, even if it costs you twenty years’ marriage.

All too soon the afternoon had passed, school and college had finished and there were now four children demanding their father’s attention. I made for home and listened to the football on my own. Southampton drew, so the Glenmorange remained uncorked, though I understand it saved Chris’ life on the final day of the season. He went fishing with a friend in a wind that blew hard from Siberia, and they were minutes from becoming frozen statues, until Chris remembered that bottle of single malt in his creel.

Archipelago

2008-03-26T08:49:00.005Z

Dear Reader,

I am delighted to inform you that ARCHIPELAGO Issue Two will be available in the first week of April 2008.

To speak geographically, Issue Two ranges from Donegal, Derry and Antrim to Scotland, via Galloway, Skye and Cromarty, to descend into England at Filey Brigg. It delays a few days to explore the Wash (neither sea nor land), then puts out again to round the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts. As it progresses it turns the archipelago this way and that, celebrating it across a host of literary, artistic, linguistic, historic, political and topographical trajectories and perspectives.

Please visit the Website for more information
on contributors and to download an order form to reserve your copy.

With best wishes

Andrew McNeillie
CLUTAG PRESS

More Pike Fishing On Lake Windermere;

2008-03-25T19:23:00.005Z

the final part of Andrew's the Lake District adventure;

I’d love to be able to describe exactly what happened and how I skilfully played the fish, but it’s a blur. Initially relief that I’d not missed the run, but panic that I’d not set the hook properly. A flurry of reeling and the knowledge that a fish bigger than I've ever previously felt had my hook in its mouth, was pretty pissed off and wanted to get away. Some time passed, I've no idea how long and we finally see the angry pike swirling and splashing just below us. Rich skilfully nets it and it’s in the boat. Now, between me and you, this is the bit I'm dreading. Catching the dangerous mother is one thing, but dealing with it another. I look at Rich, and with a sinking feeling hear the words, 'Your fish, you deal with it.' He helpfully flicks the hook out of its mouth with his fingers and with blatant disregard for their safety. I start to inwardly panic. He then places it a sack, lowers it over the side and lets it get its breath back before we release it. I have a few minutes respite, but soon enough it’s back in the boat. Rich shows me how to slip my hand under its gills and grab it by its chin bone (or whatever technical term). This doesn't seem so bad. I mean my hand might be in its mouth, but I've entered from its throat and I'm nowhere near its teeth (or so I hope). I'm not exactly comfortable, and I'm trying to take the bulk of its weight on my knee

Rich takes a few snaps and I plead with him to take it off me. Somewhere during this I remember stretching my fingers to get a better grip. They must have gently brushed the pike's teeth as when Rich finally relented and helped me release the fish, there was blood coming from all of the fingers on my right hand. I haven't mentioned before, but one of the few things I know about pikes is that they have anti-coagulates in their saliva. They bite their prey and even if it tries to get away, there's a clear trail of blood to follow. Sure enough, the blood flow from my fingers doesn't want to stop. I ask Rich, if it wouldn't be better to wear a glove on the hand that you put in the pike's mouth and get that look of disdain you'd get if you tried to order a half on a Friday night in any Northern town. Not the done thing apparently. Although I do then notice that the so-called pro on the front of 'Pike and Predator' seems to be wearing chainmail over his hands.

My drama is quickly followed by another one of Rich's successful strikes. He brings in a 16lb pike pretty quickly and shows me again how to unhook and handle the fish safely. The irony is that as the fish swims away from the boat we notice Rich's little finger is bleeding profusely. Gloves all round next time? (Obviously not)

We’re so contented with the fish that have been in the boat that we both spend the next few hours dozing. I open one eye from time to time to appreciate the surroundings, but on the whole the gentle rocking motion of the boat keeps luring me back to sleep. The next time I awake I see Rich strike, but unfortunately he’s a little too late. I then get a run, but inexplicably (not really - just lack of skill) also miss. I think we both miss again, and maybe its my turn when we again hear the sound of line leaving a reel, but in all honesty, I'd rather see another fish in the boat than get that sinking feeling that comes with another missed run. And besides, Rich has been more than generous, if not completely altruistic with our alternate strike deal. To prove my decision entirely correct, within minutes another 14lb pike is in the boat.

A few beers later, followed by a much better nights sleep, its Sunday Morning. We awake to find a mist, possibly even a dense fog, has descended on the lake.

We head out, but it’s difficult to navigate with visibility at only about 50 yards. We put out the rods in a spot we've guestimated is about right, just by an island, but we're not hopeful. After an hour or 3 (time has by now become meaningless) the mist/fog slowly lifts and a pike jumps about 100 yards from the boat. You wouldn't think it was possible. A huge dinosaur launching itself out of the water and sending ripples for as far as the eye could see. As with all fisherman, I instantly panic about the prospects of this being over. I phone my parents who are kindly providing home cooking before I return to London. With a sigh of relief I let Rich know that a late lunch is okay and we look at the rods with a renewed hope. Conditions now feel perfect and after witnessing the flying pike, we sense that there's going to be one more monster in the boat before we have to return to civilisation.

We pack up the rods as slowly as possible, even leaving the last bait out a little longer as we have a final look at our beautiful surroundings. Unfortunately, its not to be, but I have consolation in that thought that there'll be other times. But maybe rent a cottage?

Andrew Walsh

Pike Fishing On Lake Windermere;

2008-03-24T08:25:00.015Z

here's the first part of a Lake District adventure, that Andrew took back in February;

I've been meaning to go fishing with my friend Rich for a few years now. Fishing for me has usually been a fair weather sport. Lazily watching a float on an estate lake type of affair, the vague dream of a carp making it slide from view. This was to be a whole new experience. Freezing cold weather and fishing for prehistoric beasts with loads of sharp teeth. Finally, just after Christmas, we put a date in the diary and decide to stick to it. Whilst flicking through the paper on the train journey, I see a picture of a cormorant eating a 3ft pike. Clearly a lucky omen. Rich meets me at the station and we nip back to his to pick up the boat. I'm not sure what to expect, but it’s basically a one-man tent on top of a small motorboat. 10ft long at the most. Rich has been busy with preparations and the boat is laden with food, warm clothing, tackle and baits.

As we're driving up through the stunning scenery that leads into the Lake District, Rich points out kestrels to me whilst letting me know that the conditions are looking good. There's a 15mph wind from the southwest and the sky is overcast. The temperature is about 9 degrees. Tonight will apparently be an almost full moon.

On arrival we don fleecy adult baby grows. I immediately become attached to mine and insist on keeping it. (Probably the less said the better). More layers of waterproofs and we're ready for off. We launch the tiny motorboat next to a sign that says no launching of motorboats.

Rich heads towards one of his favourite spots and I enjoy the amazing views and surge of pleasure in the knowledge that I'm out of London, phone turned off, in the middle of a lake, about to hunt for monsters. By early afternoon we're fishing. The water is crystal clear and you can see down to depths of well over 10ft. I keep expecting to see pike swim past I’m that confident we’ll catch. We have 6 rods out (Jeff – Rich has 2 rod licences so we're legal!) with a variety of dead baits including mackerel, smelt and lamprey. We're fishing on the bottom at various depths between 20 and 40ft. The deal is we'll take turns in striking at runs. Rich will go first to show me how it’s done. No bite alarms, just sitting waiting and listening for the sound of a reel.

We only have to wait 20 minutes and we're rewarded. It’s a more frenzied strike than I'm used to seeing, as Rich ensures that the hook is set. Within 5 minutes he's brought a monster into the boat. An 181⁄2lb beast. Its beautiful and yet, extremely vicious looking. My first big pike up close.

Rich handles it with the utmost care and extreme ease, even hugging it against his waterproofs to calm it when it tries to wriggle from his grasp. Easier said than done when you see the endless rows of razor sharp teeth throughout its gaping mouth. After the photos and weighing we relax with a beer. Rich is incredibly relieved that we've had a big fish and that my journey from London hasn't been wasted. I assure him that just being there would have been enough, but we both know that's not entirely true.

About an hour later, the slow hiss of line leaving a reel interrupts my thoughts. I strike and feel the pleasant weight of a fish on the other end. It swims off and puts up a fight, but I sense that its nothing like the monster we've just witnessed. The tackle we're using is fairly heavy, so without too much trouble, I bring the fish to the surface. This excites Rich no end who informs me that the small pike I think I've hooked on mackerel is actually a giant brown trout. (A ferox). Apparently in over 10 years he's never managed to catch one and he's delighted to have it in the boat. Despite the fact it would comfortably feed a family of 10, we put the 8 1/2lb beauty back.

Another a beer and I wonder aloud how I'm going to pee. A tricky affair in a small boat involving the other person needing to go to the opposite side to balance you. Definitely not something to try in the dark after many more beers. As we've already had a brilliant evenings fishing we decide to head back to a bay where we'll sleep for the night. We eat a delicious dish of Italian meatballs that Rich cooks on the boats tiny, but functional stove. The sleeping arrangements are cramped but no less comfortable than a small tent and we settle down for an early night.

After struggling to initially sleep due to Rich's snoring I'm woken up around 4am by other fishermen arriving and launching their boats. It starts to get light so we drink tea and prepare to set off. As we start the motor we drift behind another fishing boat also leaving our bay. Amazingly (to me at least) it kills it lights and motor, allows us to pass and then doubles round behind us. I have no idea what's going on, but Rich informs me that it's just somebody paranoid about protecting their favourite swim. I know that anglers can be protective of their favourite fishing spots, but the clandestine nature of this behaviour seems excessive to say the least. I mean, the lake is 12 miles long.

We arrive at another swim that has been productive for Rich in the past and by 7am we're fishing. I am by now feeling slightly guilty that Rich is doing all of the work. I try and make amends with bacon and egg sandwiches which doesn't quite do the trick as Rich allocates dealing with the anchor to me. This involves dragging about 50 yards of soaking wet rope attached to heavy lumps of metal at fairly regular intervals. That said, there’s a sense of achievement when the anchor is finally up, and it certainly helps me to keep warm.

We’re fishing for about half an hour and Rich lands another fish. Only 12lb this time. Its hardly photographed as we’re becoming pretty complacent about the fact there’ll be more. Sure enough, another run and this time it’s my turn.......

AW

The Lost Estate Lakes.

2008-03-24T05:51:00.014Z

Andrew & I were left devastated this week when we found out that our favorite fishing spot had closed it's doors to anglers.
That really isn't an understatement, this place was special. We have had some great and memorable times there. We've caught big fish, but we've seen bigger. We've caught sod all and it hasn't mattered. The place is mysterious, beautiful and secluded and as good as secret. I've fished there with only deer for company. But now it's gone and it's secrets will remain. The lakes are set in the (enormous) grounds of Heythrop House, on the edge of the Oxfordshire Cotswolds. The house, which was once very grand, is now a hotel and conference centre. A pure Fawlty Towers one at that. It had previously been a private home, a Jesuit college and from 1970 until the mid 90's I believe, the training centre for the Nat West Bank. The right to fish there was taken away during the Nat West years but reopened when the hotel took over. Now, they want another nine holes on their golf course. Not even the chance of one last cast. Golf is a four letter word. (JB)

Stewart Moss shares his memories of Heythrop Park lakes;

The story begins way back in the 1700's. Charles Talbot, the 12th Earl of Shrewsbury commissioned a magnificent house deep in the Oxfordshire countryside, to be surrounded by equally indulgent parkland. The custom of the time was for such estates to feature an ornamental lake, and this one was no exception. The classic strategy of damming a stream was utilised, with a cotswold stone bridge spanning the dam, with a smaller lake below ending in a pretty little waterfall.

Fast forward almost 300 years to the 1970's when I first set eyes on the lakes as boy on a family outing. But it wasn't until the late 1990's when I first cast a line into the lakes, beginning to taste success with some of the old carp in the lakes a couple of seasons later.

The top lake was the more popular, being more carefully manicured, easier to fish, and boasting a large number of fairly easy-to-catch carp. But it was the bottom lake which really enchanted me, being the epitome of an old overgrown estate lake. It was plainly neglected, hopelessly overgrown, with awkward banks & lots of submerged fallen branches - all helping to create a seductive 'shroud of mystery'.

I imagined it had changed little through the centuries, and who knows what handsome old carp lived in its coloured water? Most of the lake was thickly masked by a series of stunning old Beech trees, and punctuated in the gaps with hawthorns, Brambe, Birch and Alders. With some of the surrounding terrain also heavily wooded, the lake was a haven for wildlife - Deer, Foxes, Badgers, Buzzards, Barn Owls, Kingfishers etc all made frequent visits along the waters edge. The water itself was mostly shallow (save the dam end), with a few patches of Lily & Reedmace, and was usually quite coloured - with a bed of thick silt, sprinkled liberally with old beech twigs & branches. Fish species included carp, bream, tench, roach, perch & pike. All in all it was a stalker's dream - and I soon discovered that on occasion, the carp liked a floater in the sun...

I did not fish the lake hard - it was not the sort of place which deserved such twentieth century pressure; instead making occasional short forays, mostly stalking and surface fishing over a period of several seasons. The carp were not particularly hard to catch if you were very quiet, and a few mates and I did well. The carp were not huge, mainly ranging between 10 and 20 pounds, but all were gorgeous old Oxfordshire carp, mostly commons but with a few stunning chestnut and gold Mirrors mixed in. A discreet little syndicate was formed.

Although not strictly allowed, a few day ticket anglers (and some even without tickets) from the top lake began wandering down to the lake from this time on. Sadly, this coincided with the first appearance of litter at the lake - breadbags, coke cans, sweetcorn tins etc; which was extremely disappointing at such a beautiful lake. Sometimes mankind's filth never ceases to amaze.

I will describe (with the aid of my diary from the time) one of a few treasured fishing memories of the lake. An evening floater fishing session, when I arrived at about 5.30pm and spend a good while first scouting round the lake looking for targets - climbing fallen trees & pushing through undergrowth. Having chosen a swim I spent about 45 mins getting a group of fish feeding confidently on pieces of floating crust - It was apparent that the smaller Mirrors were feeding avidly, but the bigger fish are only glimpsed fleetingly, travelling thru the swim without stopping to feed for any length of time. Finally I decided to start fishing - after one of the bigger fish, and I was able to gently move the bait away from interested smaller fish - the carp were competing with each other for crusts so were not unduly alarmed by this. However, a particularly rapid moving mirror was to quick for me and hooked itself, making a right commotion in the swim before I could land him! It weighed about 7lb and I cursed myself as another 30mins feeding were required before I got a 'competition' situation going again.

With my crust back in position, it seemed that only a group of three smallish mirrors were in the area, greedily slurping, when out of nowhere a much bigger fish rose from the murk, circled my crust, and then (with my heart banging in my mouth), engulfed the bait. Waiting until the big common turned to go, I whacked him, and he sank into the deeps quite lazily, as if he didn't realise what was going on.

But this soon changed and an exciting scrap ensued. To the left of me a rod length was a very large bush, with a whole maze of trailing branches in the water, extending about 15 feet from the bank - the bush also ringed by debris and weed beds. To my right, about two rod lengths was a fallen tree, which is right across the lake, bank to bank! If the carp reaches either snag its curtains! The carp's first real run was flat out towards the bush - using maximum side strain I slowed him down, then stopped him dead just as he was reaching the bush. The water under the branches boiled, debris and clouds of silt colour the water, and a stalemate for a few seconds (but seems like minutes) occurred - the carp trying to reach safety with every sinew of energy, versus me and a carp rod in full battle curve! I won though, and he grudgingly eased into open water. After an arm aching 10minute scrap the common was netted without to much difficulty, hooray!

I carried the common clear of the brambles and twigs & steeply sloping bank to the edge of the field behind, and quickly unhooked him on the mat. A quick selftimer photo on the digital and he was released unharmed, to swim free again. I took particular care to give the common plenty of time to recover in the margins, before he kicked strongly and glides away. What pleased me most is the sensational condition of the fish, a scale perfect mix of chestnut, bronze and honeysuckle...and almost certainly an uncaught fish too, weighing just over 17lb.

Now sadly I hear the lakes are closed to fishing (again), due to expansion of the estate golf course from 9 to 18 holes. A huge shame, but I guess all good things come to an end, and they can't take away the memories of those that have enjoyed it! Looking on the bright side, the lake will become sealed within the course, and apart from a few golf balls, should get another rest for a while....

In Carver Country.

2008-03-22T08:47:00.006Z

By Greg Ames.

When his first collection of short stories was published, I was a young associate professor at the University of Buffalo. This was back in 1976 or 1977, I think. We'd all read the book in hardcover and couldn't stop talking about it. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? The laconism of those sentences, the casual humor, etc. We knew it was a masterpiece.

We scurried to our desks to write short stories, hoping some of his genius would rub off on us, but his style was impossible to copy. You just ended up sounding really stupid. Here you've got a teenager named Earl in a Laundromat folding his shorts, or you've placed an Arlene on a Tilt-a-Whirl up in Washington state. And then what? We sipped our coffees and shook our heads.

But Christ. I was dying to write one. My friends were all dying to write one too. A Carver story. We were not ashamed to admit it. And worse, we were reading our meager efforts out in public. In the late 1970s, open fiction readings were pretty popular in Buffalo. There wasn't much else to do during the ball-shrinking months of winter. I still remember the night Tony Pelosi sauntered up to the microphone at The Verb and read an "original" story. Nobody in the audience knew what to make of the narrator who was a forty-year-old man reclining on a cot in his mother's ranch house, chain-smoking Merits and asking things like "What's the weather like in Tonawanda?" and "How much are you asking for that color console?" But hell. We all clapped like crazy when old Tony finished up, even though we were pretty embarrassed for him.

Snow fell relentlessly outside the bar's plate glass window. Red and green Christmas lights blinked off and on above the bar. I drank eleven cups of draft beer. Soon it was my turn to read. My piece -- "Hand Me My Pajamas, Honey" -- didn't go over much better. Hell.

We were in hell. Carver hell. We couldn't break the ties. Every time I thought I had gotten over him, moved on, found my own voice, I would write a few sentences that were undeniable rip-offs. And I'd bury my face in my hands. But I wasn't the only one struggling. Every young professor in our department wanted to be a writer. One guy was a Beckett fanatic, of course, there's always one of those types lurking around, but he kept mostly to himself -- his clothes always smelled of gasoline, as I recall -- and he ended up committing suicide in 1984. His suicide note read: "I can't go on. I really mean it this time." But Carver was the ghost that haunted us more than any other writer.

So a few of us started a support group, using the twelve steps and traditions laid down by Bill W., the founder of A.A. The first meeting was held at my house on a Tuesday night in 1985. We called it the "So Much Raymond So Close to Home" group. As chairperson, I read the Daily Reflections and How It Works, replacing the word "Carver" for "alcohol" when appropriate. Then I welcomed any first-timers and out-of-towners. Nobody said anything. "You're in the right place," I said. After that, we went around the room and introduced ourselves. The first meeting was not very well attended. It was just me and Barry Stein from the PhD Comp. Lit. department at the University of Buffalo. So instead of sharing in the traditional sense, we just sat on the folding metal chairs, sipped our coffees and talked back and forth.

"You know, I have never even been to the Pacific Northwest," Stein said, rolling his Styrofoam coffee cup between his palms. "And yet I dream about it. Every god damn night." He shook his head. "And fishing! I hate fishing. I wake up in the morning and I can smell pike on my hands."

I nodded my head. Sure, we'd all been there. Pike on the hands. "Go on, Myers," I said, stubbing out my cigarette on the chair beside me.

"What?" Stein said, turning to me. "What did you say?"

"Go on. It's just an expression," I said. "It means I'm listening," I said.

"But you called me Myers," he said, holding up his hands. "Why did you call me Myers?" he said.

"No, I didn't," I said, holding up my hands. "I didn't call you Myers."

He shrugged. And he tried to get it talked out. "I just need to get it talked out," he said, shaking his head.

"Talk it out," I told him and shrugged. "Who's stopping you?"

"I can't do my own work, my research." He looked at me and sighed. Stein had spent the last three years working on a biography of Nikolai Gogol. Raymond Carver was the bear in his path. "I thought I would have accomplished so much more by now. But it's the little things that get to me." He swirled the coffee in his cup. "Things are bad," he said. "Things are real bad."

"Tell me about it," I said. "It's really something," I said.

He seemed desperate. "Maybe I need to take a trip somewhere," he sighed. "A little vacation. You know, to clear my head."

It was then that I had the idea. "What say we climb into one?"

Stein gave me a look. You know that look that Stein gets? He gave me that look. He used his face to give the look. "What do you mean?" he said, looking at me.

I meant what I'd said. "I mean what I'm saying, Stein," I said. "It's simple."

"I need a drink," he said.

"Look, we choose a story," I said, "and then we go into it. As readers we become textualized. Christ. It's beautiful," I said. "We've got them all memorized. Let's pick one and climb in," I said.

My mind galloped over the plains of Carver country, but I found it hard to concentrate. My living room seemed so clean and comfortable. The TV was a beaut. The ferns were healthy and sprawling. The sofa was too damn soft. It just wasn't right. We were miles away from Carver country. So we moved the So Much Raymond So Close to Home group to the bar -- Tiny's -- on the corner. I didn't have any money but Stein did. He was a tenured professor. He bought the first round.

"What's wrong with us?" Stein said and shrugged. We took two stools at the bar. "Christ. We're a mess. Are we crazy?"

"Hell," I nodded, shaking my head. I'm a big man and I have a big head. I shook it. Then I nodded. "We're lost in Carver Country," I said.

Then we didn't speak for seventy-four minutes. Nobody said anything.

"Hell," Stein said finally, looking at me.

I said, "Christ." And looked back at him.

Finally Stein said, "Let's get us another round. What do you say?"

I nodded. Why not? I shook my head and shrugged. What was stopping us? "Okay," I said.

Neither of us budged. Time passed. Shadows moved over the bar. It was not the sun or the moon casting the shadows. It was the bartender. Big Jim. He wanted to know if we were drinking or just taking up goddamn space. We ordered two more and moved ourselves to a booth in the back.

"So," Stein said after we were seated, "how do we get into one? How do we get textualized?"

As professors of English we had every damn right to do it, I argued. I thumped my fist on the table to emphasize my point. Stein was a mess. His tie was undone and his collar open. He looked down at the table and began to cry. "I'm drunk," he said.

"All the more reason," I told him.

First, we drank another round. Then we ordered another one. We poured that round into the round we already had. Then there was a mess on the table. Beer was dripping on the floor. Stein began to cry again. A good-looking woman, an ash blond, came over with a wet rag in her hand. She mopped up the table. She didn't say anything. We watched her. We didn't say anything. Then she walked away.

It was getting late.

Stein yawned. I was drunk. The jukebox was off. So we went home.

Stein went to my place and I went to his place. I unlocked his door and took off my soft beige-colored shoes that made my feet feel free and springy. I stepped into Stein's slippers and I put on Stein's cotton pajamas. Then I went into his kitchen.

What I wanted more than anything was to break free of Raymond Carver, to become his opposite. I wanted to be known as his sworn enemy. Carver's nemesis! If he was a minimalist then I would be a maximalist. If he ate meat then I would become a vegetarian. But you couldn't flick him off like a piece of lint on your sweater. He was too big. At night I felt his hairy fingers pressing into my neck, constricting my windpipe. His enormous shadow stretched behind me when I headed to work in the morning. I turned quickly to find nothing there. I cheated on him with other writers. I read promiscuously. I spent nights in bed with Proust, Mann, Kafka and Borges. I tried desperately to love Katherine Mansfield and Doris Lessing. I cradled Eudora Welty in my arms and let my gaze linger on her spine. But I kept coming back to one man.

Carver had me in a full-nelson and wasn't letting go.

I sipped some whiskey and watched Stein through the kitchen window. Over in my house, Stein was wearing my red flannel pajamas. He kissed my wife on the lips and put his arms around her waist. They slow danced. He grinned at me through the window.

"Stein," I said.

But he couldn't hear me. He was in my house and I was in his. I banged my hand against the glass. I called out his name. I called out my own name. I called out Carver's name. But the night was silent. Nobody heard me. After a while I stopped talking.

taken from Pindelboyz.com

About the author:

Greg Ames lives and works in Brooklyn. His short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals and websites, including McSweeneys, Open City, The Sun, Fiction International, Literal Latt, failbetter.com, Brooklyn Review, and Other Voices. He received a special mention in the 2003 Pushcart Prize anthology and in the Best American Nonrequired Reading of 2004. To learn more, go to gregames.com

Near Klamath

2008-03-21T08:03:00.001Z

Raymond Carver

We stand around the burning oil drum
and we warm ourselves, our hands
and faces, in its pure lapping heat.

We raise steaming cups of coffee
to our lips and we drink it
with both hands. But we are salmon

fishermen. And now we stamp our feet
on the snow and rocks and move upstream,
slowly, full of love, toward the still pools.

Caught By The Reaper

2008-03-20T12:24:00.003Z

Mikey Dread, 1st January, 1954 - 15th March 2008

Must have been around 1978 that I gave Paul Simonon a C-90 (that’s an audio cassette to you young 'uns) of Dread at the Controls, a legendary radio show in Jamaica. That set in motion a sequence of events that led to me becoming friends and working with the sadly departed Mikey Dread.

The tapes had been passed around on the reggae circuit and had soon become a roots must have. But I'm running ahead of myself. Michael Campbell was the maverick radio DJ whose radio show on JBC (Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation) which notably started in '77, musically revolutionized the island. He was dropping exclusive dub plates and 45's bringing the dancehall vibe live and direct to the airwaves. We're talking custom made jingles, sound effects and sampled bits of dialogue. This at a time when all the other local radio shows were playing bland foreign music. I should point out that this coupled with the social and political climate of the time is exactly what fueled England's punk movement. 'Dread at the Controls' was Punk Rock. He broke Althea and Donna's 'Uptown Top Ranking' and Gregory Isaacs' 'Soon Forward' for Christ sake.

Back in England the Clash had become pretty popular themselves. It was Paul Simonon that suggested they bring Mikey to the U.K in 1980 to join them on the 16 tons tour. Now I ain't here to give you a history lesson (go buy some bloodclaat books!) but rather pay respect to a bredrin' that would go on to produce 'Bankrobber' and was to be an integral part of the Clash's flawed masterpiece 'Sandinista'. By this time Mikey had quit JBC re-invented himself as a singer/producer and in a D.I.Y stylee started his own label, D.A.T.C. Check his ‘Dread At The Controls’, ‘African Anthem' and 'World War III' to get Mikey in full effect.

Michael Campbell passed away on March 15th 2008 and let me say that although he was indeed 'Dread' he was also easy going, funny and importantly open to ideas. Mikey we miss and salute you.

Respectfully

Don Letts

Download podcasts and buy records from Mikey Dread's website

Archaeological Scrumping

2008-03-20T08:49:00.005Z

Peter Kirby on ‘archaeological scrumping’ on the North Bank of the Thames

You might remember we ran Peter Kirby’s brilliant pieces on cycling from sea to source on the River Teifi a couple of months back (thanks to howies for that hook up). When we were talking to him about running it, he happened to mention that he’d built the steps to his house out of things he found in the Thames. We thought that it was worth buying him a pint and getting some kind of explanation…

“A while back I started to explore the Thames, just down past Blackfriars Bridge, where you can get onto the banks in low tide. There are certain things in the British Isles that aren’t owned, like the foreshore. I did a project for The Guardian about churches on beaches and I found out about a Catholic preacher in West Clare in Ireland who was outlawed from celebrating Mass, in an attempt to enforce conversion to Protestantism. This he got this little shack and wheeled it down to the foreshore and baptised people in the sea, then wheeled it back. The church was called “The Little Ark”, people would say Mass outside it every Sunday, whatever the weather.

Anyway, the Thames has got a massive tidal shift, so I spent time watching the tides. I’d go down when it was low for a period of about a month with two massive plastic bags, and I’d collect bits of pottery, glass, slate, clay pipes… for some reason there huge amounts of cream and coffee colour plates down on the banks, lots of clay pipes too, very rarely whole ones though. The tide shifts and it dumps these things on the North bank. Also, weather affects things, brings different things to the surface. By sifting through things, you’re kind of fulfilling a role of cleaning the riverbank as these things obviously aren’t natural to it.

So I’d get this stuff home (just near Guy’s Hospital by London Bridge) and I’d rearrange it with the intention of starting to build steps to my house out of whatever different materials I found. I set out a load of grey slate, about 10ft of it, and then took coloured pieces to run through it like the river. There was a lot of terracotta that came out which was quite flat - it must have at one time been roofing tiles. Certain pieces have holes in, certain pieces that are very defined shapes – oblongs, perfect triangles, squares. I’d set them aside into different classifications. I bleached all the scum off them then laid them down with grouting. My mate came round and said “What the fuck are you doing?” I was looking at it thinking that, if the worst came to the worst I could just tear it up and paint over it. In the end it took on this Spanish villa look. Oddly, having it there has made the house cooler, especially in the summer. Now people come round and are blown away by it, which is fantastic.

The great thing is, you don’t really know what you’ve got until you get it home and clean it up. I’m very interested in the idea of taking things from its seemingly natural habitat then reclassifying it somewhere else. It’s something that Richard Long does in his art, he arrives on a spot, there’s a bank of rocks or something that he’ll rearrange into an unnatural shape. When photographed it becomes poetically beautiful.

Whenever I’m giving talks to students about creativity, I’ll always tell them to forget trawling through the museums, just head down to the river for inspiration. At low tide, you can rummage about in front of the Tate Modern or somewhere and you’ll always find something down there that will get you going.

One odd thing about being down there is when the river police come past, half checking to see what you’re doing. If I had bags of stuff, I’d drop them and mosey about somewhere else until they sped off to do something more important. You can get a mudlark license from the authorities which means you don’t have to give anything you find over to the Museum Of London. They only cost about twenty pounds. It’s such a brilliant thing I think, mudlarking. I didn’t get one in the end though. I thought about it, I even downloaded the forms, but then I thought it was just too official, I wanted to be a bit covert about it.

I’ve stopped doing it now though, I think I’ve brought enough detritus back to the house. Building the entrance and steps was enough I think, I don’t need to do the whole house...”

Letter From France..

2008-03-19T08:40:00.000Z

Jeff
that's a great osterly brace, even if it wasnt carp or chub week, it's a sweet end. love to see the tench, love to catch a tench. they're extinct in france. they eat 'em.
if i had access to a private oxon lake i'd kill for it. good luck with that. i'm fed up just fishing shit pits with ring roads rushing by. i'm catching fish, but with the roar and flap of lorries it's not tea, cake and nature. i'm still hoping my butcher will invite me soon to his wild pond. i went and bought another kilo of sausages i didnt need off him this evening just to keep my hand in, even asking him when we were going fishing. no time, he said. it's the black pudding championships this weekend for christs sake.still, had another mid-20 yesterday so cant complain, 60 acres of water and i'm usually the only angler. i'm going further afield this year, the only way. up to the seine once the garden is underway, under control.
the rivers just opened for the new season, but they're all flooded. walking those of a spring evening is the antidote to ring roads. wild streams, empty of fish but worth taking the cake.
DP

The River.

2008-03-18T09:27:00.007Z

By Raymond Carver

I waded, deepening, into the dark water.
Evening, and the push
and swirl of the river as it closed
around my legs and held on.
Young grilse broke water.
Parr darted one way, smolt another.
Gravel turned under my boots as I edged out.
Watched by the furious eyes of king salmon.
Their immense heads turned slowly,
eyes burning with fury, as they hung
in the deep current.
They were there. I fel them there,
and my skin prickled. But
there was something else.
I braced with the wind on my neck.
Felt the hair rise
as something touched my boot.
Grew afraid at what I couldn't see.
Then of everything that filled my eyes—
that other shore heavy with branches,
the dark lip of the mountain range behind.
And this river that had suddenly
grown black and swift.
I drew breath and cast anyway.
Prayed nothing would strike.

The Last Day.

2008-03-16T06:18:00.015Z

The traditional coarse fishing season came to an end last Friday.
The final chance to fish favourite rivers sees anglers grabbing every opportunity to get on the bank in hope of catching the monster or to drink tea with their mates for the last time before June 16. Of course, it never really goes to plan. Last week the severere winds and heavy rain played havoc with conditions up and down the country. I ended the season with targets unfulfilled. Catching a chub from a river and a carp from Osterley Park will remain at the top of my list for next season.

Jakub & I went to Osterley last Sunday and had to deal with a day of extremes, going from an hour beneath an umbrella to burn inducing sunshine all through the day. The Carp wasn't forthcoming but I was chuffed to catch a Tench in March (at 6 1/2lb) and to follow that with a 6 9ozs Bream.

Tuesday saw four of us go down to The Old Mill at Aldermaston, this being a favoured stretch of the River Kennet. We got there only to find it incredibly busy, incredibly high and deeply murky. Pretty depressing really as it made my chances of a chub next to none. Therefore, I targetted Perch and therefore I caught Minnows (and yes, I even failed to catch Perch on Minnows). Andrew decided to plot up beneath his brolly and fish the pond and was rewarded with a 10lb common carp and a 7lb Bream. Dave's first Barbel will stay atop his list for next season and Jak's swift and brutal change of fortune continued.
I still had hope for the chub as a trip to the Thames at Oxford with Justin and Neil was planned for Thursday but alas work got in the way and I reluctantly hung up my rods.

The question now is, how long will they stay hung up? 'cos although the rivers - and lakes at owners discretion - are closed, it is no longer a regulation applying to all waters. When I fished as a kid there was no (coarse) fishing anywhere between March 15 & June 15. In my early twenties, when I lived in Devon, I would occasionally join my Brother on fishing trips across the water to East Cornwall, where, I believe, there has never been a season, allowing you to fish all year round if you wished (anyone know why that is by the way? Is it because the rivers are game rivers?).

When I picked up fishing again, loads had changed - three rods, carp everywhere, nobody on the rivers - and fishing out of
season was seemingly encouraged, so I did it. Now, I appreciate the tradition but I'm not sure I can uphold it. If I fish (a lake) in Cornwall on a holiday next month, does it count? Do I move to Cornwall?.....

A gentleman that does up hold the tradition, in fact believes very strongly in it, is Chris Yates. Here Chris shares his last day with us;

The weather was perfect for the last day, but the river was not. Rain over the previous few days had brought the Stour's level up and coloured it too much. Though the level was falling yesterday and the water fining down, the conditions didn't improve enough to save my blank. Mind you, I had three good chances, but missed two and just briefly felt the other. It was, however, a memorable day; a typical Golden Scale Club outing: eight anglers, eight nice pieces of cane, some favourite floats almost lost in the willows, a massed boiling of Kelly Kettles and plenty of cake. Also, 76-year old Peter Wheat landed 3 nice roach. The moon appeared at the day's end, at the same moment that a barn owl glided across the water.
Now I won't have to look longingly out of my window any more whenever the fishing conditions threaten my work, which is why I always appreciate the Close Season. I shall go bassing and trouting in May, but no more perch, tench barbel or carp till June 16th.
I hope you managed to have a last cast with Andrew somewhere lovely - or did the work prevent you?
Best fishes,
Chris.