When chaos engine Donald Trump met elected by his mates to lead the country Andy Burnham at the United Nations, social media naturally did what media does best and immediately turned a perfectly ordinary diplomatic encounter into a forensic examination of two men standing approximately three feet apart. Burnham, with his wonky glasses, slightly rigid posture and expression suggesting that somebody had just whispered "we need a word" in his ear, was soon being compared to Ronnie Corbett halfway through a particularly uncomfortable monologue, which seemed a little harsh until you looked at the photograph again.
There was something about the whole thing that reminded me of fishing the Warwickshire Avon when it is gin-clear, because that is precisely how you feel when you are stood on the bank and every fish in the river knows you are there.
You do not simply feel like you are fishing; you feel like you have been invited onto a television quiz show where the fish are the audience, the presenter is a particularly judgmental chub and every movement you make is being marked out of ten.
The difference, of course, is that Andy Burnham probably had advisers, security men and assorted United Nations types around him, whereas I had a tub of mashed bread, a quiver tip and a cormorant that looked like it was waiting for me to make a mistake.
I suspect Burnham's advisers were marginally more useful, although whether any of them could have located a chub in gin-clear water is another matter entirely.
The reason I found myself on the Avon in the first place was largely because my fishing partner has recently rediscovered his enthusiasm for fishing, although calling him my fishing partner at the moment is perhaps being slightly optimistic.
Sam has been going fishing with me since he was four years old and has now reached that rather annoying stage where he is actually becoming quite good at it.
He likes nothing more than stalking chub off the top, fishing a float for whatever happens to be swimming about, or chucking a lure around for predators, which seems to be his current obsession. I suspect this is partly because quite a few of the youngsters his age are currently indoors shouting at people they have never met while playing computer games, whereas Sam is outside shouting at fish he has never met, which seems considerably healthier.
Although, to be fair, fish do not usually respond by telling him that his mum is something unrepeatable. They tend to just swim away, which makes them considerably more civilised than some of the people he could be talking to online.
I can fish for several hours, carefully select a swim, contemplate the hydrology, assess the light levels, consider the wind direction, choose the perfect bait, make three hundred casts and return home with a damp sleeve, while Sam and his mates chuck maggots into a canal and catch nine. At some point you have to question whether your carefully developed fishing philosophy is actually just a very elaborate way of not catching fish.
The problem is that Sam's renewed enthusiasm has resulted in me being somewhat demoted. Last weekend he was off fishing with some mates from school and this weekend he was off again, meaning that I appear to have gone from being chief fishing companion to something resembling an Uber driver with a landing net.
The previous report had been particularly galling because it had been delivered with the sort of casual indifference normally reserved for somebody telling you they had popped to the shops for some milk. "We caught nine," he announced, as though catching nine fish was something you simply did between breakfast and lunch.
Nine.
Still, I cannot really complain because at least he is out there fishing, and a couple of his mates apparently want to go but do not have anybody in their family who fishes. That is a difficult one when you are a youngster because unless an adult is prepared to take you, fishing is not exactly something you can simply decide to go and do.
So, after picking up some maggots from Martyn's, I dropped Sam off just outside Stratford-upon-Avon to meet Hugo, this time rather than Noah. I think there are a few of his mates who would like to get into fishing, but when there is nobody in the family who fishes it becomes surprisingly difficult for a youngster to get started.
Sam is competent enough to know what he is doing, which is slightly irritating because his Dad isn't always quite so sure. I have spent years teaching him how to fish and am now discovering that the most dangerous stage of parenthood is not when your child starts walking, talking or answering back, but when they realise that Dad occasionally has absolutely no idea what he is doing.
He had wanted a lie-in, naturally, so I did not drop him off until around 9.30am, which is not exactly an ideal time to be starting a serious summer fishing session. By then the sun was already doing its best to illuminate every pebble, weed stem and suspiciously positioned fish in the river.
Still, I decided to kill two birds with one stone, although given the number of birds involved later in the session I probably should have chosen a different expression. I would bait up the swim where I had caught the carp recently, ready for fishing on Sunday evening, and then spend a couple of hours roving around trying to winkle out a chub while getting some exercise.
I parked at the top of the stretch, grabbed some mashed bread and set off down the river. The plan was to prime seven or eight swims, put plenty of bait into the area I intended to fish the following evening, then return to the car, get the fishing tackle and see whether I could persuade a chub to make a catastrophic error.
The Avon was proper clear.
Not just clear, either; this was the sort of clear where you begin to wonder whether the Environment Agency has quietly drained half the water out during the night. You could practically see the fish thinking, and I am fairly sure one of the chub looked directly at me and then moved behind a piece of weed specifically so that I could not see it.
Now, trotting a stickfloat with maggot would probably have produced some bites because maggots are basically the fishing equivalent of ringing the dinner bell. But I fancied a decent chub, and there is something about bread fishing in clear water that appeals to the part of the angler's brain that apparently enjoys making life unnecessarily difficult.
I settled into the first swim with bread on the hook and, almost immediately, the quiver tip started moving. It was not the lovely, confident pull-round that suggests a decent chub has arrived for breakfast, but a frantic series of bangs and snatches from small fish that seemed to believe I had delivered a buffet specifically for them.
The tip was constantly on the move, literally every swim, with the bread apparently causing more excitement among the small fry than I had anticipated. It was less like presenting a bait to a wary chub and more like throwing a loaf of bread into a swimming pool full of toddlers.
Still, I persisted because that is what anglers do when the fish are small. We tell ourselves that the proper fish will be along in a minute, and then spend twenty minutes proving that it will not.
In the third swim I finally managed to connect with a chublet, so technically I had caught exactly what I had come for. Admittedly, I had been hoping for something around ten times the weight, but I have always believed that you should never look a gift fish in the mouth, particularly when it is small enough to disappear through your fingers.
At least it was not a blank, and that is an important distinction. A blank is a blank, whereas a couple of tiny chublets can be described as "a difficult session where I managed to nick a few fish", which sounds considerably more respectable when you are telling somebody about it later.
I moved on, continuing the old roving routine that I have always enjoyed. There is something wonderfully simple about carrying a small amount of tackle along a river, dropping into likely-looking swims and never quite knowing whether the next cast will produce a tiny chublet, a proper fish or absolutely nothing whatsoever.
The beauty of roving is that every new swim brings fresh optimism. Fresh optimism is one of the most important pieces of tackle an angler possesses because it weighs nothing, costs nothing and can be replenished simply by walking twenty yards downstream.
At one point I dropped the bread into another swim and within a few seconds something substantial appeared from the depths. For a moment I thought I had finally found the decent chub I was after, before a huge cormorant surfaced right in the middle of the swim. You forget just how big cormorants are until one suddenly appears a few feet away from you. Close up they are basically a scale model of a prehistoric bird that has somehow survived into the modern world purely to annoy anglers and eat the fish they have spent hours trying to catch.
It was enormous.
It was also completely unconcerned by my presence, which is the sort of confidence I admire in wildlife. I stood there holding a fishing rod while the cormorant stared back at me as if I was the one who had wandered into its swim uninvited.
We stared at each other for a while.
I am fairly certain I lost.
The cormorant eventually disappeared downstream, presumably to terrorise somebody else's swim, leaving me to wonder whether it had actually been there before I arrived or whether it had simply been summoned by the scent of mashed bread and angling incompetence. I suppose it could have been worse; at least it had not asked me for a share of the bait.
A buzzard had also been keeping me company throughout the session, circling overhead and occasionally calling from somewhere beyond the trees. It was a pleasant reminder that there was considerably more going on around me than my inability to catch a decent chub.
In fact, when you think about it, I was in a fairly precarious position in the food chain. The cormorant was below me, the buzzard was above me and the fish were somewhere in between, probably discussing the easiest way of making me look stupid.
I picked up another couple of chublets as I worked my way along, but nothing remotely approaching the sort of fish I had envisaged when I left the car. The conditions were always going to make it difficult, particularly with the sun getting higher, so I was not exactly surprised.
Still, it was enjoyable to be back to my roving roots. There is something about moving along a river rather than sitting in one swim for hours that keeps you grounded as a fisherman, especially when you have spent far too much time convincing yourself that you need another rod, another reel or another box of bits.
The truth is that I need less tackle.
Unfortunately, I already own the more.
The roving approach also provides an extremely useful psychological escape route when things do not go according to plan. You have not blanked, you see; you have "explored the stretch", which is a phrase that sounds much more impressive and has the added advantage of being almost impossible to disprove.
Eventually, after a couple of hours, I decided to call time. I had caught a few chublets, seen a cormorant the size of a small Labrador, been accompanied by a buzzard and walked enough of the riverbank to justify the breakfast I would inevitably eat when I got home.
It had been tough, as expected, but I had enjoyed it. Sometimes that is enough, although it is worth noting that I generally say that immediately after catching small fish and considerably less enthusiastically after blanking.
The really important part of the day, however, was what I had done before fishing. I had baited the swim where I had recently caught the carp, and that was where I intended to fish the following evening.
The swim is a big one, too, which means I might even take two rods.
I know.
It sounds reckless.
But there is a lot of water in front of me and, in theory, two rods should allow me to cover different areas. I have watched other anglers do it and they seem perfectly capable of keeping two rods under control, so how difficult can it actually be?
This is where experience and optimism occasionally collide.
I have fished two rods before, and the second rod has a remarkable tendency to transform itself from a fishing implement into a highly sophisticated device for creating problems. The moment both rods are out, both tips apparently decide that they require my attention at exactly the same time. Meanwhile, Sam and I will be doing some lure fishing in the morning at his request. Which means that once again I will be following somebody considerably younger than me around while he casts lures at things I probably would not have thought were worth casting at.
He is pretty good at it too.
Annoyingly good.
There was a time when I was the one showing him how to cast, how to hold a float, how to present a bait and how to stalk a chub. Now he is reaching the stage where he occasionally looks at me with the quiet expression of somebody who has realised that Dad does not actually know as much as Dad claims.
I am hoping he never fully works it out.
Although, judging by the number of fish he is catching with his mates, I suspect we are rapidly approaching that point. The pupil is beginning to become the master, and I am beginning to wonder whether I should have spent more time teaching him how to catch fish badly. Still, if the younger generation wants to go fishing, I am more than happy to take him. Even if I am increasingly being relegated to transport manager, bait supplier, net carrier, photographer and general provider of sandwiches.
It is all part of the service.
And frankly, if the alternative is him sitting indoors all day on a PlayStation shouting at somebody called XxDestroyerxX, I will happily drive him to the canal at half past nine on a Saturday morning.
Even if he comes home and tells me they caught nine.
Especially if he comes home and tells me they caught nine.
Because that is what fishing is about, really.
It is not always about catching the biggest fish or taking the photograph that will eventually be printed at enormous size and hung above the fireplace.
Sometimes it is about getting outside, walking a river, watching a buzzard, being surprised by a prehistoric-looking cormorant, catching a chublet the size of a large sardine and then going home wondering why you did not bring more bread. Sometimes it is simply about being there.
And occasionally it is about watching your son become a better angler than you are. Which is lovely, although I am not sure I am quite ready for the day when he starts telling me which swim I should fish.
Although, if he tells me where the fish are, I suppose I will listen.
After all, he caught nine last week and a small pike this week !!.
I caught three chublets.
So perhaps, on this occasion, the pupil really has become the master.
I am just hoping he does not ask me to start paying him for guiding.
Although, given the current price of maggots, I would not be remotely surprised.
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