Well, a week off the booze thus far after August's excesses and I must admit, I'm already sleeping better. Which is probably a good thing, although I'm beginning to wonder whether sleep itself is the problem, because my subconscious appears to have developed a taste for the frankly disturbing.
There's an old rumour that eating cheese before bed gives you wild dreams, and as somebody who occasionally likes to experiment with lucid dreaming, I thought I'd put this ancient dairy folklore to the test yet another time. Cheese contains tryptophan, which the brain uses in all sorts of clever ways involving serotonin, sleep and dreaming, although quite why my brain decided to interpret this as an invitation to produce something involving necrophilia (yes really 💤🙈) is a question I'll leave to considerably more qualified people.
I'm not easily shocked, as you may have gathered, but even I felt that Bleu d'Auvergne had crossed a line. So it's back to Stilton for me, because clearly the French cannot be trusted with the delicate workings of the English subconscious.
Perhaps I've simply trained my brain over the years, courtesy of Albert Hofmann and his rather more adventurous contribution to human consciousness. Whatever the explanation, I thought the sensible thing was to give the whole bizarre psychological experiment a rest and find myself a distraction.
And what better distraction is there than fishing? Fishing has the enormous advantage that, once you're beside the river, your brain has very little opportunity to worry about anything other than where the fish might be and whether you've got enough bait, which in my case is particularly useful because I can barely think about two things simultaneously without something going catastrophically wrong.
I had an hour to spare after work before the demands of domestic diary-making called me back to civilisation, so I decided on a quick visit to one of my local smash-and-grab spots. I'm lucky in that it's virtually on the way home from work, meaning I can get my fishing fix without requiring the logistical planning normally associated with an Arctic expedition.
When I say minimal gear, I really do mean minimal gear. Rod, reel, size 6 hook and that's about it; if I need anything else, I've clearly misunderstood the assignment. This little stretch is one I know reasonably well, particularly at the beginning of the season when the chub have a habit of hanging around. I'd visited before my holiday, though, and the chub had apparently decided that my company was beneath them and relocated themselves into the pool upstream.
Unfortunately, that particular pool is about as accessible as the vault at Fort Knox.
You could probably reach it in waders up to your armpits ,but getting a decent chub out once hooked would involve the sort of aquatic gymnastics for which I'm neither sufficiently young nor sufficiently enthusiastic. Still, there was a bit more water in the river now, and that can make all the difference. So I thought I'd have another go and see whether the chub had returned or whether they'd taken permanent residence somewhere with better security.
I started with surface bread, which is always a pleasing way to fish because it makes you feel slightly like a Victorian gentleman feeding ducks, only with considerably more concentration and a hook concealed somewhere in the bakery department. The trouble with chub is that they know exactly what bread is, and they also know exactly what a hook is, which makes them rather less cooperative than the pigeons.
Those pieces of bread were going down completely unhindered, which suggested one of two things: either the chub weren’t in residence, or they were there but had collectively decided to observe a strict carbohydrate-free diet. Then, right at the very tail end of the swim, there was a swirl not exactly a biblical revelation, but certainly enough of a fish showing to make me wonder whether I’d been prematurely writing the swim off.
The problem was that getting a fish out of there would have been difficult, to put it mildly, with enough snags lurking about to make the swim look less like a fishing opportunity and more like an obstacle course designed by someone who genuinely disliked anglers. Still, I bookmarked it mentally, because if there is one thing fishing teaches you, it is that the places you convince yourself are impossible are invariably the places you spend the next six months thinking about.
So I made my way downstream to a few swims that normally produce fish, although with the extra water on, the river had a bit more flow and those little areas where the chub usually hang about were conspicuously devoid of chub. I peered into likely spots, stared into dark corners, and generally behaved like a man who had misplaced something expensive, despite the fact that I was actually looking for a fish that had absolutely no obligation whatsoever to be there.
Then, just to add a touch of rural theatre to proceedings, a horse decided to follow me down towards the bridge swim. I was half expecting it to ask whether I’d seen any chub, but instead it got knee-deep into the water and began enthusiastically harvesting the rich pickings from the reeds and bullrushes downstream, apparently having worked out the fishing wasn’t going particularly well and deciding to get on with something productive.
I did manage a chublet, which after four or five tentative nudges at the bread finally decided that one more go was going to be its downfall. Unfortunately for it, this time it found a hook rather than the usual free lunch, although it was hardly the stamp of fish I had travelled through the countryside expecting to meet.
It was, however, perfectly respectable, and after a brief encounter I returned it to its watery abode, where I assume it immediately went back to telling its mates about the terrifying near-death experience involving a suspiciously fluffy piece of bread. I meanwhile stood there wondering whether this was genuinely how the session was going to end, with my fishing ambitions reduced from “proper chub” to “something that could probably fit through a letterbox”.
With my tail firmly between my legs, I decided on one final attempt in the first swim, because apparently disappointment makes you more determined rather than more sensible. This time I concentrated on the snag pit away from the main river, where there was a much slower piece of water, which was encouraging, although the word “snags” was doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in that description.
I flicked a few pieces of crust onto the surface and, wearing the polarised sunglasses that make every angler feel briefly like Jacques Cousteau, I could see the silhouettes of several chub milling around below.
They were definitely there, which was encouraging, although their attitude towards my carefully presented floating bread was roughly equivalent to mine when someone offers me a spotted dick with gloopy cold custard.
They simply weren’t interested in taking it off the surface, so I decided to change tactics.
Now, I assume chub are rather like us although hopefully with fewer problems concerning council tax and the price of petrol in that they possess both animal instinct and a more rational side capable of assessing whether something looks suspicious.
On one side are our animal instincts, developed over millions of years of evolution and designed to keep us alive, while on the other sits the rational brain, constantly calculating, cogitating and occasionally wondering why on earth we thought buying another fishing rod was a sensible financial decision. The chub, presumably, had arrived at the conclusion that floating bread was suspicious, but perhaps had yet to develop the ability to question its own existence, mortgage rates or whether it had chosen the correct swim in life.
So a piece of bread went onto the hook, dipped into the water and was squeezed, and squeezed again, until it became something resembling a small soggy dumpling with a criminal record. This time it was slow sinking, and after a strategic and, I thought, rather magnificent underarm flick, I watched it disappear underneath the raft while using my forefinger to feel the line.
About ten seconds passed, during which I became increasingly convinced that absolutely nothing was happening and that I had once again managed to turn a straightforward fishing exercise into an unnecessarily complicated experiment in disappointment. Then I felt the line tighten, struck, and immediately discovered that the fish at the other end had considerably more enthusiasm for the proceedings than I did.
Now, you only had to look at the swim to realise that this wasn’t going to be a polite little fight conducted in open water with the fish eventually swimming obligingly into the net. This was going to be carnage, and with a tippy barbel rod in my hands I was going to have to bully the fish away from every branch, root, twig and other item of aquatic furniture it had thoughtfully positioned itself beside.
“YOU HEATHEN, MICK,” I could almost hear the traditionalists shouting from the bankside hedges, horrified that someone had dared use a tippy barbel rod for a chub. But at this point I wasn’t particularly interested in conforming to angling etiquette, because etiquette is generally of limited use when a decent chub is attempting to introduce itself to a snag at high speed.
The ensuing battle would probably have earned an audition for Best Fighting Chub on Britain’s Got Talent, assuming there is a category for fish that spend several minutes trying to make an angler question every decision that led them to that particular stretch of river. Eventually, however, it gave up, rolled over and seemed to say, “Please net me, I’ve had enough of this,” which was an offer I was more than happy to accept.
So I did exactly that, because there are some things you simply don’t argue with when fishing decent fish, snag-infested swims and the sudden appearance of a net in front of a chub that has just spent several minutes trying to dismantle your tackle. Things you do to catch fish, eh?
And there it was, a proper chub, and suddenly the earlier chublet seemed less like a disappointing consolation prize and more like an important piece of narrative development. From a little chublet nibbling at bread to a proper chub trying to rearrange the underwater architecture, the session had somehow managed to redeem itself.
It had taken little more than an hour, but that was all the fishing fix required, really. No epic twelve-hour campaign, no bivvy, no alarms screaming through the night and certainly no need to explain to anyone why you have spent half a day sitting beside a river staring at a piece of bread.
Just a river, a few pieces of crust, a horse, a handful of suspicious chub and one fish that eventually decided to cooperate after being subjected to what was, frankly, an unnecessarily stressful audition for Britain's Got Talent. Sometimes that’s all you need, well maybe a tussle with SofÃa Vergara might be nice, a memorable fish, a ridiculous little adventure and enough material to convince yourself that the next session will obviously be even better.
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