Cider With Mutants

ja

your dawn dispatch took me jolting over the ruts down memory bus-lane, the summer dawns in a london park. there is no city scum more stiller or the need of a fish more depressingly urgent in the world than in a london park at 6.30am as the sun comes up to sour the stomach. and to come so close to going home for breakfast john. hooking dogs and ducks and having hyperactive commons fed on burger buns tailgate old mens' floats is a great part of the game and i'm pleased to see you've kept that tradition alive. you did very well to get a take first time on. i want to see your float as much as a fish on your mat.
bb's words are gospel here too, engraved on the rod butts. more If than but, i'm not a dawn angler. unless the wind is slapping the boards, i can't fish through that sense of diminishing hope you get after the early morning bubblers have dispersed and the fry huddle the margins for the day. your photo fixes that classic atmosphere beautifully. the rising sun sours my stomach and blears the eyes and suddenly the rest of the day has to be endured at half-mast. i like getting to the water after tea with the wind at full flight, an hour away from a nice shade, hopes building as the fish start showing and smelling out the groundbait. unlike the mornings, time is on your side and every blank hour means the next hour only brings you nearer that first pull on the tip. my whole life is based round avoiding other anglers & kids & dogs(no cider mutants in france) and that's another fact which makes evenings my domaine. the world disappears into a black hole till that little red light comes on...
the last two trips to penelope pit didn't pan out like that. the solitude was there but the fish were turning on sixpences. cast a yard wide and they won't play. yesterday afternoon i tried getting there before six when they give away their positions for the coming hours. only there was an air raid and i just got the anderson up in time. must have been bomber harris come back to finish off the snipers. a hundred thousand tons of ballbearings hit the water just as i got the second rod out and had my feet up:



h2o bombs or a leak from a lead research factory which even downed a few swallows attacking from below. the anderson was still leaking after the last air raid but i managed to get the pva saftely away so it didnt fall into enemy hands for a meltdown. trouble is, a straffing like that kept the fish in hiding, probably till dawn when you should've been there to take over the quill watch with a chick-pea. by midnight i was in full winter gear, 2 carl-forbes under fleece and thinsulate and gortex and dri-plus and just the gloves missing. i drove home scattering rabbits and knowing i should've put the right hand rod 3 feet to the right just before black-out.
with autumn just over the hill i'm taking one more 3-day trip with laure on the off-chance this friday, rods in back and mais in bucket, over the loire & just beyond, before watching the local leisure waters empty of their campers and become fishable in solitude again after august 15. this is your cue, of course. i've given up trying to get bob over to france. i've added one intriguing little water to the list. this one is half a mile down the lane from me, a poaching job, an acre of rush fringed pool owned by some parisian git who comes for 2 hours a year just to walk his dog round it for ten minutes then phone up the garden care to cut the brush back and mow the grass. this could be the lost moat from roger deakin's garden. i've long thought of poaching it, thinking it maybe a rudd haven. so i sat by it the other night at sunset to see how the land lay, seeing as the pond is visible from the lane(following spy-photo taken mid afternoon in drive by shooting):



as the moon rose red, so did the carp. double or quits. i'm putting in the mais for a week down by those rushes where even bomber harris wouldn't find me after dark. the dummy run on that red moon night was accomplished with avon wrapped in a groundsheet and done up with bale twine, worms in pocket. twice had to throw the rod in the ditch and whistle on my way down the lane as the local farmer stopped to shake hands and inevitably said: taking a stroll? ten minutes with silver paper and a size 10 in the margins produced a little rudd. i'm thinking of putting an dead rudd eel rod out too. something tells me there's an elephant's trunk or a teenage mutant swimming round this place. what do you think? worth getting on a lysander?

black out drapes on the bird table

dp

Sawdust Specimen Hunters

dp

finally made it down to bushy park yesterday, to the leg of mutton. left home at half five and was on the water by half six. an august mist coming off the bracken and the water like a stew. carp all over the place. the sun hot even at seven. i fished chick pea on a goose quill that john richardson made - copper wire and all. think the carp wanted to take the float more than the bait. got plenty of liners. was tempted to fish on the top but there wasn't a ripple in sight. just good to sit by the water and drink tea. by ten the wind had got up and the fish had gone down. i switched to a leger - 1/4 ounce arlesley and long tail and had storming take. back-winding for jesus, bottle top butt-ringer. a good fish, a common probably set off down the other end of the pond running the clutch. not wanting it to cross the lines of the two old boys fishing next to me i clamped down and the hook pulled. that was it for the rest of the day. the only unhooking i got to do was taking a size 4 out of a dog's jaw - a discarded link tied to an 1 ounce lead. the owner was fairly sanguine when he had every right to be furious. despite the legion of rules the baliff didn't show up and by the time i packed up it felt like shooting apples in a bucket - a cheap fairground ride. i committed the cardinal sin of staying beyond midday and the pond filled up with kids on holiday - sawdust specimen hunters developing boilie related psycosis, name dropping the big carp in the heron and teenagers out of their heads on cheap cider. i vowed not to go out of the house for a week and sit in the garden reading bb - confessions of a carp fisher. he had it right when he said, 'early morning and late evening will find your carp addict abroad - during the midday hours he is not visible, having left the waterside. so then after a long apprenticeship, he takes upon himself something of the character of the carp - he is most active at sunrise and sunset, and the midday hour knows him not'. i'll be back there over the coming weeks but the midday curfew will be observed. i just wanted to fish but the place i should have fished was really the moat in roger deakin's garden. i remember my visit to his house in eye in suffolk a few years ago. the moat was like a medieval stew pond. you could have fished it forever and blanked for eternity. it would have been paradise. he left the house unlocked and we went inside - i was with his friends paul and sarah - the kettle was still on the stove and there was an unfinished manuscript on the table. probably the book that's just been published. there was an abandoned railway carriage in the garden. no sawdust specimen hunters, no teenage mutants, no dog snares. nobody at all.

a dream of solitude on the bird table


ja

Penelope Pitstop

ja
commiserations that blighty has its foot in its mouth again and your chub get the knock-on. all the more reason to go bushy tailed down to the heron pond where it's all mouth in margins when it rains, bob reckons. and i should've guessed dcarl-forbes wanted those copper fittings for his tench rod and not his home-perm salon. you're right, he was a man after my own heart. his "small stream fishing" was meant for my childhood on the kent ditch.
i write in haste to get back to the swim pictured below:



i call it penelope pit because it's a scruffy ex-ballast hole about 12 acres beside a route nationale like whacky races. full of neglected carp because the small town the other side of this 24hr lorry race is all but underwater itself, in a contained way, with a canal, the river and about 10 other pits all more conducive to french leisure angling. it's like bomber harris missed the V2 launchers and left 20 holes at random which filled up with water from a standpipe leak, one pît for every street, fishing under the streetlamp instead of bouncing a ball off the wall. penelope pit is free and unpatrolled so i can fish undetected several hours after dark. when lorries come off the roundabout i light up like a roman candle for two seconds in the glare but the fish are used to it. these are dexie's midnight runners. the one below gave me one bleep at 12 by the church clock in a deep margin the other night. called it i-leeny:



photo quality has hit an all time low since laure's 11yr old girl took the good camera to holiday camp and i had to buy a cheap 20 quid 1mega-pixel stand-in at the supermarket on the way fishing, 3 battreries per shot. you can see i've got the carl-forbes roll-on up to my neck. fish might've gone 25. i've ordered 2 proper cameras off ebay recently and both were knicked in the post. got a refund and ordered a third. in the meantime, expect carp that look like holiday snaps from dan dare's paradise lake on mars.

mutley on the bird table

dp

Roger Deakin

In praise of... Roger Deakin


Leader
Monday August 6, 2007
The Guardian

A cool, damp British summer, of grey skies, floods and high humidity, has been kind to gardens and wild plants, if not to farmers or householders in the north and west of England. Hedges and trees have sprouted in profusion, a sight that would have pleased Roger Deakin, an individualist, environmentalist and writer, whose book Wildwood has recently been published.

Deakin, who died last year of a brain tumour, is much missed. But his spirit will live on in his two distinctive books: Wildwood and its predecessor, Waterlog, a narrative of wild swimming across Britain. To read his descriptions of swimming in rivers and ditches - from the Helford river in Cornwall to the backwaters of East Anglia - is to feel the sharp cut of fresh water and the smell of wet vegetation, what Deakin called his "frog's eye view" of the world. He wrote, as few naturalists do, of mankind not as an enemy of nature but as part of it, a creative (and in recent times sadly destructive) force.

In Wildwood (which is not the easiest of books to read) he describes woodworkers and foresters, as well as forests. He also had a special tie to the land on which he lived, in Suffolk, an intense localism that led him to help found the charity Common Ground. His writing can thrill, as it did in one memorable description of nocturnal waters: "In the night sea at Walberswick I have seen bodies fiery with phosphorescent plankton striking through the waves like dragons." After reading that, who would not want to swim out under the stars?

(see also; http://www.commonground.org.uk/new/n-roger.html)

Cake, Death and A Requiem For One Of The Greats

Lee Hazlewood, an Obituary and Record Guide

Taken from New York Night Train

Yesterday we lost one of post-war America’s coolest, most prolific, and secretly important pop artists/composers/producers. While Lee Hazlewood will perhaps always be best remembered for his work with Nancy Sinatra, writing and producing “These Boots Were Made For Walking” as well as their hit duet “Some Velvet Morning,” to his growing cult, which definitely includes me and a number of my friends and acquaintances, Lee Hazlewood is an everything man of pop music - up there with Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, and David Axelrod in terms of visionary production, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen in poignant songwriting, and Scott Walker, Johnny Cash, and Serge Gainsbourg in distinctive delivery.

I had the good fortune of seeing the man speak at an Anthology Film Archives presentation of his films about a decade ago that featured a documentary about his Las Vegas stint with Nancy, a collection of videos from his under-rated and flawless Cowboy in Sweden album, and an odd collection of late 1970s videos in which he interpreted the songs of Harry Chapin. He showed up wearing cowboy boots with his beautiful younger wife and blatantly disregarded the theater’s request that he not smoke. A short man with a big voice, Lee was everything in person that you would have expected from his recordings – a heroic rebel, a friendly mensch, and a badass in general.

And this charming combination of contrarianism, humanism, and cool, when combined with his brilliant aesthetics and poetic imagination, are exactly what distinguishes Hazlewood from the greatest generation… of contemporary pop. His work, a synthesis of the rustic and the urbane, chock full of signifiers of both high art and populism, evolved across the years through his battles with the music industry – remaining, for the most part, give or take a Chapin cover, uncompromising, unique, and even timelessly hip all the way up until his self-conscious swan song Cake or Death last year.

There are a number of documents of Hazlewood’s early career as a producer and songwriter that are well worth checking out. Born in Oklahoma, and raised primarily in Texas, after serving in Korea, and DJ-ing on Armed Forces Radio, he wound up in Phoenix where he wasn’t only a disc jockey, but started writing and producing tracks for his own Viv Records imprint. Sanford Clark’s 1955 country hit "The Fool" not only exhibits Hazlewood’s trademark work in the echo realm, but also hints at his ability to throw together a melodramatic pop song early on. In the later 1950s you hear Hazlewood’s unseen hand in the sound of the super-reverbed-out guitar tone of Duane Eddy (literally in a grain silo). The success of Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser” made Hazlewood a bit of a name in the industry and brought a young Phil Spector to Phoenix to check out his game. Some of Spector’s earliest productions wound up on the label he co-founded with Coaster’s manager Lester Sill, Trey Records, and both were early partners in Spector’s Phillies imprint. As Spector’s star rose, his mentor’s fell.

Despite a lack of recent commercial success in his productions, Mercury funded
Hazlewood’s first solo album, Trouble is a Lonesome Town (1963) – a sort Western take on Our Town bristling with rustic narration. The next year found him scraping the pop charts a couple of times with the singles "I'm a Fool" and "Our Time's Coming." His next albumN.S.V.I.P. (1965) was yet another surprisingly likeable portrait of a small town’s grotesques.

During this period he recorded Dino, Desi and Billy, including Dean Martin and Desi Arnaz’s kids, wrote Dean Martin’s stellar hit “Houston” (with the line “I’m so hungry when I walk I squeak”), and reached the commercial pinnacle of his career writing and producing the Nanci Sinatra’s mega hits "So Long Babe" (1965), "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" (1966), and her
duet with her papa "Somethin' Stupid.” While these productions amounted to some of the better pop music of its time, the quality solo material he recorded in these prolific years exceeded them all.

In addition to Friday’s Child (1966) the next couple of years saw the release of two albums that introduced the Hazlewood’s golden age of cinematic, highly orchestrated, extremely stylized Western-tinged pop, Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood (1966) and Lee Hazlewood-ism: Its Cause and Cure (1967). The baroque arrangements are courtesy of session guitarist Billy Strange, who later went on to produce the Partridge Family Album and many other sweet delights. These two classics were only the beginning of an artistic winning streak.

A Nancy Sinatra B-side from this period, the duet with Lee, “Some Velvet Morning,” became a flip-over hit sensation - resulting in Hazlewood’s brightest moment in pop culture, an album that is universally regarded as one of the best albums ever pressed on wax, the million-plus seller, Nancy and Lee (1968). Creating an odd intersection of the lush crooner pop he was producing, the country vocal stylings of his roots, the beat literature on his mind, and the surreal psychedelic pop of its time, all bounced through his trademark echo, this unforgettable collection includes a number of other rubies for which Hazlewood's typically best remembered - including "Sand,” "Summer Wine," “Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman,” and “I've Been Down for So Long (It Looks Like up to Me).”

The quirky yet patchy next one, Love and Other Crimes (1968), includes a couple of exceptional somber classics "Pour Man” and "Forget Marie." Then, once again working with a gorgeous blonde celebrity, but with less success, Hazlewood's excessively baroque The Cowboy and the Lady (1969) features the fine “Sleep in the Grass.”

After this bit of a lull, our hero moved to Sweden and entered the 1970s with some of his finest hours on record – most of which weren’t pressed in the United States until Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley re-released them on his Smells Like Records imprint in the late-1990s. The first, the hazy masterpiece, Cowboy in
Sweden (1970), doesn’t have a dinger in the bunch and includes the superior impressionistic flights “Pray Them Bars Away,” “Leather and Lace,” “Hey Cowboy,” “No Train to Stockholm,” and “For a Day Like Today.” Never has he sounded this good or had such perfect production – in terms of both utility and invention. A definite contender for his best work ever.

Despite somewhat hokey spoken intros a‘la Trouble is a Lonesome Town and his homespun sense of humor, Requiem for an Almost Lady(1971) is his saddest hour on wax and another one approaching perfection. Hinting at a more sophisticated version of Barry Maguire or Mamas and Papas,Requiem includes “I’m Glad I Never,” “L.A. Lady,” and “I’ll Live Yesterdays.” Poet, Fool or Bum (1973) is another canonical near-perfect collection.
They’re all good - the title track, "Heaven Is My Woman’s Love," “Kari,”, “Feathers,” “Nancy and Me,” “Wind, Sky, and Sand, etc. plus covers of Leonard Cohen’s “Come Spend the Morning” or Tom Waits’ “Those Were Days of Roses” ("Martha").

Hazlewood had a number of other albums but after this point I get a bit lost on his catalog. While he seldom
performed live, and is truly one artist I regret missing, he appeared with Nancy on her 1995 comeback tour. He also made a pair of lovely final albums - the eclectic oddball Farmisht, Flatulence, Origami, ARF!!! Me...(1999) and last year’s and Cake or Death (2006).

Lee knew that he had cancer, was still smoking, was ready to go, and had an incredibly philosophical outlook in interviews from the last couple of years. Let's use his death as an opportunity to go back through all of his outstanding catalog and explore his many avenues we’ve yet to travel... Let's also use his life as an example of uncompromising artist who not only
managed to find a wealth of adventure, experience, and even happiness in this world, but also of one of the rare birds who persevered and continued to produce vital work until the end - dignity intact.

Jonathan Toubin
Soul Proprietor

New York Night Train

So, They Can Be Caught...

Jakub cracked it. 9 1/2lb. What a fish . Doubtless, never before caught. Been pretty hard over there thus far this season. I've had five visits and it's just Bream. Bloody big uns though. Smallest in at just under seven. More anglers on there this season. The word is out but can see the frustration kicking in. There are great Tench in there too. A fella had three last week at, 4, 5 and 6. Still, my boys have sharpened up their skills. In the patience and practical departments. Danny caught a 12ozs Rudd last week and coped with it himself, that was cool. Joining us all up to "The Barnes & Mortlake Angling Preservation Society". Only want the badge for me parka.
They got a nice, small pond over Barnes, plus a park lake Feltham way and a stretch of either the Brent or the GUC in Brentford. The pond is pretty (see "Bloke Of The Day"), with what they call an "extension" that is dark and windy and snaggy and totally Perchy. Good obstacle course as part of the boys training.

Got a visit to the Hampshire home of the Crucians planned for tomorrow but have to cross the Surrey border near Guildford and fear that foot & mouth could have put paid to that. Have to find an alternative as I'm going with my mate Steve who hasn't fished for a few years and he's fit to burst so "another time" isn't an option. Kids came along, got busy at work, then fell foul of pissed off soon to be ex wife of mate who apparently "don't give a shit if some of that tackle is yours, it doesn't leave the garage 'til I fucking say so". And I thought it was his boozing that got him a new address...

Leave the Hawley tickets with me but remind me again closer to the date.

cheers for now

Jeff

The Carl Forbes Kent Copper Ferrule Roach Perfection

dp

thanks for the despatch. the ghost of david carl forbes has cast its shadow over the whole week with giant roach swimming down the flooded streets. they rescued a shoal at worcester cricket ground. have you still got the chit dcf signed? did it make it onto the wall of fame in the caravan? he's a hero in all senses, a man after your own heart - sturdy says of him 'he cared passionately about such things as the desirability of organic farming and over fishing the sea by ruthlessly efficent deep sea fishing. his son carl recalls that he learned a lot about the desirability of natural farming methods whilst going fishing with his father who knew at least one local organic farmer with land adjacent to the edenbrook in kent. in these convictions he was perhaps somewhat ahead of his time'. perhaps your barn is not as empty as you think.

great shot of your land-rover, built for road trips. landscape like the lea valley before and after the olympics. you serious about buying the boat shed? shame you didn't meet my scouse mate tony crosbie at emma peel lake. he lives in japan and has just named his new born son elvis liverpool crosbie. probably feeds him on boilies from a vending machine as well. how's the 600 page edit coming along? i'm trying to clear the decks and buy myself some time to fish in august and september. bushy is on hold until my new permit comes through - which will hopefully be monday and now the foot and mouth which threatens to shut everything down. was up at woodys of wembley last night dropping off a couple of rods for restoration and they had a great 8 ft carp stalking rod - split cane, intermediates - benwoods of london for a oner. you ever heard of them? they're a new one on me. was sorely tempted by the rod but cash tight as ever. might have to go back there.

in my search for the history of the thames professionals mark the zim put me onto some footage he shot. it's amazing - bream like you've never seen before - go to you tube and type in 'underwater thames weirpool'.

fire on the horizon, dead cow on the bird table


ja