Canal Roach: Trapped in a Sisyphean Loop - Pt.13

The other evening found me in one of those familiar moods that every angler of a certain persuasion will understand only too well. You know the sort. The kettle had boiled, the tackle had already been checked twice despite not having moved since the previous outing, and yet there I sat staring into the middle distance at some temporary traffic lights wondering where on earth to go. 

Not because there aren’t places to fish mind, but because after enough years wandering canal towpaths and riversides you begin to realise that the venue matters less than the feeling you are searching for. Some evenings demand adventure, others solitude, and some merely ask for a quiet float to slide beneath the surface while the world busies itself elsewhere.

Earlier in the week Sam had stood before his class to give a talk about fishing. Fishing! Imagine that in this modern age where attention spans seem shorter than a size 24 hooklength and most youngsters know more about touchscreens than towpaths. Yet there he was, calmly explaining the virtues of angling to classmates who probably regard sitting beside water in the rain as a form of medieval punishment. 

I must admit I felt immensely proud reading what he had written entirely under his own steam. Not just because he spoke about fishing itself, but because somehow he had already grasped what takes many people years to understand  that fishing is rarely about fish alone.

He had written about peace, patience and observation. About slowing down long enough to notice the world around you. About wildlife and quietness and the strange satisfaction that comes from doing something where success is never guaranteed. In truth, many adults could probably benefit from hearing those lessons. Fishing teaches you to fail gracefully, to persevere quietly and to appreciate moments most people walk straight past without ever seeing.

Perhaps that was why my thoughts drifted toward an old stretch of canal on the way home from work. A modest place really, the sort of waterway most people would drive past without a second glance. No grand scenery, no famous pegs, no tackle shop gossip attached to it. Yet a memory had lodged itself somewhere in the dusty corners of my angling brain. A couple of years earlier, while wandering there in pursuit of zander, I had encountered something so rare it nearly caused me to drop the rod entirely — another angler actually catching fish on the float.

Now canal anglers are a suspicious breed at the best of times. See another fisherman and the immediate assumption is that he must either know something you don’t or be entirely mad. This chap however looked reassuringly ordinary. An old landing net, well-used float rod and that unmistakable look of concentration peculiar to anglers watching a float. More importantly, every now and then he was striking into fish. Not a monster by any means, but enough to convince me there was life present beneath the surface gloom.

The area itself has an interesting little history attached to it. One of the neighbouring properties backs directly onto the canal and the owners clearly possess both affection for the place and respect for its heritage. 

Visible nearby still stands part of the old bridge structure from 1917, once carrying the railway line over the canal in a time when industry ruled these waterways rather than dog walkers and cyclists. The ironwork remains as a reminder of another age, rusting quietly yet stubbornly refusing to disappear altogether. This stretch I've filmed Otters a few times, once two at the same time milling around the lock and then another time when one was eating an eel, were there any fish left ?

The garden attached to the property is immaculate. The sort of lovingly maintained place where every flowerbed appears carefully considered and where even the ducks seem somehow better behaved than usual. More importantly from an angling perspective, the owners feed the ducks regularly and generously. Bread rains upon the water with admirable consistency and where food gathers, fish are rarely too far away. At least that was the theory occupying my mind as I unloaded the tackle.

Theory and practice of course are entirely different matters in fishing.

The evening carried that slightly heavy atmosphere canals often possess in summer. The water dark and sluggish beneath overhanging trees, occasional bubbles rising mysteriously from nowhere, distant traffic humming softly beyond the hedgerow.

Somewhere a moorhen complained noisily while pigeons shuffled about in the bridge girders overhead. It felt fishy, though experienced anglers know that waters often look their absolute best immediately before refusing to produce so much as a sniff. Still, confidence is a strange and valuable thing in angling. Once you convince yourself fish are present, every tiny movement suddenly appears meaningful. The bird song was amazing on this lovely evening and 17 species were recorded via the Merlin app within half an hour, very nice indeed.

Anyway for bait I kept things beautifully simple. Mashed bread mixed with a little groundbait to create a soft cloud of attraction, combined with bread flake on the hook itself. Bread remains one of those timeless canal baits that somehow survives every fashionable trend in modern fishing. While others debate pellets, wafters, flavours and attractors costing more per kilo than decent steak, bread continues quietly catching fish exactly as it always has. Cheap, effective and wonderfully nostalgic.

 There is also something deeply satisfying about fishing simple baits on traditional tackle. No alarms screaming across the cut, no endless gadgets clipped onto rod rests. Just float, line, bait and concentration. Angling reduced to its purest essentials.

I had also decided to tinker slightly with the lift-bite rig arrangement. During previous sessions I’d been plagued by missed bites. Not loads admittedly, but enough to irritate me. 

The float would lift beautifully, hesitation would build, strike… and nothing. Either tiny fish were playing games with me or my arrangement wasn’t converting bites effectively enough.

This time I moved the shot from roughly an inch and a half from the hook to nearer four inches away. Not a dramatic alteration perhaps, but often these tiny refinements separate frustrating evenings from memorable ones. 

Canal fishing especially tends to reward subtle adjustments. Fish in such venues inspect baits carefully and feed with caution born from surviving cormorants, boats and generations of anglers waving dubious concoctions at them.

The float settled nicely after the first cast, cocked perfectly against the dark water. There is immense pleasure in watching a properly shotted float settle. 

It sounds ridiculous explaining it to non-anglers of course. “I spent twenty minutes admiring a tiny coloured stick.” Yet every fisherman understands. The float becomes your connection to an unseen world beneath the surface. Every tremor, dip or lift suddenly carries significance.

The first half hour passed quietly save for occasional trembles that could have been tiny fish or drifting debris. Canal water darkened further until the reflections of nearby foliage blurred into shadowy streaks. A duck wandered suspiciously close, eyeing the bread mash with criminal intent.

The canal was flat calm, moody, faint smell of old leaves, dog poo, diesel and broken dreams. The sort of evening where you convince yourself you’re about to outwit a thirty-pound canal carp using a bit of bread and blind optimism. In other words, proper fishing. None of this commercial puddle nonsense where the fish queue up like pensioners outside a garden centre café. No, this was a proper natural venue. A place where mystery lurks beneath every ripple and where disappointment is never more than one strike away.

The first proper bite came as a textbook lift. The float rose beautifully, elegantly, like a ballerina emerging from Swan Lake. I struck immediately with all the confidence of a man who absolutely knew he’d connected with a fish. Naturally, I hit thin air instead. Nothing. Not even a scale. The canal had mugged me off before I’d even settled in.

So out came another lump of bread. Lowered in delicately. Except the float never settled properly this time. 

Something had intercepted it on the drop. “Aha!” I thought. “They’re having it now.” I struck again with the precision of a seasoned matchman and once again connected with absolutely sod all. Outstanding angling. Two bites. Two misses. I was fishing like a man wearing boxing gloves.

Then it happened.

The next bite was different. Proper different. I struck and hit something that felt less like a fish and more like I’d accidentally hooked the Northbound Titanic. 

 It just held there, deep and solid, before slowly plodding off to my right as if late for a dentist appointment. I couldn’t do a thing with it. No head shakes. No panic. Just pure underwater authority. The sort of fish that pays council tax.

At this point my imagination was working overtime. Was it a giant canal carp? One of those old leather-skinned warriors with fins like shovel blades? A prehistoric bream the size of a dustbin lid? Or perhaps a pike that had casually inhaled the bread because it fancied a change from murdering perch all day? Whatever it was, it felt BIG.

Somehow I managed to turn it. The rod finally bent properly and for one glorious second I thought, “This is it. This is the fish.” It started swimming toward me and to my left and then — because canal fishing is essentially organised suffering — the hook pulled.

PING.

The float exploded out of the water like a Polaris missile and flew straight into the tree above me with a crack. I just stood there staring into the branches while my soul quietly left my body. Somewhere in the darkness the mystery fish carried on with its evening, probably laughing.

And then came the true tragedy.

The float returned minus the insert. Not just any insert either. Oh no. This was a discontinued Drennan Glow Tip Antenna. Rarer than honesty in a tackle shop. You can’t buy these anymore. They exist only in old seatbox drawers and whispered legends passed between ageing canal anglers in waterproof trousers. Man down. Float down. Catastrophe. I briefly considered climbing the tree and holding a small memorial service.

Still, the canal gods weren’t quite finished humiliating me.

I reset the tackle and carried on because that’s what anglers do. We suffer endlessly while pretending it’s relaxing. Then, thankfully, another classic lift bite arrived. I struck and this time actually connected with a fish. Admittedly it fought with all the determination of a damp tea towel, but after recent events I’d have accepted a hooked traffic cone.

Sure enough, a canal bream surfaced. Not a monster either. Just your standard issue bronze bin lid with the charisma of wet cardboard and the delightful ability to make your landing net smell like a blocked drain for the next fortnight. Still, a fish is a fish. I nodded respectfully at it as one might acknowledge an elderly drunk outside a pub. 

By now the sun had crept round behind the trees and was blasting directly into my face like an interrogation lamp. The swim died completely. No fizzing. No movement. No signs of life whatsoever apart from a moorhen looking mildly disappointed in me. I was also well past curfew, which meant it was time to pack up before I had to explain myself at home like a teenager sneaking in after midnight.

So what did the session produce? One lost mystery beast. One violated glow-tip float. One small stinky bream. And yet somehow, driving home, I couldn’t stop smiling. Because that’s canal fishing. It’s weird. It’s frustrating. It’s mysterious. Every swim feels like it might hold either the fish of your dreams or an abandoned bicycle. Sometimes both. 

And honestly? That’s exactly why natural venues will always beat commercials for me. On a canal, anything can happen. Usually something disastrous, admittedly, but still… anything.

Canal Roach: Trapped in a Sisyphean Loop - Pt.12

Freeman’s down the road used to be the sort of butcher’s shop where the floor was permanently damp, the counter stained with thirty years of honest graft and somebody always seemed to be carrying half a cow through the doorway. 

It had character. Proper character. Sadly, character these days apparently means selling artisan chutney at the price of a small mortgage payment, so the whole place after the owners sold the land has transformed into a fashionable farm shop with reclaimed wood, hanging baskets and customers who discuss olives as if they’re trading fine wines.

I wandered round it carefully, frightened to touch anything in case it added twelve quid to the bill. 

One sausage roll looked like it ought to come with finance options. The café was packed with people paying the thick end of a tenner for a pork bap, which felt wrong on both a financial and spiritual level. 

I gave that a miss entirely and headed for safer ground at the butcher’s counter and cheese section, where sanity still just about survives.

To be fair, the Cumberland and Welsh Dragon sausages were absolute belters. They went down on the barbecue with the sort of sizzling confidence usually reserved for bank managers retiring early. Even the neighbours started sniffing the air hopefully. By the time they were done there was barely enough left for a photograph, never mind leftovers.

After that I sat sorting the tackle out for a dabble in the morning, pleasantly full and smelling faintly of smoke and sausage grease. Leads untangled, hooks checked, rigs inspected with all the seriousness of a bomb disposal unit. There’s something reassuring about preparing fishing gear at the end of the evening while the rest of the world worries about important things. Somewhere out there the fish were probably making similar preparations to avoid me.

Now there are two types of canal roach in this world: the honest countryside roach, lean as a tax inspector and twice as nervous… and the town roach, which resembles a silver dinner plate with fins and the confidence of a pigeon outside Greggs. You can keep your misty rural cuttings and your kingfisher postcards. Come November, the real canal aristocracy has already abandoned the hedgerows and relocated itself beneath the shopping precinct, directly opposite a vape shop and a kebab establishment called “Marmaris Mega Kebab & Continental Flooring.”

The average towpath rambler imagines fish crave tranquillity. Absolute nonsense. Roach adore civilisation. If they had hands, they’d queue for discounted pastries and complain about parking permits. Take water temperature for starters. In the countryside, winter arrives like an unpaid gas bill. The canal turns icy, bleak and about as welcoming as a magistrate. Out in the sticks, a roach has to flap about all day merely to remain alive.

Meanwhile, in town centres, the water enjoys the comforting warmth generated by buses, chip-fat extraction fans, concrete retaining walls, and eighteen thousand people panic-walking to Primark. The canal acquires the pleasant temperature of weak tea. Naturally the roach pile in by the thousand like shoppers at a Boxing Day sofa sale. Then there’s the food situation. Rural roach survive on the occasional bloodworm and whatever drifts past looking unfortunate. Urban roach, however, dine like minor royalty.

A single Saturday afternoon beside a town canal produces:

Half a baguette.
Three chips.
Two unidentified orange items.
One complete sausage roll.
And, mysteriously, a floating kiwi fruit.

You could trot maggots through there if you wished, but the fish are probably discussing focaccia.

Predators also present fewer concerns in town. A cormorant likes open water and solitude. It does not enjoy dodging mobility scooters beneath railway bridges while being shouted at by a man carrying lager before midday. Consequently, the roach feel perfectly secure. They wedge themselves beneath lock gates, under shopping trolleys, alongside abandoned bicycles and occasionally inside traffic cones. If architecture could produce scales, every municipal drainage pipe in Britain would qualify as a fish refuge.

The great joy for the angler is that winter shoals in urban canals become outrageously concentrated. You spend six fruitless hours on a picturesque rural stretch catching one perch the size of a cough sweet… then arrive in town and accidentally hook fifteen roach before you’ve unfolded your chair properly.

Of course, town-centre fishing possesses its own atmosphere.

There is always a elderly gentleman with nothing to do asking whether you’ve caught any.

There is always a terrier attempting suicide via keepnet.
And there is invariably a teenage scrote on an electric scooter who appears silently behind you like an ambush predator from the future.

Still, the fish remain gloriously unconcerned. The urban canal roach has evolved beyond stress. Sirens, buses, nightclub basslines, heated arguments over chicken shops none of it troubles them.

These fish have seen things.

So next time somebody tells you the “proper” canal experience lies among silent fields and romantic reed beds, smile politely and continue assembling your tackle beneath the ring road flyover. Because somewhere under that bridge, amid the flickering reflections of takeaway signs and the gentle aroma of battered cod, lives a shoal of roach so fat and content they probably pay council tax.

Anyway to the fishing, the cut was flatter than a pub pint left out overnight, not a ripple on it apart from the occasional suspicious swirl from something either fishy or gastrointestinal.

I’d dropped into the crane swim armed with optimism, a loaf of medium sliced, and approximately three teaspoons of actual confidence. 

Bread was the plan this morning. Sensible, reliable, traditional. Maggots sat in reserve like emergency rations in a war film, waiting for the inevitable collapse of morale.

A decent roach would’ve done me nicely. Nothing heroic. I wasn’t after one of those mythical canal perch that only exist in blurry photographs held by blokes named Kev who smell faintly of woodbines and resentment. 

Just a tidy red-finned roach to remind me I still vaguely knew what I was doing. Ever since that tench turned up last week completely uninvited, the canals have felt all wrong. It’s like the fishing equivalent of accidentally seeing your dentist in Tesco buying Wham Sourz's and Haribo Sparks. The whole balance of the universe goes a bit peculiar.

Truth be told, the canals aren’t doing it for me lately. No rhythm whatsoever. One session you can’t stop catching tiny gudgeon with ambition far beyond their station, then the next it’s deader than a vegan barbecue at a cattle market. Every peg looks perfect until you sit on it for three hours and begin questioning all your life choices. I spent twenty minutes staring at a single bubble trail convincing myself it was feeding fish when in reality it was probably a submerged bicycle quietly rusting to death.

Still, there’s always hope on an early Sunday morning. That magical window before the reprobates arrive. Before somebody starts power-washing a transit van nearby or a cyclist in fluorescent lycra screams “MORNING” directly into your soul at forty miles an hour. Canal dawn has a fragile beauty to it. Moorhens pottering about. Mist lifting off the water. The faint aroma of damp earth mixed with lager and urban regret.

Down on the old cut at Bankside, yours truly arrived at what can only be described as “an hour fit for sensible folk and milkmen.” The canal looked proper fishy too — you know the sort of look, a few dimples on the surface, a suspicious swirl under the far bank and just enough confidence to make a man ignore the fact he’d forgotten his flask. 

Naturally I went into full panic mode and got set-up quick sharpish like a contestant on a timed game show. Out went a bit of mashed bread mixed with groundbait, bread on the hook, float cocked perfectly and suddenly I was fishing. Proper fishing too, not just staring moodily at water pretending to understand nature.

Five minutes later a decent fish launched itself clear of the canal right beside the float like a hairy-arsed salmon auditioning for Countryfile. “Here we go,” I muttered confidently, already mentally photographing myself with a four-pound redfin and composing exaggerated Facebook captions. Naturally the float then sat there like a pensioner at a bus stop. Not a tremble. Not a dip. Absolute naff all. Thirty minutes later I finally had a bite and struck into something solid, only for it to come off after a few seconds. Buggeration of the highest order. The sort of moment where you stare accusingly at the hook as if it personally betrayed you.

Still, there were fish in the swim and that alone was enough to keep hope alive. Two more missed bites followed, each one delivered with all the precision timing of me trying to clap along at a concert after four pints. Then at last — wallop. I struck into a proper fish and the thing tore around the swim like it owed money to dangerous people. At first I thought I’d connected with some colossal canal roach, the sort old blokes lie about in tackle shops, but when it finally surfaced looking thoroughly offended with life it turned out to be a roach-bream hybrid. A lovely fish too, going 2lb 8oz on the scales. Not exactly British record territory, but after recent blanks it may as well have been a marlin from the Amazon.

The funny thing with hybrids is they fight with all the confusion of a fish that doesn’t entirely know what it wants to be. This one lunged about magnificently while I conducted my usual bankside ballet of stumbling backwards, muttering nonsense and praying the hook hold would stay put. Mercifully it did. Another three hybrids followed over the session, one even nudging 2lb 9oz and scrapping like an angry Staffie on espresso, and the next biggest 2lb 8oz which I thought was the same fish at first. Ridiculous fun on light gear and exactly the sort of fishing that keeps you coming back despite all evidence suggesting you should perhaps pursue quieter hobbies like gardening or tax accounting.

At one stage I swapped to maggots hoping for a bonus fish, but all I got was a succession of perch that looked like they’d been assembled from leftover parts. Nice enough little fish, but hardly the stamp of stripey warrior that gets the pulse racing. Still, bites are bites and canal anglers are not proud people. We celebrate almost everything short of catching old shopping trolleys, though admittedly even that sometimes earns a photograph if it’s particularly impressive.

The biggest battle of the morning, however, wasn’t with the fish. Oh no. It was with the tow, the wind and the endless parade of floating canal crud that insisted on dragging the float about like a drunken Labrador on a lead. Presenting bait cleanly became less an act of angling and more a test of emotional resilience with enough debris to start a compost heap. Bits of weed, leaves, mysterious slime and what may once have been somebody’s Greggs wrapper all joined forces against me.

Then, just as things were ticking along nicely, a boat came through at 9:20am with all the subtlety of the German navy entering Warsaw. The swim churned up, the tow increased and the fish disappeared quicker than free bacon sandwiches at a match lake open. Still, all in all it had been a cracking little session. A few proper fish, plenty of action, no blank and best of all — the bailiff never appeared to relieve me of my hard-earned pounds. That alone counts as a result these days.

I’ll definitely be back though. There’s something brewing down there amongst the bread mash, hybrids and canal chaos. Either that or I’m slowly losing my mind beside urban waterways, which admittedly is also very possible.

Transient Towpath Trudging - Pt.149 (Canal Zander)

It was one of those damp, drizzly afternoons on the Warwickshire canals that make a man's whiskers sag and his bait box feel heavier than a sack of spuds. Old Bert, a lock-keeper with more stories than teeth, swore blind this was how the first zander slipped into our sleepy network. Not by some stuffy scientist or bored angler with a bucket, mind. 

No, this was proper Piscatorial Quagswagging at its finest. Bert reckoned it all started when a narrowboat called The Flying Dutchman (though the captain was from Solihull and about as Dutch as a pork pie) came chugging through the Hatton flight one moonless night. 

The fella had been over in Holland, doing whatever it is narrowboaters do when they get ideas above their station. Brought back a couple of "exotic pike" in a big plastic tub, didn't he? Claimed they were for his cousin's garden pond. 

Garden pond my backside. Well, as luck and strong ale would have it, the boat got wedged solid in a lock. Tempers flared, language turned industrial, and in the ensuing kerfuffle the tub went arse-over-tit. Two dozen confused zander, all teeth and attitude, went sloshing straight into the cut with a splash that sounded suspiciously like laughter. 

The captain apparently just shrugged, lit his pipe, and carried on towards Birmingham, whistling as innocent as you like. By morning the zander had already started eyeing up the local perch like they were tomorrow's breakfast. 

Within weeks they were spreading through the Warwickshire ring faster than gossip at a match night. Proper canal pirates, they were. Slimey, stripey, and always hungry. Bert says if you sit quiet by the bank at dusk you can still hear the ghost of that Dutchman (or Solihullman) chuckling every time a big zander grabs a lure, or eats that deadbait. 

Anyway enough of that !! it was one of those damp Midlands evenings where the canal looked less like a place to fish and more like the sort of watery ditch a sensible person would throw shopping trolleys into and avoid altogether. 

The drizzle had settled in properly not proper rain mind you, just that miserable floating wetness that seeps into your cuffs, your sandwich bag and eventually your very soul. The sort of weather that makes moorhens look annoyed at life. Still, there I was, wobbling down the towpath after work with all the optimism of a man who has learned absolutely nothing from previous sessions.

Now canal zander are funny creatures. Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha. One day you’d swear there were more zander than actual water in the canal. You could lower a lure in and practically bounce it off their foreheads. They’d be stacked up in the margins like stripy little nightclub bouncers waiting for trouble.

Then two days later?

Nothing.

Not a knock. Not a swirl. Not even the courtesy of a missed take. You start questioning whether fish ever existed in the first place or whether you’ve imagined the entire species after eating dodgy service station Cornish pasties. That’s the thing with canal zander. They’re transient. Wandering hooligans. Aquatic gypsies with bad attitudes and excellent eyesight. One minute they’re terrorising a stretch like tiny underwater gangsters and the next they’ve vanished entirely, probably halfway to Coventry chasing romance and roach fry.

And romance, I suspect, is usually to blame.

Because if there’s one thing more unpredictable than a male zander, it’s a female zander in breeding condition. The males follow them about with all the dignity of pub blokes outside a kebab shop at midnight. I imagine the big female zander leading them around the canal like some spikey dorsal-finned pied piper in a greyhound skirt, with half a dozen lovestruck males wobbling after her through the coloured water.

No wonder you can’t locate the beggars.

One minute your hotspot is alive with fish. The next it’s emptier than a politician’s promise.

This late afternoons trip was at least more convenient than last week’s expedition into deepest Warwickshire misery. Tonight’s chosen stretch sat only a few miles from home and crucially on the route back from work, meaning I could disappoint myself far more efficiently than usual. The hotspot itself is one of those classic canal areas that always looks fishy. Bit of depth. Bit of cover. Slightly murky water with enough shopping trolley architecture beneath the surface to shelter a medium-sized submarine. The kind of place where you fully expect either a double-figure zander or a stolen bicycle to grab your lure.

Hit and miss, mind.

Mostly miss.

But when they’re there, they are THERE.

I’ve seen sessions on this stretch where the canal seemed positively possessed. Zander slashing through fry. Perch scattering like panicked confetti. Tiny fish spraying out the water as though being pursued by underwater tax inspectors. Then other nights it resembles a decorative drainage feature outside an industrial estate.

Still, that’s canal fishing.

If certainty is what you want, buy a goldfish, so anyway, how did it go ?

The tow had a nasty pull on it from the off, the sort that drags hope downstream quicker than a forgotten landing net. Still, after spending half the day dodging showers and squinting at weather apps like a man trying to decipher ancient runes, I eventually hot-footed it to the cut with dreams of a canal zander rattling about in the old loaf. 

One rod carried a smelt, the other a modest little roach, and both looked full of promise beneath a stretch illuminated by a watery burst of sunshine. Trouble was, the canal itself resembled builder’s tea after a hard stir, heavily coloured and pushing through with enough tow to make presentation awkward at best. Add in the usual wind tunnelling down the cut and it became one of those sessions more about persistence than pleasure.

I leapfrogged several likely looking areas, with overdepth float rigs tight to cover and dropping baits where any self-respecting predator ought to have been sulking. 

Not a tremble. Not a flicker. The kind of silence that has you checking whether you’ve accidentally forgotten the hooks entirely. Yet anglers are funny creatures; we endure conditions sensible folk would avoid simply because somewhere deep down we need that fix of uncertainty and anticipation, even when the odds look about as favourable as dry socks in November.

In the end the answer came not from pressing onward, but from retracing old footsteps. I dropped back to an overhanging tangle (the banker) that had looked fishy from the start and slipped the smelt beneath the cover .Five minutes later the float jabbed and a spirited little schoolie tried burying itself straight into the thick stuff. Thankfully it was stopped in its tracks before matters became too agricultural, and after a brief but satisfying tussle the blank was avoided. 

With black clouds rolling in like unpaid bills and the first hints of fresh rain on the wind, discretion won the day. One fish, a damp walk home, and chaos waiting on the other side of the front door.