Working from home does have its perks. Whilst some people spend their lunch breaks discussing quarterly projections and key performance indicators, I find myself pondering far more important matters, such as whether the charcoal snake on the Weber kettle is progressing nicely and if the pork shoulder is receiving sufficient hickory encouragement. The kids, despite looking like they have seen less meat in their lives than you’d find on a butcher's pencil, appear to have adopted the dietary habits of escaped velociraptors, and are currently consuming protein at a rate usually associated with industrial rendering facilities.
Fortunately, pork remains one of the few things in modern Britain that doesn't require a second mortgage or the signing away of an unneeded kidney. By half past ten, the snake method was lit, the kettle had settled into a contented 120-130 degrees of pure smokey optimism, and my personal confidence levels were considerably higher than they normally are whilst fishing.
The beauty of the snake method is its utter simplicity. Lay it out correctly, avoid the temptation to poke it like a bored child with a stick, and the kettle just gets on with things. Four or five hours in, once the bark had formed and was looking suitably magnificent resembling a meteor that had plummeted from orbit and landed directly in a hickory plantation the foil went on.
By dinner time, the shoulder was pulling apart like warm butter and disappearing almost as quickly as I could shred it. The domestic carnivores descended with forks drawn, making noises that would have alarmed a seasoned zoologist. Within fifteen minutes, the 2.5kg joint looked like it had been picked clean by piranhas with an attitude problem. Job's a good'un.
With the family pack temporarily subdued and entering a profound, meat-induced coma on the sofa, it was time for a dusk sortie to Tramp Alley on the South Stratford Canal. Regular readers of this parish will know this particular stretch has produced some respectable roach and hybrids over the years, although whether the fish themselves are respectable is another matter entirely.
Most of them look like they’ve survived a few rounds in a blender or have spent their lives dodging shopping trolleys and discarded lager cans. This evening, however, I fancied a complete change of scenery and a holiday from the usual maggot-drowning routine.
The pint of reds was left securely in the garage to contemplate their life choices, in favour of an all-out bread offensive. I had bread on the hook, liquidised bread as feed, and enough assorted bakery products packed into my car to cause serious alarm to a qualified nutritionist.
Alongside the traditional lift float, which usually offers a masterclass in watching plastic paint dry, I also decided to deploy the sleeper rod. It featured what can best be described as a scaled-down zander rig designed by an individual with unrestricted access to a tackle box, a surplus of free time, and highly questionable judgement.
The centerpiece of this contraption was a crude but very effective Guru foam pellet waggler. For the uninitiated, this thing sits entirely flat on the surface like a fluorescent orange kayak, anchored down by a substantial SSG shot that looks like a small cannonball. It looks crude, and if we're being completely honest with each other, it is remarkably crude. It possesses all the aerodynamic finesse of a flying house brick, but it works surprisingly well.
The beauty of the arrangement is that it can sit quietly in the margins doing its own thing, while my primary attention is focused entirely elsewhere. Bites are not exactly subtle; they are blindingly easy to spot, usually involving the yellow kayak vanishing violently into the abyss. Fishing tight to the far-bank brambles often reveals decent fish lurking exactly where sensible anglers, or those who value their expensive carbon tips, would expect them to be.
The plan was straightforward enough, formulated with the kind of tactical precision usually reserved for failed military coups. Fish the main canal track with the lift float, plaster the far cover with the sleeper rod, and hope that somewhere between the two, the local fish population had received the invitation and fancied a carbohydrate blow-out.
Furthermore, rather than dragging my weary carcass over half a mile down the towpath to my usual, well-trodden peg, I made the executive decision to fish an entirely untried area situated halfway between the hybrid hotspot and the roach spot.
It’s a stretch running along the back of a sprawling industrial estate. The romance of the British countryside was entirely absent, but out of hours, it possesses one magnificent feature: I can literally park the car directly behind my peg. I’d spotted some fish showing here one morning at dawn whilst pretending to look busy, so the seed of hope had been planted. Were the fish forthcoming?
I squeezed myself between a rusted palisade fence and a particularly aggressive clump of stinging nettles, dropped the sleeper rod right under the overhanging brambles of the far bank, and gently lowered the lift float into the track.
It wasn't a world-breaker, but in the tight confines of the South Stratford, a small angry carp trying to wedge itself under a submerged supermarket basket feels like a marlin. The little rod doubled over, the drag gave some protest, reluctant protest, and after a rather epic battle on 4.5lb line and having to steer it away from the nearside metal piling, a wonderfully thick-set, common carp slid over the drawstring of the net. It was fat, completely unbothered by the proximity of a sheet-metal factory, and had completely inhaled the chunk of bread.
Before I could even unhook the brute, the lift float on the match rod gave a classic, heart-stopping wobble, rose entirely out of the water, and lay flat on the surface. 
Nice canal carp.
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