Angling is no occupation for the hypersensitive.
Let's face it. Some of the things we take for granted as a normal part of angling are pretty revolting.
Handling maggots. Used as we are to them as bait, it's always a shock to come across them in their wild state when we pick up a dead bird or mouse. That horrible, slimy, heaving mass, straight out of a Hammer film-surely they can't be the cousins of the little beauties we play with so tenderly every weekend?
And as for the old match anglers who kept maggies warm under their tongues in cold weather-how did they do it, Stanley?
No wonder we get black looks in the pub when we've spent an hour poking around reeking ditches for bloodworms, turning over cowpats in the hope of finding something tempting underneath, or spiking on lengths of smelly fishguts and nauseous squid.
But hold on. Hang about. Wait a minute.
Perhaps it is not we who are revolting after all. Perhaps everybody else is too refined. We do, after all, live in an age dedicated to removing all traces of our animality.
We spray ourselves all over with stuff to take away our cosy human smell. (When I say we, I don't mean us, of course. I mean them.) We powder ourselves from top to bottom, and further down than that. We shave our armpits.
We are scared of using a toothpaste that doesn't promise a tingling fresh ring of thing in the close-up zone. We take tablets to rid our breath of unpleasant things like the smell of scotch. Our socks are treated with chemicals that leave our old plates smelling like violets. After every shave we slap on stuff that makes us smell like the Queen of the Fairies. And I do mean fairies.
Our food is bought ready scrubbed, peeled, homogenised, shrink- wrapped and unrecognisable. Even the flavour has been removed so that we don't actually taste anything resembling something that once grew in the earth or walked about on it. How many hausfraus nowadays buy a chicken with its feathers on and its guts still inside, or buy a bunny with its coat on?
Our beer has been rationalised out of all recognition. Of course it never goes off; there's nothing in the plastic gnat's hiss that can go off.
So perhaps the angler now stands for something more than just the quiet waterside philosopher. Perhaps, in staying close to the earth, in keeping contact with the creatures which swim, walk, fly, or crawl over it, we are preserving something for future generations: the ability to operate as a human animal and not as a deodorised, computerised, compliant zombie.
Perhaps we are the last of the ogres in the land of the pygmies, and perhaps we ought not to give up our ogrehood without a fight. There are very few of us left with this gift-this very precious gift-of being so thoroughly, unutterably, unashamedly and irretrievably... revolting.
Anyway to the fishing, after another day in the office after a short detour I had a couple of hours fishing time before I had to head off home. Timing, preparation and making every bite count is everything to maximise fishing time however that didn't get off with a good start. You see after a bite within a few minutes of putting out a groundbait filled small feeder and a thumbnail piece of bread in to a >6ft deep swim, I struck in to a solid fish that within a second the rod went went solid. Damn It, a SNAG !!
Thankfully it was only the light hook-link so that was sorted quickly and the rig cast out again. Another bite came quite quickly casting a couple of meters to the right and I was hooked in to a small chub. Not the biggest of fish for this stretch but a blank avoided.
As the light was going the first of those sharp roach pulls which I can only assume were from small fish because nothing materialised in to a strikable bite. A switch to a lobworm tail didn't have any interest whatsoever and oddly as the torch was needed to illuminate the rod tip those bites tailed off.
I had half an hour fishing time left but after casting straight in to a tree 🙈 where I got the whole lot snagged I decided to call it a day rather than set-up again under torchlight. Sadly none of the big roach showed up that swim here however next time I'll try some more swims I think. A lovely little river though, my sort of stamping ground.
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