Letters From Arcadia

Wardrobe Up The River Orne

2008-07-05T22:42:00.001-07:00

ja

so much for the glorious then, the tragic dawns of the heath robinsons, where no contraption ever made will bag an underground tench, if that's where they've gone, flushed down sherlock holmes's plot-hole or in a wicker basket round the back of a polish deli. fewer tench under gordon brown, more bolt-riggers on permanent leave to remain. modern britain sucks like a poisson-chat when your tench end up on e-bay instead of in the fucking bay. at least our osterley heroes found survivors who look as if they've been eating each other till food parcels arrived on the 16th.
i launched the wardrobe myself last week, afloat up the gorge, the echo of goat bells and the slap of waves. no more shit-pit tossers on quads or bottle chucking scum-bags. just this:

set up camp under gnarled oaks and sunken houses, baited up the old road home and one beside the bush once at the end of madame birkin's garden, 8 feet of post-war flood over it now.

rying the sausages when i lost the only carp of the trip, a scout patrolling the weeds, must've gone back and told the legion to stay put because i heard them all night feasting in their flood halls, their revel magnified by the sheer escarpments, you could even hear their squawking gills like hot air balloons adjusting ballast. 4 am they moved away, burning the village behind them. in the morning the boat was chin up on mud where the sluices on the dam had generated the microwaved coffee for the haymakers and milkers. second night i ferried over the other side and the bream came, hoardes of pillage and slime, underwater forest of waving tails, stripping the mud of bait and tripping the buzzer lights all night till they'd made mincemeat and gone with the coffee drop. loaded the boat and headed back to the land of bolt-rigs.

it's the only way to fish narnia:

the line, the hitch and the wardrobe on the birdtable

dp

Bustewr Crabbe's Baitdropper

2008-06-17T22:52:00.000-07:00

DP

It was too much, the wait for the beginning of the season, the false alarms, the rumours, the pictures of fat birds from France and the people who went over the top too early only to be shot in the back of the head by the baliff or sent to Porton Down to be fed on additives. The rumour doing the rounds on the Heath is that there are no more tench - they are extinct, gone to ground, buried their heads in the mud in disgust at the four ounce leads which keep hitting them on the nut. Come the evening of June 15th the shores of the boating and bathing pond looked like a bad festival, bolt riggers all waiting to be taken up in a spaceship come midnight to Planet Boilie. In defiance since 14th March I have been on the roof building a Thames punt from old mahoghany wardrobes and soon it will be complete. I will drag it across the Heath in the dead of night and set off across the Viaduct in search of just one tench. The lone bubbler, the acqualung exile, spotted in the cabbages one more than one occasion. In the meantime my other close season contraption is all ready to go: Buster Crabbe's Baitdropper, the Bloodknot Dreadnought, an Archway Bomb, and up here the only way to fish.

A large splash in the distance on the birdtable

JA

Pilgrims Progress

2008-06-11T01:58:00.000-07:00

ja

that really was me on the speaking tube, live from walker's pitch as carp made weirpools over the baits. the last thing either of us expected, because as you know:

i've never owned a mobile phone
nor never hope to own one
because when i'm away from home
i'm fuckin fish-not-phonin

the nokia baked-bean tin was a mike walker set-up. he says: when d'you last talk to that ja? years ago, i said. he doesn't like phones either. the purepiscator then hands me his communicator which starts yarning me about highgate ponds, and june 16, and i could smell your eight o clock bacon and see the tench bubbles popping round your jr quills. great to hear your ivories so in tune, geared up and counting, pacing your ponds, inspecting the pitch on your daily rounds now you're tench-runner for the hampstead & highgate home piscatorials under captain bellamy. you'll strike gold in that there mud, filling your pot with bamboozled private doctor fish and the hangman's speigals. arcadia the new carptalk. or the best bit of the ham & high. in the 1955 edition of fishing for londoners the ponds are given the hot tip for bags of early morning tench. for 2008, plastic bags i shouldn't wonder. all the tench i caught in victoria park were inside tesco bags i hooked winding in. more natural food in a tesco bag once it's chucked in the water.
close season pilgrims are prone to visions. in 1986 i took a coach from victoria and got off at wisley with rucksack and 3 days supplies to walk the woods and wisley ponds before paying the club dues, sleeping in the future swims, because i'd be fishing by public transport. woken first morning by thundering hooves just in time to see the belly of a horse as it jumped over me, rider dressed as a highwayman. no dream, the hoof prints were fresh with crushed beetles. cuckoo man is a swim stealer, i fear, a low-wayman, fishing over another man's bait.
here it's been mixed fortnights. grey, wet, all four winds in the ring and carp on stop-start rations, either jumping the gun or on hunger strike. by train to walker's pitch, then, french train style too, cheap, punctual, polite and peaceful:

made la morinais by teatime, first cast by evening as the sky looked silt, it overshot the mark and hung in the osiers leaning off the island. a gentle pluck and it fell intact into two feet of brown water. the one that goes in the top corner, the six over the grandstand.

you just know it's going to happen, but it went the full 90 minutes before one beep and the rod inched round a twitch. tug-boat resistence, spuds in a sack, snagged on fallen boughs, but all held tight. 46lbs of monster mash:

fickle as the wind, they fed once more for ten minutes my whole four days. 5 minutes on the wednesday afternoon, 41lbs.8:

and the wind seemed set, the fish all pushing and shoving at the trolley so i hung hooks for tea and narcissism up at the hut, laure's rum fruitcake in that tin for the king of spain you sent me one christmas.

i shouldn't have lingered, should've just downloaded the tea and not the photos. back at the lake for evening it was a scene to cause a riot at the baitmaker's gate, the curse of la morinais, all the wind stumped, all bites cancelled:

thursday morning a paper-boat breeze scimmed over to the island; upped sticks in a rush and put two in the windlane off the island point, then blew a hat trick at dinnertime when a forty came off at the net as the other rod screamed blue murder and a junior mirror showed off with a lot of flashy tricks then fell to the simplest of tackles. walker's pitch glorious but true to form: gone with the wind, only when it rains, never on a sunday, this side of midnight.
back home again with grass to cut and slugs to gather, my rows of french beans looking like the woods at ypres, cabbages like stained glass windows, the anatomy of a leaf. by tuesday the garden was tidy enough to neglect again and it was time to test the poach-hole on the bluewater pit. they were under the rod tops, coming in on a northerly, everyone a wild twenty that came on a duck's leg, no bloated triploids this time:

wed,thur, fri, just popping down for the coup de soir, half-seven till just on dark:

come friday they were twanging the line like the strings section at swan lake, piccicatto till sunset without a run. the wind was in my face. huge fish on the timpany at a 100 yards. the rods were bending double from the plucking. you sit on your hands and face the music when that happens. they were closer than where i'd slung my hook, down a deep shelf at ten yards. i pulled the right hand lead back and it jagged in weed at 5 yards out. wound in, plopped it back, sat down, rod went double in ten seconds and the line took off this time with water music and screaming reels. a loony tuna. no carpark scrap this, no thumping in the distance. a wild fish making for the trees, thinking of evolving just to walk up the bank and smack me one. 70 yards of smoking pulley and it nearly made it. tom brown hooks flashman. it bottomed the scales at 50, weighed in the unhooking mat. anywhere between
48 and 52 is my guess:

relics on the birdtable

dp

Birdman

2008-06-03T11:03:00.000-07:00

DP

Have you really been down at Walker's Pitch or was that phone call from closer to home, a sweetcorn can on string from the top of the Heath? Good to hear your dulcets. Last week John Richardson and I took the close season pilgrimage to the Creel where the lost Leneys of Frensham stared down from glass cases and Fran reminisced about fishing in Finsbury Park boating lake before she left London to head to Aldershot. A shop where you can still buy goose quills on a street where people leave notes on the door saying back in 10 minutes and you know they'll be gone for the rest of the day. From there we went to the Tarn over on Seale Sands another Leney water sculpted by Humphry Repton, a succession of lakes drawn by BB and cutting their way through the oak and the ash woods. The trees on the dam grown up where Chris Ball caught his first ever carp off the back of a Vespa in the 60's and Kay Steuart fished a pair of MK IV's in a Pucci dress and sawn off waders. Pre bivvy, pre boilie, post modern. Through the trees the Warren, a water beyond the reach of every rod and line back then but opened up in recent years like a door that Huxley left open for us to wander through and never return. The source of many of a 10 minute note, eel-like, snaking away into the distance into the very heart of darkness. And in the trees the sound of a cuckoo telling us it was still May. Down the road we went to the River Wey at Broomfield, even more remote, thunderstruck oaks and then the sound of the cuckoo again, close at hand. We turned and saw him in the distance, running down the track cut for the powerlines, the figure of a man dressed as a cuckoo. The sound of his call still echoing through the woods.

Spooky Tooth back on the birdtable

JA

Taught By The River

2008-05-25T21:23:00.000-07:00

ja

once more you stalk the concrete brooks, shadow fishing, casting at the moon. is that the thrift shop where i used to get my breeches and elliot symack knitware? in my day there was a tackleshop in kentish town. john's tackle? for close season junkies, sundries for the vulnerable, beside a petrol garage after a crescent of low-rise, today's gun turrets for your boy gangstas. has it gone under too? a tackle shop where the maggots came in ectoplasm, reel boxes so bleached by sun in the window there was no writing left. celephane hook packets disintegrated in your fingers. run by a limping biker and his old man in leather jackets. they still had agate rings in the wooden drawer. there are no tackle shops in france. just warehouse sheds on out of town shopping centres, chains without dignity or tradition, or a few shelves in a supermarket, chineese trash with blood on its hands. tackle for dystopia.
i've left the carpark lakes alone this week and humbled down with rod and float to black-eyed pools in thunderstorms.

where viking carp make for the ribs of armoured longboats wrecked ten feet down, where they snap floats in two and fight like beurwolf (who never could spell his own phucking name).

and on to where the even humbler river runs through buttercup plain, you wade through lakes of buttercups like i've never seen before, on to where long abandoned fishing huts and crumbling pontoons haven't seen a bamboo pole since 1968:

stephane was downstream fishing the silt under fallen trees with spuds and chickpeas, all for a brace of chub on the chick pea, one a fat half-pay territorial but not the plunder we were hoping to find. i was fishing hard baits on hard gravel, one along the reeds, the other roving every half hour. i pulled the rover back just off the middle late evening, and ten minutes later it took off in a battle cry, body-building in the current, punching twice above its weight, half barbel this carp with its underslung pucker:

we glugged it with a 2000 savenniers blanc which cost s. a tenner from leclerc. angler's mass for a holy lesson by the river. spoling for a fight now i swung the lead at penelope pit thursday evening where there was post-spawn convalescent laze, a moth or mayfly running the pharangyal gauntlet but nothing solid till one beep before dark had me using up a week's worth of spinach. i must get a bigger tripod for the camera - i'm hiding a 28 behind that grass stalk.:

friday was poaching night, an overgrown NO FISHING pit with no swims either except the back gardens of four houses along the roadside. a hampstead pond in normandy without brick or privilage, just beige bungalows, the 4-car scum who leave a rod outside with a livebait 12 months a year to fish for itself. there's a bramble scrub by the last house where i could get the vehicle in unseen and just before dusk i set to work with a hand saw and took out two willows and a few bushes, enough to poke two rods through, swing a lead 20 yards if lucky. i even chopped the cuttings up and stashed them under brambles and in thicket. no one would notice any different. everything invisible from four sides:

nothing got a hook in it but they came, fat walloping carp intrigued by bait, very big fish stumbling into the line and having me hitting line-bites. neither of us used to this and the carp got bored and moved out. this is the view of it from my hide:

back on the train tomorrow, land rover in for a service, going light, 3 rods and a rucksack, 5 days bait, heading west to mike walker's lake where every fish is billy bunter. comfort feeders, like their tuck in wind and rain, and it's a glutten's forecast with a 50 on the cards...i'll let you know.

a tenner on the birdtable for leclerc

dp

Drive-By-Chicken

2008-05-20T00:30:00.001-07:00

dp

whilst you were perfecting the art of the drive-by, french style, i was out wandering the old english close season, the only map the one i was making up as i walked along. leaving the heath behind i headed down the hill past the ghost site of fields tackle shop on highgate road the place made famous by their roach pole maker who took a holiday in australia and got eaten by a great white. about as ironic a feat as emigrating to normandy and spending your days fighting them in the car parks. beyond the closed doors of fields lies kentish town proper not a place you'd recognise any more, wholly changed since your last century sojourn in north london. i found your memory half way to camden standing under the sign for angler's lane, a road to nowhere if ever there was one. on the corner where the anglers pub used to be and flat caps used to talk about the spiegels in highgate and the tench in vale of health and drink in memory of roach pole is a branch of nando's where they serve the meal of choice for every gib wielding gun toting under 16 gangsta in greater london - drive-by chicken - the tastiest dish for miles around. and opposite the perilous parlour of peri-peri a thrift shop whose bookshelf revealed a piece of hidden treasure. casting at the sun as written by shane meadows. elliott symak's diary of a lincolnshire redmire which he kept secret for ten years throughout the seventies. a two acre bloodstain on the ordnance survey map populated by mahoghany monsters and fished by h block lookalikes. the particle chronicles, a broken bedchair confessional which is more aa than bb, and either way a classic, ' my thoughts plummet back to earth as a chilling yell escapes from the spinney to my rear. the vixen - perhaps attracting her mate, or gloating over the steaming corpse of a luckless rabbit. so too do the owls screech, sending the iciness of death into the heart of an innocuous shrew. and all the time the stars watch down on us in stony silence; atomic furnaces from which we will never feel the heat but of which i always dream'.

close season confessions of a carp fisher on the birdtable

ja

Mowing Days Are Here Again

2008-05-10T21:50:00.001-07:00

ja

since your last glimpse of the winter underworld on the heath, the green fuse blew. from squelcher to scorcher in a week of spawning bream. grass growing under your feet as you mow, the oaks beat the poplars into leaf and there's cuckoo spit on the willows. spring like a rapid deployment force in realtree. yesterday's carp are over the spawning grounds and the villages are under the yellow siege of rapeseed:

last week i was squelched up to the nines, no sign of the fritz speigals here, flash floods and window fishing:

cast and run at penelope pit as the storm hit car rolling mood and even the land rover turned land lubber as i pitched in a swell with a face gone solihull green. three hours trapped in the cab, like the dug out's caved in and the drowning rats cling to your hair. i suppose the rods stayed upright on the buzzers the way a butterfly survives a downpour.
a week later the patrol boat comes by:

no roaring forties, just a pit becalmed and a common under the rod top:

carp spies the other side had binocculars on me and mustered into the freelander, reaching me as i was mid-photo. oh, the tosser said, a little common. we know it well. your first fish is it? he squeels off in a cloud of dust, back to the day bivvy in the six-car swim. they packed up and went home at eight, back to their nintendos. they're just hired rods, enduro fodder, fucking spodnicks with bent hook rigs and fin clippers in their 300 litre rucksacks. and they are everywhere and taking over. they want roads round all lakes and carparks and bait-boats and the right to fish under lights, compulsory enduros and margin fishing banned, swim booking agencies and no fishing unless accompanied by another arsehole to help throw the rubbish in the bushes. society probably says it's better they're fishing than hanging round carparks. well it's not. society is better off if they're knifing each other where they belong because the carp lake is now the carpark and it's lone opportunists like me who are caught in the headlamps.

the writings on the birdtable

dp

Cabbage Is King

2008-04-30T01:37:00.001-07:00

dp

since mansfield left highgate has gone downhill to kentish town. the hero of the hour in the village is cabbage a staffordshire terrier whose ears and tail were severed by a teenage gang to make him fit for fighting on the thirteenth floor of some nowhere block. cabbage fought back and is now in fine fettle and the teens heads have been spiked on betjeman spires for all to see and smile at their severing. on the heath the viaduct pond emerged from the snowstorm to sprout cabbages in honour of the warrior terrier and from the bridge i stare into the depths looking for the bronze back of a spiegel carp. staring back is a gaunt face framed by a stormtrooper helmet with single bullet hole and lavender token. slipped into the pond on a dark night by your former self, that black and white snapshot you found after our third bottle of bleak in the caravan in the morvan. haircut and jacket both cut like a double of a cold war dick walker escaped from the nearby russian attache's residence a sinister place of concrete walls and barbed wire coils, floodlit at noon like a commercial carp lake in the close season. the heath is still in the hands of winter, the leaves are out but the foxes screech at midnight in the rain and the early may blossom is lost in a sea of pea green. dusk is as long as dawn and as the light goes something is moving in the cabbages.

red brick arch on the birdtable

ja

cuckoo spit & dripping yarns

2008-04-23T09:18:00.000-07:00

ja

was beginning to despair of a despatch from your sector. lines down, snipers, pickpockets, village hooligans. it must be rough up highgate. thank christmas for the hampstead ponds, their toothless pike and broken perch, ladies of the silt, cutpurse carp who once saw katherine mansfield, and landlocked eels who were there before betjeman. i await your report on a full closed season inspection.
here april still sends volleys over the trench. water temperatures stuck in february. four days in stephane's tourainne 2 weeks ago at his parents house while they were away on a vichy cure. we'd planned fishing the loire but it was over the banks. so it was plan 9 from hell. one thing worse than fishing your own scroffy chanceless pits is going hundreds of miles to fish someone else's ten times worse. here i need spend only 10 minutes picking up the litter round the lake; down there we were on the dustcarts for 3 hours. 4 pits in 4 days, the only carp we saw were dead. fish till midnight and the early hours, in the downpours, the wind whistling jack the knife, spring trenchfoot as the boots leaked, carbuncles, cuckoos, rainbows like iron girders cooling after a smelt of lightening thick as trees; nightingales in thunderstorms, and as the wind dropped for an hour on saturday evening the swallows dropped with it and gorged themselves on rising gnat. i felt like a bloody weather-boy on a church clock, in and out the brolley as one foul weather replaced another. sunday was one long flush on a stuck ballcock, an eerie blue nightfall after a day of pounding rain:

this was lac de varennes, marçon, looking clean for the moment, 230 acres of rain, sunday's best and deserted. they all fish the one point visible in the blue picture, scuffed to mud while the rest of the lake is duck-mown grass. like all these lakes, off-season you're alone. the water's high and the fish are on. they're not all fish; the biggest fully-scaled mirror in france at 60lbs died last year, sick of the point, and the shoreline sunday was post-flood sticks and shampoo bottles and a few bloated fourties side on up the slope. these fish are beachballs with carp body attachments, genetic misprints with bellies designed to explode once 10kgs of gathered eggs bind at the end of its rapid lifetime. the dead ones lay like those green photos of dead soldiers at paschendale, pods ripped open, mouth stuck round on a failed breath. these things self-inflate when they bolt off with the rig. thunderbird 2 painted on their fuselage.
rituals kept us alive: a minute we're in the door a roaring fire off stephane's dad's lifetime collection of faggots, roasting sausages and drying out boots and socks, a raid on the cellar for the best of vouvray and chinon, then red-eyed sleep till mid-morning which brings no real peace as it's carpless in an unfamiliar attic, and into the wind we go again. friday night on street corner pit when the local carp-heads came to launch a thousand boats on a mere 20 acres, playing pirates in the night over disputed swims, firing boilies over the bows, hand to hand over 25 foot of cold blue water, cursing each other through the swash buckle of petzel sword. absolutely fucking crackers. you read the obituaries in the french carp mags now, another fuckhead ditched from his zodiac after a night smoking dope in the bivvy. they cant cast is the trouble. into the boat at 3am they go, squinting at the GPS to drop their bait. hat knocked off by a branch, they make a sea-sick lurch for it and down they go into lazy bones locker. worst are the orange lamps hoisted on poles outside the bivvy. simms city tossers.
once home, swept by nostalgia for penelope pit as the first leaves of spring soaked up the rain. too soggy to garden, never to soggy to fish, i went back on monday, first session there since autumn. thick mist of drizzle, soaked through just putting the rod rests in. this time i wasnt going home fishless. rigged the marker rod and scoured the bottom for something to put a bait on. right hander on a stony patch at the foot of a twelve foot gulley, left hander on a stony hump 8 foot under, dropping off to 12. the drizzle was a fucking greenhouse power mister and got into everything making pva bagging a sealed laboratory job, which meant taking off the waterproofs, stripping down to bare towelled off arms and getting into the front seat of the landrover with the heater blower on to do it. the first three flew off anyway as the chuck was 60 yards. but perseverence, and by half five there were two in place and the downpour suit had packed in, i'd forgot to proof the boots and there was just no point putting up the brolley. so i did the unforgivable and sat up in the short-wheel base bivvy:

the wind dropped my side as i listened to the archers and a fish crashed over the right hander.

darkness fell like a wet rag over your face and i stood outside like a horse in the rain, staring at the buzzers as the boots just sucked in mud. quarter to ten, nightingales wetting their whistle, a fish came up in the margin where one of my pva bags had come off on the failed launches. then another 30 yards off. the urge to pack up dissolved. ran through proceedure for a take off the rocky bar. made sure everything was in place. ten o'clock, one beep on the left hander, indicator tight against the rod so i hit it. like pumping in a dumped steamroller till 20 yards off it decided to practice for le mans. so good to be back on jumping scales needles in the dark, 37 to 38 pounds, who cares, spring's in the air:

i'm packing that rod down when the other goes one beep more, the runner-up, one to watch:

next week i'm getting the boat out and heading up the 7 mile dam where the wild commons go fourty and live round the islands in the gorge. the water temperature is up two degrees this week. up with the sap, down with their heads.

battery charger on the bird table

dp

vapour trails

2008-04-22T23:09:00.000-07:00

dp

the nearest blue plaque to here belongs to the memory of john betjeman who lived up the hill in a yellow stuccoed villa. he who saw the screens in hospitals like the kent and sussex in bluebell vistas and heard the bang of the coffin nail in the peal of a church bell. everything will have significance now. every spud you plant, every onion row, every trot down an empty stretch. every time the spring wind turns to the east and catches the back of your neck. signs which say 'private fishing' will take on a deeper meaning. you'll want to make bonfires of books and start again somewhere new. i met someone on saturday night who was in the same place and had burnt their passport. betjeman had it right when he wrote,

'that garden where he used to stand
and where the robin waited
to fly and perch upon his hand
and feed till it was sated

the times would never have the space
for ned's discreet achievements;
the public prints are not the place
for intimate bereavements'

oil the hinges on the garden gate and put some cake and crust on the birdtable

ja

Old Mortality.

2008-04-08T06:32:00.000-07:00

ja

relieved you spratt yourself up highgate hill. the lost village tench ponds, blue plaques floating in the margins, lift bites off discarded murder weapons. a stolen handbag under every bush, olde tench silted from the days of the poisoners. you must've won the pools mate and pulled the black-out curtains down; was beginning to think you'd snapped your rod and got into the bell jar with jeremy bentham in the interests of science. you haven't missed much. my last winter fish squirmed like an eel on the mat. nine photos like this:

a dozen rivers flowed under the bridge since; mud in bed, mud on the eggs, mud on my literary future as another novel gathers waterstones moss in the amazon jungle on its way to a good pulping.
spring search parties are out for new waters within an evening's radius. found a moon crator colonised by life-forms from garbolino 6, or is it a retired railwayman's miniature model of a highgate pond?:

not the one i found last summer, this one's in the wells fargo village with the health club pit(see Dynamo Kev). a sign nailed to a tree says "no bivvies" (the french spell it biwwy). you can errect a fucking bungalow and fish six poles while you're away at work, but no bivvy. photo in local paper once of this place; some grundy in a red ball cap holding a fourty against his wooden railings. his four rods were laying on the kitchen table, lines taught, between bottles of plonk, baguettes and dried sausage. way to fish.
3rd week of sleeting winds, northern raspers no stab vest ever made stops you getting it between the ribs. i've hacked the pva out several times against it and done the long spring evening but these winds don't drop, they just keep coming at you like they're on something. not having a bungalow handy, i've got under the unhooking mat. just survival time till the chopper picks you up.
another ten quid's worth of sausages off the butcher friday night. the final payment. he called me a bohemian and said i could fish his pond if i ate snails with him. the grey ones that live round his pond. i'll do anything to fish. even that. next it'll be his tripe and frogs legs off the ones that live round my own pond. careless talk with corporal jones...
saturday evening after gruelling on the garden, early spuds in nice curved rows, peas, broad beans and onions squarely put to bed, i pulled some worms and took the avon down to the village stream. miles of heartbreak, barbed wire swims and fallen trees and not a minnow's twitch to the worm:

i found a stump & twig stretch at sunset, the winter wheat rising as far as the house where i'd bought my 5 steres of firewood last october. ash, hazel, the very logs which warmed me this winter came from here:

i'm after significance with this; end of winter, trees cut to the root, sleeted aprils like they were in childhood when we were worming along the village stream; because, as i made these fruitless casts and broke the rod down at sunset, my old lady died, aged 83, behind a screen in the kent & sussex. she who stood at her garden gate to watch cat's eyes cunningham dog jerry 109s over gravesend. she who wrapped the fruit cake in greaseproof paper when i went tench fishing down all saints pond with a stale crust.

grave's end on the birdtable

dp

Letter From Arcadia

2008-04-03T04:04:00.000-07:00

dp,

the season is over and thanks to the weir-rash I stayed away from the river. On the last day I was carried by bath-chair up Highgate hill to the smallpox hospital and suspended in a large jar of sprats. I am cured! The air is good up here, we have pitched camp and are exploring the many hidden tench ponds on the heath. The season may be closed but the door to arcadia was opened by another inch.

birdsong on the birdtable

ja

Spring Offensive : Leave Cancelled

2008-03-13T08:27:00.000-07:00

ja

tragic luck that, in dry dock with thames pox. angler's curse, pepys' revenge, and falling at season's end is a court case under sod's law. may the scales and scabs fall from your eyes and the spume of cess ridden weirpools glance off your shield. sipping claret in a punt as your herrings bob along the weirs sills does strike me as reaper's charter if the thames really is flux with 21st century pox, unless it's angler's menopause and the estrogens and all the other hermaphrodite's jetsam got into your claret and you're actually mutating into a barbel. next time you walk into an indian restaurant you'll end up on the menu: bangers and masheer.
while you've been doing your walking freak show, i've been chained to the desk, the dancing editor, refilling the coffers after a spend-up on the rods of necessity, a month of sundries. and it all sat grinning in its wrapping as i ghost-wrote for the aged, sleep-walked for those with the writing pox in search of diagnosis. outside the wind shunted my stove pipe sideways and turned my greenhouse inside out like an umbrella on the fens, the plastic in shreds, the spinach swelling into thick fronds like a crowd of waving mittens. the fields turned nitrogeon green, the rivers of tea and all the spring yellows buttered the bread of the land. after five days and nights of tempest, imagining the waves in the town pit bay, and all those old creaking carp sheltering like wrecks on the bottom, i busted the ghost-writing, rigged up the new rods, piled into the truck and headed for the pox line.

i fished the tail-end of the recent storms, settled to a blue-sky billow, the ramrod steam-rolling half-retired, but it was still an x-ray westerly which all the fleece in china can't keep out. just baiting up, the rods blew out of my hands and the unhooking mat flattened itself against my face like burst bubblegum. by 4pm both rigs were down at 20 foot, water temp 9°, air temp 10° in the wind, baits at 25 yards. stephane turned up at 5.30 having blagged his pupils about some staff meeting, sneaking out the firedoors where the gear was hidden in his car. he's got two clocks ticking away now too - the one on the classroom wall and the biological one in his girlfriend's belly. after september the only runs he'll be getting in the night will be in his kid's nappies, so he's squeezing in every snatched minute behind the rods he can.
it was gloaming on a dropped wind just as i'd fallen back to the gravel path to shake a bit of warmth into myself when i saw the left buzzer light come on. i couldn't hear a thing because i'd plugged the speaker hole with a rubber swivel sleeve. the hanger was jammed against it and the rod tip was bent down underwater. i played this one down the margins for a couple of minutes. the other buzzer light caught my eye and the right hand rod took off like a dragster, the reel crashing into the buzzer head before upending like the death of donald campbell in bluebird and hitting the water in a deathly spray. it was like those last minute goalmouth scrambles in the mud: you're 30 secs off getting into the village cup final when a bad clearence ricochet's off your own striker's legs and loops towards the top left hand corner. the fucking striker shouldn't have been back there anyway. it looks impossible, the spinning ball is a ref's whistle away from the net but the goalie, who'll end his life doing a milk round anyway, grows wings for the only time in his career. the next thing i knew i was airbourne with a bent rod in hand and landing head first into the water. in my right hand the last six inches of the cork butt. the other rod was now under me with my full weight upon it. i began playing two fish on my back in nappy-mud, the right hand fish taking off on its first run. stephane rescued the left hand rod once i regained two feet and he played the fish into my net as i tried to get control of the rod thief. before stephane could come back with a second net mine came off close in, a good upper 20. the smaller common was spawned up and built like a nile steamer from the omdurman campaign:

i topped the swim up and swung the lead close in, ringing the water from my sodden clothes. there were fish crashing now. lorries on the ring road canvas flapping, double decker trains bringing insurance clerks home from paris and herons cackling, ducks in a night-time panic and pheasants bickering over roosts. the blue light on the right hand rod comes on. one muted bleep and all holds tight so i hit it. this time the fish takes off like the rod had. it's a tale of revenge. just scraped 30 with half a pound to spare:

spring offensive battle-map pinned to the birdtable

dp

Half A Guinea A Look

2008-03-04T21:45:00.001-08:00

dp

whilst you were running round in the blackout trying to plug into the sun i was taken by the victorian weir rash. the same one that g had three years ago. it came up on my return from wimbledon, i thought it was a flea pit infestation caught from the car boot car park and then maybe the dungeness shingles but they were both ruled out by the ridley road 'designer handbag change your life' quack who told me i had a water borne virus, probably from the thames, that would cover my whole body with scars and scabs within weeks and stay until april. threatened me with the smallpox hulk but then she arranged for me to be pickled in a large jar for private display in the museum of curios on whitfield street but i gave the velvet caped baliffs the slip and went feral. look like the fucking leopard man only my eyes without sores and scabs. calming down a bit now after a rub down with a tench but still look like a floater in the margins. it's put the ki-bosh on my end of season plans as i have a fear of water that borders on the rabid and i can't get the sores infected otherwise it's curtains. emptied an indian restaurant in two seconds when i took my coat off the other night and mr rose broke into his new favourite song 'leprosy, i have bits falling off of me'. surviving on a diet of vegetable roots, ox's liver, ale thistle and the rosary.

merrick on the birdtable

ja

Dynamo Kev

2008-02-26T22:10:00.001-08:00

ja

sorry for the delay... lines were down after a nuclear strike from the electric company, a well aimed million volt power surge knocked out the 8 houses in my hamlet, smoke pouring from electrical goods two fridays back just as we were all plugging in our toasters and downloading the morning post. my modem in ashes, so too the radio caught mid-humphries, freezer with bait the fish got prematurely, eco-light bulbs and everything with a wire attached. heavy losses. this is the great EDF luftwaffe who are going to build britain's nuclear toasters. go solar is my advice. i have recieved not the least apology nor any admission of liability. some metal head pulled the wrong switch at hq, dynamo kev himself shakey after a night stealing cars probably. my insurance company are sending inspector cluebucket who has yet to be seen. i'm having to connect to blog on with a tin can, some fish-paste and a length of copper wire slung up the telegraph pole.
in the meantime, whille you were on the football special rattling over points, i was fitting out the icebreaker for imminent service, minus 1 at sunset all that week and plunging. one night i couldn't sleep so i watched the pond freeze over in moonlight you could've played extra time in if EDF had done the floodlights. days are garden duty now, the crusade against creeping buttercup, the original green fundamentalists, suicide weeds that evade your most efficient security. dig one out and make ten more of the raging, clustering parasites. i've had to move my entire herb garden to a secure zone. risky when half the garden's an iceburg till midday, but the herbs are well trained so can take it. a pair of fox euro-warriors with full cork handles arrived in the middle of this skirmish to hasten forward my next leave behind the lines.
i did manage a scrape-through double a week back. remember those stuttery half-seven bleeps i was getting? stephane got them too apparently but it was too cold to sit it out another 2 hours in case they were line bites. i did 3 blanks, then a bit of on-site rig-tweaking, dump the pop-up, short hook-links, anti-waterlog 12" stringers, leave the stutters and sit tight, fucking freezing, till nine o'clock then hit a good run as the herons fly past in the night croaking like cut-throats, camera flash bouncing off the mist:

next day a parcel to fetch from a cafe 3 villages off, a post-house, fag shop and flat screen, heinekin optics and a five quid menu dinnertimes. it was four pm and the gear was still in the land rover half frozen and wet from the night before. the parcel was a new fleece duvet i was going to flop the evening away on with the wood stove boiling fumes and the wine chilling on the porch. but the gear was with me and 300 yards from the cafe is the scuffiest gravel pit, a scum dump for petrol-heads whose only mission in life is smashing bottles on the benches. i've fished it once, last june, three hours dusk till dark in the pissing rain, but even that didn't deter the pillocks sliding through mud on their peugeot 50s. i was on that point in the photo, putting out a pva bag into a big hole 30 yards off. as the rain lashed and the gits road round and round with bottles in their gobs i got a run and lost a big 30 at the net. i had the fucking thing over the rim 5 times too, but the bottles were flying and the pests were circling... something, i thought, must put them off, keep them indoors. maybe the freezing cold. so by 5 i'd set up in a chilly corner with the hole outfront, pit levels up at least a yard . zander dandy fishing off the point which meant i had poor rights of way; a bouy on the left and tree roots to the right. off the point you're in the clear. the fish actually came off on a sand bar close in.

well, nothing came by except a pheasant to roost in the tree beside me and squirk till i packed in. since then the leaves have sprung on the willows, three muskrats have set up an underground station beside my pond and a calf was born in the field opposite:

solar panel where the bird table was

dp

You'll Never Make The Station

2008-02-13T04:46:00.000-08:00

dp

the last of the few marched from the birdtable via redan hill and sebastopol road to the east bank aldershot with a pint of bull's blood from the crimea fresh in our throats. to stand in a february fog in tailored red coats with brass buttons, led by a drummer boy who took the king's shilling out the back of the bus station in '82 and has never looked back. suedeheads and old songs. a richardson linocut come to life entitled, 'everywhere we go, people always ask'.

the five fifteen out of waterloo took us there out along the thames past bob's catfish swim at battersea power station, along the side of the pike cut at staines to the basingstoke canal at brookwood and the pits at ash vale, stopping just short of badshot lea pits where i hooked my first ever pike by the caravans. a night time tour of the paid up permitted waters that i have failed to fish for a full calendar year. all too soon. rather than the empty bank and the lonely moon i needed the camaraderie of the crowd, old familiar schoolyard faces and the blinding white light of the floodlights. a glimpse of heaven. just enough to know that it might exist.

last train out of here on the birdtable

ja

Fish-Fingered

2008-02-05T22:30:00.001-08:00

ja

thanks for that buchaneering tale, nabbing a duke's pike under flush winter sky from a punt, clapping butler and cooing maids. there should be tapestries and painted ceilings of stag party pike inside the dutchess's boudoir. you know the old song of course, "pull out the stopper & lets have a whopper/get me to the bob church on time..." was the butler singing that?
pit fishing was just flushing lead down a hole last week. minus 7 sunday night, water tanks frozen even in sun. i put two baits out at 3 monday afternoon but by 4 the temperature was zero. sky streaked like a german raid on the docks at sunset. a fin nudged its reflection 30 yds off. numb toed, minus 2 before the blackbirds put their songsheets away.

i packed up as church bells rung up the start of the archers. chair frozen into the ground, pulled the skin away with it. line frozen in the rings, making the reel gears clunk. wednesday was identicle in blue:

this time an itchy run after dark, four stuttering bleeps. i struck ice. put the same bait in the same place as fish started rolling in the mist. my boots froze into the ground as i stood like a red guard outside the kremlin, brushing frost off my sleeve. cat ice forming on my teeth, findus written on the rucksack. yesterday it was back to mud and just raw. a bream hooked in the back, two bleeps in the only ten minutes of sun at 4 o clock. listened to the archers driving home. wednesday's forecast is belting sun and 13 degrees. the wind is whipping the margins to froth in the bay as i speak, a wind in its twenty-fourth hour. wednesday's carp is full of bait, they say. they'll be butlers clapping, and rods a-looping, sure as g's pike...

last of the few on the birdtable

dp

The Last Supper

2008-02-04T10:07:00.001-08:00

dp

whilst you were gorging on your winter harvest of fat monks me and g were punted up on blenheim for the last supper, the final cast before g tied the blood knot and got married. lost count of the false casts and pulled hooks that had led to this day but there we were the anticipation greater than ever. as best man it was my job not to forget the bait. the day was breezy, a westerly rolling in from ireland bringing scudding clouds and the threat of showers, a hint of spring but nothing more. the floods had brought the level of the lake up by over two feet, some feat when you consider its vast size. occasionally in winter the boathouse there is full of fry penned in by perch and jacks but today the water was clear of souls and we rowed out to the slope. we put the baits into eighteen feet of water and waited for marlborough's blast on the bugle and for the fish to come over the hill. at lunch there was a shooting party on the horizon birds dropping into the water but it wasn't until dusk that the music started. g's float vanished and his rod looped round. it was a good fish from the off staying deep and diving for the anchor rope. after a fight of ten, maybe even fifteen minutes it was the net. what god has created let no run cast asunder. shoulders like a horse jaws clamped shut. a stout eighteen pounds. the hooks were out without a struggle and the net was thrown over the side of the punt for the staff of the house to see the evidence. centuries of them from the butler to the cook standing on the lawn with the lights from the house in the background applauding as g climbed the path away from the boathouse smiling and laughing because he knew it was meant to be.

bells ringing out on the bird table

ja

The Navy Lark

2008-01-26T04:38:00.000-08:00

ja

osterley. even the name sounds like catacombs of doomsday pike, bones piled and sifted in their field of honour at the foot of that dam wall. and maybe when the wind snuffs out the parallel world, the sound of the M4 becomes a ghostly perlon whistling through the ceramic rings of bill keal's pike rod, lady osterley herself, half-jack half-gill, gliding through the laurels with the sprat.
down bleak pit the carp were history too. for monday dinnertime, the meteo forecast sun and ten degrees. i ate my baguette and camembert in gloves as a filthy spit glanced in on a wayward south westerly. stephane came over from his swim upwind, bringing a bottle of nouveau apple juice, crushed by village rovers, two real glasses in his pocket. we hunched it down, this fermenting pre-cider thick with the tang of apple mound and barbed wire fences trampled down by cows on heat and we didn't give a sou for our chances of a carp. at 2 a black dog walked between me and the rods. i suggested a dual which was stopped in its tracks by a puff of white spume as a pirate showed on the starboard rod. but stephane's lookout gave first shout. a whaler played him along the plimpsol line. it was bullion at three:

i missed a fidgety run in the dark. the sou we'd bet on a blank was worthless. i should have stayed on but the rain came down like a poll tax riot. truncheons and bricks and waves swept silver by a full moon, orange highlights off a street lamp half a mile away, putting a streak across the whole pit. while packing away i glanced up the streak just in time to see a coaster roll over and go down. stephane heard the lifeboat splash but didn't see it. it was off his bows.
wednesday i went back whistling a wrecker's shanty. swung the lead with a pop up and a pva stocking, a leg of pellet, sat back swatting gnats in a breeze mild as a french curry, hatless and overfleeced. the gravel washer on full blast the other side of a bank of dirty ballast and drying sludge. the townie's were out strolling, dogs and dames, men in hatshop hats and mothball coats. three o'clock came and went like a cancelled train. points failure, wrong kind of pop-up, leaves on the bottom. it turned cold so i took the temperatures and the water was up one degree from monday, a healthy 8°c. the wind blew off the gravel path; everyone got the same perfume for christmas. till the strollers thinned i was pulling the rollneck up over my nose. what is this perfume? old coats. channel number twos. it's what you spray in the toilet after your aunt's had a dump. but at 5 the wind dropped and i could only smell myself. cold and pikey, and orange bung at 20 yards would've looked nice. cold still water, and a carp bobbed instead of a bung. an hour of carp bobbing, like summer, so it had to come, one beep in the dusk, the tip twitching as the blackbirds sang like divas. i hit a mirror which looked white in the water, fought like a brick with fins because it had swallowed a brick.

up anchors as they started shelling the margins. then yesterday, last manouvres before shore leave and stephane sunk the graf spey in a wet north westerly, under the bows at dusk, pride of the fleet battled on his 7ft stalking rod, 37lbs of winter fruit:

boatswain whistling on the bird table

dp

Coldwater

2008-01-22T02:38:00.000-08:00

dp

while you were digging in the town pit for half scaled medieval relics, fat monks with red fins, me and jeff took the sixties back streets from white city down the A4 towards isleworth. every traffic light scene a sweeney set, every turn off a light industrial dead end with more broken windows than a medway riot. past the last working brewery in london town at chiswick, the rising thames lapping at its doors threatening to take barrels of fullers off to essex creeks and make the ghosts of long gone smugglers merry and rich. to osterley park we went on a winter's morning, a pale sun and an estate lake within spitting distance of london town. you know the scene from memory, a long walk down a flooded gravel track, wild ponies scratching their necks on splintered wooden fences leading to an eighteenth century secret garden. a dam made from london brick its lip cut and broken by centuries of smacks from westerlies turning the ornamental lake into an inland sea. an island in the distance with the big house behind it. in front of us beds of reeds in their pale brown january colours and the drop off beyond them, down to twenty feet. a pit dug by spade and wooden wheelbarrow when the pay was half a pint in a pewter pot and the pike were prison hulks. we put our baits out into the past and waited as the sun crossed the sky and a dampness and cold came out of the walls to whisper the tales of the house into our ears. the screech of an owl and the bark of a fox. the distant roar of traffic on the M4 in a parallel world just over the fence. a blank but we were beguiled by the place and will be back. they say lady osterley walks the lawns at night feeding on sprats.

a haunting on the birdtable

ja

Last Train Out Before The Lines Were Blown.

2008-01-15T18:25:00.000-08:00

ja

your kind words leave a fireside blush. as long as you laughed, and it echoed down the empty corridors of the dead mansions like a shoal of bream-coughs in a kent borstal, you can skip the iodine chapters.
i hear your fishing fixtures are being cancelled one-by-one as the participants drop like 3oz leads in the maynard from thames plague and aldermaston trench-throat. i've been striking out and doing half-monday sessions on the town pit. it takes a lashing all winter, winds piped in from siberia. i'm sticking to the one sector, a deep bowl and bay, 25 foot drops, hoping a regular bait parcel will shift a fish one of these teatimes to come.

as i write, this pictured sky is gathering for the kill the day after. lashings of rain and empty catfood tins rolling round the yard, the dustbin lids like ufos over the fields, a wind sounding like the dambusters coming up the ruhr, stripping feathers off my chickens and punching out the last plastic tatters on my greenhouse. it's still cranking up, storm warning for 100kph, that's a high dose of beaufort, the original barnes wallis wind tunnel, bending trees like a uri geller spoon. each spurt shunts at the caravan and the pots and pans hanging above the stove chime and clash, unsteady in the moorings. sending this before the lines go down. lights flickering, first lancaster in sight.

bird table swaying like a john richardson big quill in the weirpool

dp

The Original Anglo Saxon Chronicle

2008-01-09T08:39:00.001-08:00

dp

the apothecary's bottles have been drained and i even thought of raiding the bramble covered house where you and bob discovered that cache of pills back in the eighties. the lingering bream cough was banished with the final spoonful of syrup that was a day in front of a linewinder fire spent reading 'one last void' and being transported to a corner of kent that is now long extinct, the view from an imaginary swim on the medway, the one that boyd tonkin always fishes with a winfield allegro, a pocketful of plastifol maggots and a typewriter with half the keys missing. well done, it's a tours de force, a worthy fourth novel and not many make it that far so put another log on the fire and crack open the pelforth. my only confession is that i marked and skipped the pages where chambers was in hospitals and homes, i can only do empty houses these days. far too many ghosts and smells that catch in the throat even now. most of the time i live out the back of oakfield with an eye on the sky a word for no-one and a wild boar strung up in the barn. are you going to write a third kent novel and complete the trilology? you should. before they cover the garden of england with pylons and starter homes. your pen is filled with the same poisoned ink that sinclair uses. it tastes better than champagne. your mad old butcher will be stocking it soon and selling it in vials to maigret's wife down the cafe.

to see out the old year and ring in the new john richardson went to aldermaston and had a day chasing jacks. as the light went and the smoke crept out of the chimney pots i had a sergeant major on the smallest minnow from the christmas tree.

caravan imaginary like all good things.

burning secondary modern on the bird table

salut

ja

Blood on the Matchmaker's Apron

2008-01-06T22:52:00.001-08:00

ja

i trust the clank is now the distant thud of an empty bottle in the recycling bin, that your apothecary has other brows to wipe, that the bream-cough has been weighed on the reaper's own avons and returned undersized to frank barlow's locker upstream of us, and that your convalescence involves a healthy dose of pike-fever.
my reply too is long overdue, though the all-clear sounded on arcadia's western front the last full moon. me, i'm sound as the euro again, the bream cough a minnow's whisper, but the rods are still bundled, the boilies in kryonic suspension, the wild boar christmas dinner gone full cycle from roast to cold cut, sandwich, curry and finally enveloped by a pastie coffin awaiting the final mouthful in a fishing bag. like all wild pigs, there is a story behind him, though it's mostly obituary, post-execution. he was, i'm afraid to say, shot on my orders. word was passed to my local village butcher whose meat box of a shop is kept at 4 degrees. a man of steel blades and sacrificial chopping blocks of seasoned oak, his medals under glass beside the goose paté, his bravery for the trade well recognised; champion's league tripe and a guiness book of records entry for the worlds longest sausage, 611 metres. he sends the blue ticket, the gloucester blackspot sign of the boar, to his men in the forest at verneuil. in the drizzle of a tuesday mist they shot the traitor, smuggling acorns. so i go pick him up, he's reduced to a gigot. 3 years i've been buying sausages off monsieur prevost this cutfingered butcher, and i never knew he prefered fish. and fishing. an angler with his own backdoor redmire not 2 miles from here. the reason he shuts shop. islands, a sunken tree, bubbles at dawn, pike he puts back, carp who burn the paint off quills. a tough half hour convincing him of my credentials and i got the invite, money changed hands for more sausages and cup winning black puddings i didn't need but sealed good faith. he doesn't fish the winter. we wait till march when they'll be buckets of bullock blood in the margins, my blue bloody butcher at the gates of dawn ushering me under the trees to pork pie corner where the carp are on champagne.
the december freeze up is a distant star:

the swim looked like this last time i saw it and now it's a village team goalmouth quagmire, with temperatures putting the wrinkles of feeding crucians back on my pond, so monday i'm on the town pit for a flask of tea with a couple of pop-ups renewing the long awaited replay.
is that caravan photo real or a dinky covered in moss?

boyd tonkin on the bird table

dp

The Clank of the Apothecary's Bottle.

2007-12-23T21:28:00.001-08:00

dp

thank you for your letter of the 12th and for your kind words in your year of shadows and reflections. my reply is long overdue. whilst you were roasting spuds around the ceasefire and nailing barbel by the tail to every door in laure's village i have been marooned in a shiplake punt in the lock cut to nowhere. unable to put a long trace and the red richardson bung at the foot of the big door itself - marlow lock gates. every pike from there to seething wells smiling the smile of the devil himself, their snitch wire jaws twitching under the willow roots and the roach shivering on the weir sill. waves slapping against the side of the oarless vessel and an owl hooting under the bridge. monday morning i was due to take to the river with g and wyndham barnes when the bream cough came and got me in the dead of night. i woke in a sweat, the weight of the marble keepnet hovering above the bed. seven days without night it seemed and blessed with a laugh like a thackeray baliff going knocking for debt and my own gills turned blue. i missed the last market of the year and a bellyful of ale in the golden heart which may not keep to the new year. if the moon is right richardson and i will be out before the box is closed. i think it will take a fried jack's liver to rid me of this throat. til then i wish you a merry christmas and may the trent otter himself be the one to knock on your door come the morning of the 25th.

hallucinations on the birdtable

ja

Dead Mans Cove Flows Back Down The Absinthe

2007-12-12T16:52:00.000-08:00

ja

dead man's cove came a-knocking here, a swell on the road, conger lobs washed past and set off speed cameras, fish clinging to wrecked trees just to stay in the rivers.

been pretty much clinging to the raft myself the last fortnight, bronchial and broke, pre-publication inertia. have yet to stock-take 07, round-up the beasts and lost sheep, the aldermaston days you might call them. tea and sergeant majors, a barbel in the afternoon - surely the titles of great unwritten books, the future slightly foxed.
as i write, the 30 day rain has ended. this morning an orange sun rose on the frosted mud. my solar torch recharges in the window. the pond is up to its feeder ditch and the crucians have breakfasted on silt and leafmould porridge. the birds are feasting off the land - under every leaf a worm. yesterday i saw the deer wander out of the forest like the all-clear had sounded, snicking the lush green along its edges after a month on the run. the chickens still churn out eggs, muddy eggs all tarred and feathered, but yokes of winter sunset, pike in your eye, real yellow waistcoats for your boiled egg soldiers, the ones crawling from their dug-outs waving wet grey flags. the garlic went in with seconds to spare - the last one popped down as the first drops fell well before the first inflatable santas went up on the slates. i've spinach waving green flags, and leeks still bold if ragged from a random tasting by an escaped cow who left deep rain filled holes all over the garden. another ibook died, but the lost novel came back from the laboratory - 470 euros just for some stainless steel surgeon to run a scalpel round my broken hard disk. all this in just 3 weeks, which makes summing up a year a memoir job. with no views of skid row, no crack-heads, gin swine or teenage pimps within a hundred miles, every minute of my year has wonder. is a wonder. which, think about it, is why i can write the bleakest of fiction. kind of a take on something flaubert said: be regular and ordered in your life so you can be violent and original in your work. even rick wakeman said that. but i will pick out some moments and post them at the years end.
your word-posters for john andrews of arcadia are becoming classics. with a john richardson original design to join bill posters jury, you'd have a collectors piece, one for the archives, it could go on a tin, merchandice, something to put the fishermans friends in.

photo: dead man's cove under laure's kitchen window last sunday

roasting spuds on the ceasefire round the birdtable

dp

The River Absinthe Flows Into Dead Mans Cove

2007-12-06T11:34:00.000-08:00

dp

your photos of the absinthe and letter from behind the lines, from beyond the imaginot line - wonderful stuff. a heady brew, a winter ale for the soul. oh to pass a saturday afternoon after a five franc rabbit lunch by fishing from jane birkin's ducking stool, a sister to the marianne faithful cottage swim on the loddon where the good miss faithful did appear to me once upon the lawn dressed in nothing but swan feathers. maybe i should have read your mushroom gospels before i cast in that day. but i did get a barbel in the afternoon. your winter should be pegged out along zola's canal with maigret mixing the heron blood for the groundbait bucket and the roar from the le theil crowd as the light fades. you'll find me by the lock cut reading the pink 'un and working out where i am on the latest free map of the front.

until then all paths lead to aldermaston mill where jeff and i had tea on the lawn with dave bedford and jakub. i sat on the footbridge in the sun and caught minnows and the occasional perch. lost one in the reeds. jeff had a cracking perch in the back garden mill pool, and i poached his swim in the afternoon and had another sergeant major. and then the frost came down, with the water thick like oil and travellers lighting fires on the horizon. it was a resistance party.

have you put your recollections of the year together yet? since i nailed mine to the bar a few more memories have emerged. standing under a full moon on mount abu drinking beer round the brazier for starters. but for now i am still captive to seatown shingle beach. from the angling times - 1962 i found this cutting of stoker's

HIGH TIDE IN DEAD MAN'S COVE

'the wind had backed around to the north, and the sea had quietened down to a smooth, bass-producing swell that clawed at the shingle beach, and reflected the cold light of the November full moon. this, i decided, was just the sort of night to try my luck in dead man's cove........... as soon as i laid the sack down, an extra large wave surged up to the foot of the cliff. feeling its natural element again, the conger went frantic. that sack seemed a darned sight more important just then than its contents and hurriedly i untied the cord that kept it shut. the conger shot out like a bolting rabbit; glissaded out of control down the slope of greasy lias and entered the water with a final triumphant flourish of its tail. the rest was comparatively simple, and half an hour later a friend spotted me by the the light which hangs outside the anchor inn. 'any luck tonight?'he called out

'well,' i began'.

the turn off for chideock they all miss on the birdtable

ja

Stret Pegging for Zola

2007-11-29T20:51:00.000-08:00

ja

that old black box of ted hughes's frayed lines you picked up from autumn's last bung fair came in handy on your drive home then. you conjoured illusion there, the grit they forgot to spread on saturday night for blizzard sunday, for the snow that caught the bulldozer rusting behind the smoke sheds and chased you home. here the grey turned morgue but nothing fluttered. the pond froze for a night or two and the fishes hung their heads in silt. whitewashed fields, whitewashed carping as i waited for the flu to lift like a smog off the river.
your high fidelity to river fishing refuelled my abandoned mission to crack the river huisne, to see a winter bung go down or a rod tip twitch from more than a brush with debris. it always looks a picture, a deep summer chalk stream, sandy runs and weed-tunneled glides. a winter avon, a crabtree pie in the sky. sunday afternoon, bouyed up with herrings and mackerel, flashy shads and frozen maggots, me and stephane toured the valley round his village, opting on a stretch of bends, yellow fields and water the colour of old socks:

pools like laundrettes, leaves tumbling like the first team's kit in the dryers, every trot with a hope-float snares the fallen shirt. the river made mockery of our sunday best. styx and stones. the waddling bungs, decoy geese, the deadbait in a deadbeat. we weren't the first to have hung and suffered there. this was the first advent window for herod's slain, marked by a raft of cast-off clutter from the dishonoured combattents before us:

unhitched the herring as the sun went down and left it in no-mans land where pike were once the stretcher bearers before the last gas fell lockjawed the whole platoon. and in the trenches the men spread rumours of a dead arm down the valley where the fish were gathered round abandoned lilypad installations. we found it in the monday spit, a mile of industrial canal, cholera in the time of zola, a brick chimney off a maigret cover, grist to the mill where it tumbles back into the river like nature's stomach pump:

a little town of railway sidings, bankside allotments and the first team pitch, le theil sportif united, the trainer's swim with a pole-shipping slit on the back:

i stret-pegged a 3AAA chubber under an old stone wall where red brick washing sheds still have their buckets and chains and doctor's lapdogs yapping behind the railings. you once described your chub swim on the mole, the marianne faithful shed i think. well, this one's jane birkin's ducking stool, but i whistled paint it black and fished there like a mourner at the funeral of the last surviving roach.

spot the float contest on the birdtable

dp

The First Snows of Winter

2007-11-21T20:46:00.000-08:00

dp

the dog days of autumn are upon us, all the leaves nearly down and me and john richardson are out looking for roach on redundant chalkstreams. the carriers chucking it through and on the main river the flow slowing to a trotless halt. the roach we want so far out of reach, every handful of maggots attacked by starving trout careering out from under the bank. we fished 1930's hardy roach rods and cursed the lack of coarse fish in a managed river. the water meadows like the commandant's garden. we took a sackful of grayling on goose quills and left before sunset.

just beyond the imaginot line the pike bung factory is in full swing waiting for the big push come december 1st, every window in the allcocks advent calendar opening to reveal a transfer covered gazette bung in a new colour or a ripple where one has gone under. the whole world pike fishing in a tree with a partridge rod and a wire trace like a russian noose. mackerel heads wrapped in silver paper and hung on the tree, the conifers in the woods on frensham common dressed with candles, carols played on hunting horns by bivvy boys gone native on magic mushrooms. darkness at noon, starlings flocking and the brown jawed predator with its deathly smile lying up in the reeds.

at the weekend up to ludlow d and i went for the last big antique tackle auction of the year. through herefordshire into country where the hedgerows stand ten feet tall and the grass grows down the middle of the road. drinking hobsons mild and aspinall's pilchard oil in pubs called the one eyed swan and listening to tales of salmon poaching and the last hangman in england. on sunday it started snowing at one and we left at six, the car laden with pheasants and japanned boxes full of treasure. into the ever whitening night the snow intensifying. we made it as far as clee hill before we turned back but the road back to ludlow was blocked so we took our last route out south and just made it before the roads froze and the lights went out on four thousand homes. back home over the cherwell and the kennet to a london that had been flooded by the low. behind us in the blackness, an ice fringed shropshire mere where at the stillest point of the night a float moved by the reeds.

dream of ted hughes' pike on the birdtable

ja

Coldwater Revival

2007-11-15T05:09:00.000-08:00

ja

your great british pike bungs are the true symbols of the fallen leaf, the design classic to rival the mini, the land rover of the float world. they should be hung down oxford street come christmas. they should be the olympic logo, the lamb street runners, the ice queen's earrings, the acceptable fesse of obesity, the billy bunter bribe. they should be signed by the entire cast of the waterlog christmas panto & cast into hornsea mere on new years day. when i flung jack spratts into the rother as a kid, i bought my bungs in the village sweetshop. a quarter ounce of acid drops and a pike bung please mr pullin. pike bungs should be made compulsory in primary schools, "only two pikers at a time" signs on the corner shop doors. but oh, the inconvenience we suffer for tradition: the land rover, the applemac, the barbour, the mitchell 300; burdens of beauty, out-performed every time by cheap modern rivals. i never caught jack nor pike on a gazette bung and snap tackle. the land rover snaps a half shaft if it has to tow uphill; the applemac burns its motherboards when doing the quicktime; barbours break your back and turn to rigour mortis in the cold; and your life is in your macerated hands if you hook anything over 20lbs on a mitchell 300. dreams and beanos, the old tackle is the the studs on the shin we used to get in the east sussex league 1972, when ex-pro trainers only had the one bung in the tactics box: "go for the man". the pike bung went for the throat. by the time it went under, so was the pike; under the wet towel in the bottom of your whicker basket. but in france the principle is alive and well. you can buy them in the supermarkets, you can find them hanging in the alders. i've even seen old resistance men fishing potatos on a treble hook six feet under pike bungs for the carp you only find in flooded bomb crators.

maybe i should've got the bungs out yesterday. the town pit in its winter patina:

skies which rushed through their dozens tasks both sides of rain:

an hour before dark a scattering of carp nudge surface out of range, moving in but not on my schedule. sitting out the two hours after dark is an endurance now, the lugging of clothes instead of bait makes the mile walk back easy to postpone. the church clock strikes eight on the moth-balled fleet. upping sticks, gloves off on a november night, puts spring a long way off. smoke from chimneys drifts over the lake and twists of it rub the windscreen as i turn the headlights on, like special effects from a zombie set. home to air cooled vouvray and the kind of email i never got from a publisher before: waterstones are gonna 3for2 my novel in january. makes blanking feasible, the 1 for 10 of winter carping.

book tokens on the bird table

dp

A Short Telegram

2007-11-13T23:49:00.001-08:00

dp

at the rising of the bobbin and the going under of the float we shall remember them. in a letter home to his wife, one nottinghamshire soldier fighting in mesopotamia in 1917 wrote, "of all the flea-ridden, snake-ridden, scorpion tormented corners of the world this is it, and i'd swap all of jerusalem land for a bit of west bridgford just now". funny how nearly a century later things have not changed.

in the garden nearly all the leaves are off the magnolia and the floor is half a foot deep in them. golden brown. the whole yard a wormery for late autumn perch, fallen soldiers each one. kettle on and bait box out with a smouldering fire at dusk.

wreaths rather than words on the birdtable

salut

ja

Laying A Wreath

2007-11-11T10:48:00.000-08:00

ja

all leaves on deck, the forests are crooked mizzens once more, nightmare cutty sarks, luminous green moss where the first chanterelles are waking:

but today, while you're flogging old poppycocks in redditch, we remember francois polvent, a young french priest from the village of ors in nord pas de calais, who went fishing during the german occupation of world war 1. he fished two rods, one in the water, the other ficked high into a the overhanging trees along the canal. this line was linked to a portable radio transmitter kept in his false bottomed case. he fished in the reeds, sending morse code bulletins on troop movements to the british. his sister lounged on a gate nearby. if a german patrol approached she'd take her hat off and wipe her brow. polvent would unsnag his antenna, close the case and carry on fishing.

the birdtable

dp

Sunbury Whiskey Sour

2007-11-07T20:13:00.000-08:00

dp

whilst you were away with the travelling circus, juggling whisky bottles and walking across the tightrope high above la morinais i was with g concocting a counter plot to november 5th. we met in the priest hole under the stairs at the cheshire cheese, took the stone steps down into the cellar and walked through the labrynth of underground passages past lost toshers a hundred years high on brick dust and rats' livers, ignoring their shouts and echoed yells til we found the grimy path to sunbury. the boatyard at wilsons the same as it was in the early summer, the green punts lying up on the lawn, mr wilson saying not to come too close because he'd caught something from the river, the dizzy sickness he called it. g and i fished the swims next to the lawns and the sheds, their green soft for one last morning before the winter would steal it for shades of december brown. trees in yellow leaf as vivid as sulphur, the water murky but gentle not giving away any secrets. church bells every hour, the hands on the clock eager to fall back one hour at midnight. we followed our floats down familiar runs and trots but to no avail, not a bite to be had. the toshers had all the silver fish tied up in a sack and were getting drunk on gin in some distant drain. snarling terriers in their pockets wanting rats.

we fished tiny penny sprats off the weir sill in the hope of a pike dressed in a frock coat and laid out in a wheelbarrow until the gas lamps were lit but we went without a touch. afterwards we drank best bitter in the magpie and sloped back to town.

i went back a few days later and mr wilson was in hospital, the fever turning to a rash. they say he should be alright. i fished the same swims but with little heart and spent the day watching the leaves come down.

prayer for one of the river's originals on the bird table

ja

Last Tango with Mike November Whiskey

2007-11-02T12:13:00.000-07:00

ja

saturday gone, bushwhacked minor roads six hours to brittany with your welsh emails tatooed like mud splash on the land rover. we needed myth, and luck, but got the north east wind chiselling at the willpower.

mike walker's lake, la morinais, 4 days fighting the sabotage. mike november whisky - he comes at night with a bottle of pure malt, willing the home team on. he calls it midnight mass. it worked once, and i'm sure it'll work again, but by tuesday for all i knew the carp were in the trees dropping acorns on us. in the deep corner, stephan, the prof de sport who usually just has to point at the water to get a run. his was a stake out, staying put and dribbling bait in day and night. the suspect didnt show. his 3 commons were so small mike gave them away to the carp eaters who live in the village. i switched swims every half day, trying to get at the one active fish. had a screaming run half hour before packing up on the last night. picked up the rod with gloves on; nothing there. shadow boxing. a trap door in the lake bed opened up and the carp went down the cellar steps, filing barrels with gunpowder or drinking our wine.

it was winter closing in, frost on the tents, a cat escaped from a circus doing balancing acts up the guyropes, waking me up to show me the moon and the wet yellow leaves that completely covered the vehicles. it's the effigy of a carp angler for the bonfire, the road home was too far. in the back, a water bottle with 3 fingerling mirrors, scales tarte au pomme, netted from the stock pond. i tipped them like an organic vouvray into the black water of my pond within minutes of arrival. they'll see me out if they get past winter.
now there's garlic to plant, and broad beans, and the markets are full of hung rabbits and pigs ears. i'm building a new outdoor toilet from willow branch and osier. paid work in the jiffy bag, the firewood to cut. the gone fishing card is back in the pack and if it comes out in the shuffle then so be it.

darkness at teatime on the bird table

dp

Fishing In The Company Of Epiphany Proudfoot

2007-10-24T07:50:00.000-07:00

dp

the road to wales is a cosmic highway, littered with giant pumpkins and louis cyphre filling stations. my soundtrack for the way home was 'angel-heart' with the immortal line, "so you know johnny favourite after all?", "yes, he was my father". but before that was the morning after where i felt like harry angel being warned off with the dogs, "you listen and you listen good mister". i took myself off to gromain. a faster stretch than llanstephan with deep pools and boulders everywhere. i was looking for wyndham-barnes' seat, a piece of rock with an arthurian throne carved into it. its magical powers give you a grayling every cast. it wasn't hard to find, the water was up and the seat half submerged, but i managed a grayling on a john richardson float and a piece of flake. the day grew darker with each hour, the hills in the distance encased in rolling mist. when your caravan is on the royal military mine will be in the hills. i went down to the tail of the pool under stephen marsh-smith's house and trotted off the boards. at dusk a chub which took off like a salmon and brought stephen out of his house and down the steps in expectation. it was the fish i lost on the kennet, in fact it was the one i've been losing all summer, mine at last. a holy grail of sorts, the turning of the season in more senses than one. i fished onto dusk and met up again with terry thomas. he'd had a 4lb chub, too. we struck our rods and drove back through the mountains past smoking chimneys, barking dogs and brooding peaks to the nine quid curry house on the outskirts of newport.

north wind all week, flocks of starlings on the chimney pots.

and a chicken from the woods on the birdtable

ja

Half - Time & Bare Spools

2007-10-18T07:17:00.001-07:00

ja

ah, that road to wales, beetroot 66. all that's missing from round here is that iron bridge...and maybe the wye going under it. but it's october brings wales and normandy into line, like the final eclipse, when the moon's like that dace in your hand, when we wish we'd all been taught by clive gammon.
i've had no fishing for a week, grounded with dipswitch and horn failure, not a disease, the landrover, got no lights. last blank on penelope pit and i was bricoling two hours with the mechanism at midnight, trying to get just the low beam on without indicators, trying to whittle sticks the right shape to poke into the switches. i did get home, seeing the world like a magic lantern show on a ghost train. always the only vehicle, and for once i only lit up half the badger's eyes and the bats didn't go for the headlamps.

in spring i baited a bare patch down the garden with pumpkin seed. peered over the cabbages the other day and saw a few bigguns, rolling on their stems, orange bellied, big as cinderella's midnight carriage. rushed to the barn to get the gear. had this one out first cut, 42lbs it went, a right plumber's halloweaner:

night rains are cold now, moon like merlin's scythe slashing off leaves. any mud and it won't dry before april. you'll be piking soon down sunbury weir, and we're all left wondering about that monster chub you lost under david jones oak. i'll go back to writing my novel once the clocks change, thermometer watching, rods at the ready. new dipswitch tomorrow, back fishing by monday. planning the snow carp, rumours of frost

and there'll be birds on the bird table

dp

Bridge Over The River Wye

2007-10-17T01:45:00.001-07:00

dp

to the far off shire, over the severn bridge and through the brecon beacons to builth for the angling writers weekend. super furries 'mountain people' on the stereo. memories and mushrooms everywhere, the unicorn's caravan over the next ridge. rumours of bob's brother and wild carp at llandrindod. dual language signs, dark skies at noon, your welsh novel on every shelf, small towns with methodist halls full of brechtian auctions. pints of brains. the next morning an early escape to the wye, stretching away into infinity, a tree lined river vanishing into mist, the longest aisle, each swim the oldest pew. autumn rain filling salmon pools, trees dripping in ancient woods and the calls of wrens, woodpeckers and jays. the water from the deepest springs, to wade in it is enough, to put a float through it is overwhelming. james of ealing never made coarse rods for the wye, it was a salmon river until only a few years ago and now it is being opened up like the midwest. so its the kennet perfection, my battered rapidex and a john richardson avon. shoals of dace, each fish touching a pound, like a silver hoard from under the stones.

a voice in the trees, and terry thomas arrives, the king of caerleon,

the man who was taught at school by clive gammon and is now his closest friend. we fish for chub in the dusk and lose a monster in the roots of a magic tree.

merlin on the birdtable

ja

Tomb Of The Unknown Angler

2007-10-09T22:14:00.000-07:00

ja

your photos always peel like churchbells from a far-off shire, pasties and mackeson, "the last of england". your market town tackle-shops are worth their weight in practical nostalgia. france, for all its backwardness, has managed to lose its high street tackleshops. post-war shame, uprooting all signs of working class culture from the grande rue. stick in a coiffeuse and a flower shop. they call that modernity and think it's chic. most french anglers buy generic tackle from supermarkets. this is the gross devaluation of a culture doomed to welcome the coming of the jacques-the- knife asbos. the french are losing home-pride, throwing it away. they eat shit now, the kids are running on pre-crack E-numbers and porsche envy and are hungry for power; this is france on the tilt: from right to wrong in one sarkozy leap. in 10 yrs time i'll be beaten up by a girl gang outside the boulangerie. count on it. france is going to the chiens. i hate to sound like the mock invader but i have to say you can't buy much of any quality in france now and no one seems to care as egality & fraternity gives way to greed. angling follows suit: the old brands have lost out to the hypermarket, cheap and chancy, breaks first go. ill-equipped anglers with bubble-pack pre-loaded reels and telescopic rods i wouldn't even use for runner beans, actions like an oscilator wave. the tackle shops you do find in the major cities and medium towns are chains, franchised clones without character or tradition, or windowless warehouses on industrial estates selling bankrupt stock and job lots by ex brassiere salesman who've only ever tied a knot in a shoelace and a kipper tie. your "the creel" is a cutty sark, a stonehenge, the tomb of the unknown angler. every june 16 the frank barlow pie&mash legion should lay wreaths at its door, lest we forget.
here it's mushrooms and hunters and bellowing bulls, 3 blanks last week, driving home in scotch mist thicker than a plank of rain. saturday was mushrooming under fire, scrambling up a mossy hillock as the gun dogs sniffed me out, bells clanking round their necks. i stank like a wild pig after a week of old dirt and it put them in a yelp as i filled my basket with pieds de moutons (hedgehog mushrooms). just made the vehicule as the shots cracked through the bracken. it was worth it, they're in the freezer:

monday, back to penelope pit, no ideas. just look for the mushroom in the swim and fish there(it's under the right hand buzzer):

both runs came to the mushroom rod. first one dumped the hook, second tore strips off me this side of midnight, a catamaran with auxilliary boosters, a hunting carp:

beetroot soup tonight as rain thrashes the leaves off trees.
service revolver on the birdtable
dp

The Creel

2007-10-07T12:07:00.000-07:00

dp

it is the desolate diana and the scene from the planet of the carps in the photo, they are one and the same. the barren wastes of crown land in the winter stalked by teenage prescription drug asbos in reebok classics with no laces, the original midnight baitrunners. your hat trick of full moons was like the great escape, i was waiting for the baliff to say good morning to the big one as he boarded the last train out of hampton court. had my own 36 this week, not a common but a shopfront, the greatest shopfront in the world, 36 station road, aldershot, the address of the creel. the tackle shop i visited with my dad after my first day at secondary school, twenty nine years ago. half a pint of maggots, a plummet and amo, amas, an unhooking mat. unhooking mats as unheard of then as latin is now. on the old strip by the station, past the old southern hotel. the smell of ammonia and giant leneys in their cases on shelves high above the counter, all found dead at frensham small, original stockings from after the war after they'd refilled the ponds from their war draining. renewed my farnham permit for winter days on the wey and trips to frensham. was going to go yesterday morning after i found the following entry in the fishing gazette:

october 14th 1905

'mr george griffiths of frensham pond writes, 'our perch are feeding well, within a fortnight with only 3 rods, six have been grassed over 1lb and up to 1 3/4lb and last saturday one of just 2lb'.

last saturday a century on would have been yesterday but put off by the likelihood of yachts on the pond and nagged by my empty pockets i chose the race track at wimbledon for dawn where i knocked out boxes of auction surplus to thames start-ups. tea in the garden today, bulb planting under the magnolia later.

tackle shopfront archive on the birdtable

swifty's in vauxhall is next

ja

Blue Hearts, Lonely Moons

2007-10-01T04:47:00.001-07:00

ja

peter sarstedt stole your baitbox. sandy denny just put him up to it. is that the desolate diana in the photo, or the last scene from planet of the carps? it sent the shivers through me, carp with glass eyes swim in there don't they? bob's mate had a 26, (or was it a 19 common?) with anal fin syndrome out of there last week. summer was dead on arrival here, and now its carcass is heaped in the fields and burning under a moon like a blood orange. i've piped a new stove into the caravan and fish with the LL bean mittens on soon as that sun plunges like the last R101, well before the french shopkeepers lock up now. the air smells of after-plough; first forest harvest in the wicker basket:

mushroom clouds on north east collision course put the cold slap on penelope pit and a couple of blanks had me on late nights in the r&d lab. sometimes you just have to take them by surprise by doing the obvious, so i stayed put in the double-30 swim when the fish were crashing on the opposite bank like bath time for aquaphobics. i tweaked the set-up to get more bleeps and last wednesday well into black-out an sos came through, this one was a zeppelin, armed to the pharangeal teeth and it went down to hand-to-hand as the wind sang through the line, a hired 40 on a no-win-no-fee mission:

paperwork and the yearly garden/barn and general tidy-up meant i missed the last chance waxing days and wednesday saw me heading for the pit through a wall of cold rain, the one thing the carp there despise. so i do too. cold piss on a full moon, so soon as i saw the pall of grey spounge over the eure valley i turned back, headed for home, avoided a straffing and got some proper kip for once. next day the clouds broke so i taxied the hurricane out of the barn again, fully armed from the day before, arriving at penelope as the sun rolled the pitch. north east wind barking like ridgebacks. a 3-rod day i thought, something i do in a blue moon, a lonely hearts way of fishing, but out the third rod went, into a 12foot hole in the wind. by 9 o clock the wind had got to me and a full moon was draped in flowing chiffon. the racket off the route nationale was what chainsaws are to rainforests, so i actually backtracked to the hurricane parked back of the swim to turn the radio on for a time check. it always works, that or a piss when you've hovered on the rods expectantly for hours: the left hand buzzer gave me three bleeps to the wind and i hit a good fish running. it's on the mat after shooting out my auxilliaries, and i'm saying to myself could be another 40 here when the blue moon rod goes off in the hole. i hit that one and let it run on a tight clutch, came back and dealt with this one when, you've guessed it, you can see the red middle buzzer light in the picture, just come on by the carp's nose before i've even time to lift it:

i'm on a hat trick with a possible upper-30 plus i've no time to weigh, two fish on collision course, more penelope madness:

the 3rd one's way off in the night and the dogs lost the scent.
weekend was spent on autumn rituals; me and laure trimming and clearing the trees round my pond, cutting firewood and stringing the onions. this is hugely satisfying work. telling winter we're ready. even the cat has got his fluffy leggings on, burying his shrews like a squirrel then digging them up when we're looking, throwing them in the air like his own penelopes, even fooling himself they're still alive, a moggy off the old block...
it's days on half pay now, watching the skies, the oak apples thrashing my pond in bursts whenever a convoy of crucians glide under it. monday morning, no work's come through, unsteady rain, and i think i'll go roach fishing.

chestnuts on an open birdtable

dp

Who Knows Where The Time Goes

2007-09-28T07:15:00.001-07:00

dp

the sun went down on summer isle and drew the north wind down from the pole. put the commons deep in the mud, up to their gills in the passing season's silt. the wicker basket men took off their masks and headed for the one doored pub, fiddles tucked under their elbows, readying themselves for a six month lock in. an excursion on christmas eve for a flounder might be the best they will manage. passing round a plate for frank barlow and his concrete keepnet. your fat forty was the start of autumn proper. the fish that stole the baked beans from the altar at the harvest festival. here the wind blew down lamb street banging the doors at christ church spitalfields like the apsley cherry-garrard's tent flap on his fortieth night at the pole. the thames is running like slate and i'm putting old float winders on the fire. the roach will be on the elder berries before too long. want to get out on the river but sandy denny has stolen my bait box.

glimpse of a wren on the birdtable

ja

Pumpkin Eaters

2007-09-19T04:21:00.000-07:00

ja

your carp is the last surviving spitfire from the battle of atlantis. gawain's supper caught on a green knight. mine are just baby-boomers, demobbed galicians whose scales fell from their eyes. mine skulk in boilie-bunkers, fox-holes and nutrabait nuthouses; yours do night-school ballistics, shooting out lights and littering their lake bed with burned out mitchell 300s. and how did you get that photo of marc bolan, david carl forbes and dick walker wearing their emerson, lake & palmers? or are they the mortgage flock queing up to take their feed out of the foot&mouth bank? wicker basket men at the weigh-in, the day 5drams of bleak took the sweepstake. the roach in the rollneck jumper looks familiar. there must have been a hole in frank barlow's keepnet.

they're playing chicken at penelope pit now the wind is a stiff draft. yesterday evening the rain turned a dirty tackle and i stood like a horse under an oak tree waiting for it to stop, waiting for the haybale that never comes. drove home early with a mud flap missing, listening to the slap of manure hitting the chassis (they're ploughing as i scatter). today i dried the kit outside and nearly didn't fish. tossed a coin, the nogent pit opted to bat. it's a weary walk round it now, having to pack extra kilos of english wool for the chilly mist and the cold blade of a machete moon. i needn't have bothered. this 28-a-day hattie jakes broke her asbo and made a run for macdonalds in evening dress as i sat in the late sun editing a novel about drinking guinness.

how did your olympic wildies running on chic pea fuel become these gas guzzlers? didn't yours strip the skin off your knuckles? mine jogged a few yards then threw up on the mat.
night fell hard though, sky like a chav's ford escort windscreen, moon hanging off the rear view, white smoke coming off the water, autumn revs, souped up and glazing the rods in dew which sent a chill down the line. days drawing in tighter than a lynch mob culling wicker men.

phoenix on the bird table
dp

The Wicker Men

2007-09-17T05:26:00.000-07:00

dp

i used to think your french carp were zeppelins when you held them by the tail and watched them creep back into the water in the beam of a torch. searchlight phantoms. now i know they're the ghosts of your juggernaut drivers as they cross the country on a cocktail of pastis and pills, with their pinprick speedball eyes, the descendents of maigret's barge boys. feeding on your baits like they were swilling down a five franc dinner at a roadside bar. they are history, down to the last scale. mirror carp, a reflection of france, the miscreant country at the back of europe's line.

while you were hitching your hooks to passing trucks i was down the leg of mutton for what felt like the last of the bushy park trilology. armed with a peter wheat bottle green glass avon, a battered mitchell 300, 8lb all the way through, chick peas and an a pair of efgeeco rod rests. i wasn't through the gates til one o'clock, an early start thwarted by the deer cull. the bracken turning and the leaves beginning to come down. thunderstruck oaks turning white. the walk through the bracken maze took me past sets of antlers that would suddenly move, and disappear into the woods like wicker heads. the feeling of being watched. the end of the summer at sunset. finally my only wild carp of the summer climbed the ladder and took the bait. the fire was lit and out came the wicker heads to celebrate. even rod stewart and britt eckland's bum double. they reckon the original master of the wicker man was buried under the M3 and now i know where, at the hampton court turn off, junction 1. with the bones of a medieval common in the can. the distant cousin of your mirror.

summerisle celebration on the bird table

ja

After The Goldrush

2007-09-14T05:50:00.000-07:00

ja

another hair-triggered memory, another johnny's jaunt whistling past my ear: romney marsh, royal military. if constable had owned a camera he'd've taken that photo. i'd cancel my exile if you lived dyke-side. pike-bung mini-breaks with the smuggler rod on the romney hythe&dymchurch shuttle, revenge a wasted childhood, begging on bleeding knees for my old man to let me take the rod on the compulsary sunday drive, me and the ratbag packed like nuns in a morris minnow. just one cast, but the cunt called fishing desire "bellyaching". all because once, to keep me from mischief, he left me there with a float rod and the crust from last week's loaf while he smarmed his way into some posh widow's kitchen with a bag of tools. she must have thrown him out. he came back in half an hour, just as my second cast sent a drunken quill lurching through a tench's haareem. "pack up and get in the car," he said, words which killed so many fisher-boys hearts dead with hatred post-1966. that one glimpse of the other life you never recover from. i dream of it still, my geoff hurst tench 40 years on, my "grand meaulnes", my dr zhivago.

penelope pit has no white horses and was never mentioned in a gazette. women who look as if they were swapped for a horse walk their dogs along the potholes, and men who limp from a tractor accident smash the nettles down with landing net poles to flip their rubber shads into the dead-leg, funny bone, tennis elbow of a river running alongside. the only sense of history is yesterday's rubbish. scruffy horses fart in the paddocks and the lorries gush by, air brakes hissing this side of the roundabout half a mile downwind. last night i could see the blue and red neons of a macdonalds from my swim. a granary town, we're still bucolic pit-side, if the word has half its leg in tuburculosis or plague. i shouldn't be there, i've things to do, but come 5 o'clock the old man within me says "get in the car". where the rods are sunday nuns in permenant supplication. it's a harvest sun and an indian wind baking the smell of harrowed fields now the kids are back at school and the swallows gang up on the late hatches. i fish back of the wind come september, cast on the line where the ripples begin. the wind is irrelevent now. blowing hot and cold and chasing its own tail. yesterday it turned south and i set up with sun in my face and not a carp to be seen. a 30lb amnesia day, rig stiff as a corpse, 3 bait stringer right on the edge of the glare, the left-hander on a bar. you'd think the old man was still on his high horse, checking his albert down the widow's pantry, my 30 minutes was up and he thinks "that boy is up to mallarky"... a single peep and the tip just creaked an inch. i was still in poloroids. after the goldrush, 33lbs of crazy horse which toppled wellington:

it's a game of two halves now. i'm in the winter fleece soon as that sun hits the macdonalds yard arm. almost too dark to see i pull the left-hander off the bar, re-bait, put it back. the tip a silouette, it pulls round, no bleep. it's only been out there 5 minutes. the old man hasn't even got to the widow's front gate. touch & go at 31. old man lying by the side of the road with the lorries rolling by:

neil young on the birdtable

dp

Romney Marsh

2007-09-10T16:36:00.003-07:00

dp

lots of pair of wellies with white socks turned over washed up at
dungeness. they walk around by themselves when the moon comes up.
you can see the tilley lamps rocking in the breeze.

didn't come straight home, too many roads to tramp. followed the
line of the old royal military canal, a tree lined, lily padded
noose, the olympic village of the napoleonic wars - redundant by the
time it was dug and finished in 1808. in his 'new and complete
history of the county of kent' published in 1828 william henry
ireland noted that the water 'abounded with large carp, tench, perch,
pike, eels and every other species of freshwater fish'. their
descendents still swimming its length. the ultimate back water, the
end and the beginning of romney marsh, two and a half hours from my
door - i am going back to pike fish it in the winter. talked to a
few old boys watching their floats by the pads, as the wind cut
across the fields. swore i saw wellington crossing the ditch on a
white horse. could have been you landing a double in 1978.

cutting i found from the 1804 kentish gazette on the birdtable:

"last week the wife of one of the men employed in cutting the canal
at shorncliffe was conducted by her husband to the market place at
hythe with a halter around her neck and tied to a post from whence
she was purchased for sixpence"

ja

Brooke Bond Beach Heads

2007-09-05T11:15:00.001-07:00

ja

your seascapes would make even captain cat's eyes get up and walk. dungeness was a legend of my childhood. there were men down my road who went there sundays, leaving me guessing with my breadflake and hooks to nylon. men of dungeness, powerstations in donkey jackets, long green heave-ho rods and twelve snoods of mackeral, white mini vans come back half rusted from an hours high tide, men not born to roach and rudd their lives away. beach-heads, big intrepids, bobble hats and wellies with the tops turned down. i imitated them, even bunked sunday school and collected mackeral feathers but the call never came. they left me sucking split-shot. unto the carp i went. lugs to holland in a dream, or a john buchan novel. you brought it all back, the sunken wreck of kent childhood, a jarmanised chassis. dungeness lighthouse, my photo on a brownie from a school trip, 3rd prize in the brooke bond inter schools....

last night the moon a-tilt, a punctured wembley winner stoved in from a kneeing. i was still beside the nogent pit as it topped, way beyond the whistle, the cold wet dew on its victory lap, my knees pulled up under the fleece. random fish, aimless strollers on the flat orange water after a day of northern bitter ruffled their feathers. i'd put the right hander on a bed of granules first and only cast at 7, 3 hours back, a 1oz lead flattened with a hammer, using up the Hutchinson hollow braid, flurocarbon a thing of the past, it shouldn't be on the market, you wouldn't trust it to hang your granny with a grinner knot. burn the lot and start again. no doubt it's a hooklink breakthrough, but research only got as far as the break. and in the left hand corner 30lb amnesia, looking like a fucking power cable out of dungeness. cold, de-wined, and running on four bits of toast, i decided a piss and a pack-up. it would get me home by 11, early night, plan it again sam. instinct is stubborn. 15 minutes more, then i'd piss and piss off out. the run came on the piss. 29lbs:

got in at midnight, cooked from dry, digging up the garden veg with a dim smack-it-again-sam torch, the moon long back in the brambles by the time i fell asleep. i should've gone again tonight, but the tide is low and the powerstation down. everything is drawing in, from the money pouch to firewood carts, and autumn signals make frantic prompts off-stage.

first pumpkin on the birdtable

dp

Space Shuttle

2007-09-04T09:08:00.001-07:00

dp

back from dungeness, the lost beach, the largest area of shingle in the world along with cape canaveral, a post apocalyptic edward hopper vision in a corner of kent long forgotten by the mapmaker. the first sight of the power station chills the guts - a ticking time bomb, a concrete tumor lost in a forest of pylons. no human life visible, little birdsong. all around it the future post dirty bomb perhaps, a wasteland of gravel, sand and alpine plants, giant sea cabbages, rusting arms of iron poking out of the ground. occasional pilgrims to derek jarman's prospect cottage with its gethsemane garden and john donne's 'the sunne rising' nailed on the side.

a row of clapperboard houses, its occupants the pioneers of the 21st century, their dwellings built from abandoned railway carriages.

expected to see the ghost of roger deakin walking round or swimming in the areas marked DANGER on the map. a place bleak and beautiful beyond the imagination. porpoise in the sea, your sailfish wouldn't have been out of place. left the rods in the car wrapped up in a flag. walked and walked and sat on the beach and watched the fishing boats being winched on and off the shingle, stick men on the horizon hurling their leads and lug at holland. planned our dream of living here. the white cliffs in the distance. collected driftwood for the first proper fire of the autumn and had a pint of spitfire in the britannia - the last pub in england.

the best day of the year on the bird table

ja

When To Catch Them

2007-08-31T05:37:00.000-07:00

ja

dick walker's two bites a day sounds optimistic this week: red moons and north east winds, right raspers making the fleece feel cheap. fingers too numb to turn the pages of dave steuart's classic to see if there's a "when" chapter still left to write.
sawdust & halibut pellets, sounds like the lucky dip at the village fete. bob says they leave the bushy gates open at night for "security reasons" to give emergency services easy access. crack-heads who fall on broken gin bottles. lock the gates, let them repent as they bleed to death.
you & me, we're slaves to different ends of the day. i'd probably catch more if i fished a morning. you might if you took a flask of afternoon tea and sat till the gin was delivered on that red moon tray.

so dave steuart's still outside the gates. o for the days when writers had their own tackle shops. instead of selling it they get given tackle now and they should be ashamed to have their names on it. soon as you put some sponsered cunt's name on it it'll break, snap, leak, twist or disintegrate. is dave the steuart of the grey plastic tackle box? well, they last 40 years.

gin moons or not, it was tuesday after tea at penelope pit. the sawdust were there too, all fishing from their car boots. one drawback with the sun; the fairweather drive-up pellet-heads. they were all on the calm end, backside of the wind. i set up on the chilly bay right in the teeth after gathering a dustbin's worth of 3 euro groundbait packets and throwaway red worm tubs from last sunday's recreational litter-bugging dance. it wasn't looking good, i re-tied the rigs a dozen times and fussed over where the leads fell. but i left one under the bush on the right, another with a 3-bait stringer 40 yrds into the bay out front on some stony ground.

the pellet-heads were packing up as the run came to the long-rod; fought till last minute of extra time, the golden goal, 1-0 to me, pellet-heads gutted:

yesterday the same wind still cut mustard on the nogent pit. same fuss, same doubts, but i put the left-hander into 20 feet of water and the other a pop-up in the weed bed a yorker's length out.

first dark and listless carp on gin winter-warmers rolled in the gutter as the red moon made the water slicken like oil and the dew felt like a freeze-up. i was packing up when i hit one bleep on the deep rod and found it snagged. same snag i had when you were there, remember? i was pissing in the bushes and you saw my rod go twice round the moon in the rests. this one came loose too, like a sailfish blown into the shipping lane:

i'm baiting your swim in any case. "one true void" is published by two ravens press in jan 08, but i should have a copy by november, when your rodrests will be pushed onto the mud, as you will be if you don't make it to mike walker's two-meals a day lake. in the meantime, you'll have a bushy common on the third day, i'm sure of it, in time for the fry up. bob's on a golden duck there too.

skinhead moonstomp on the turntable

dp

How To Catch Them

2007-08-31T05:27:00.000-07:00

dp

well done on your rotten bait bushwhacker what a lump. you must have written the lost chapter in dave steuart's 1954 - 'carp - how to catch them', - 'carp how to catch them after three seasons of rain'. that's what i call stalking, sometimes i feel as though it might take me three seasons to bank a common, i don't mind the wait, in fact it may make the final fish all the more satisfying and feels a little bit more how carp fishing used to be. after all it was dick walker who said in a letter to bb 'two bites in a day from a carp are as much as an ordinary mortal can hope for'. he obviously never anticipated fishing at bushy park where the permits would be torn up if the locals were told that two runs a day was the limit. i went there last wednesday, leaving home in the dark and sneaking through the open gates at 06:20. it was barely light blowing a gale and raining streadily. my only joy was that i had a flask of tea and that the water would be deserted. the deer were huddled under the oak coppices and i plotted up under a big willow. carp rolled under my feet and jumped over the lily pads. i put my bait in the deepest water for once, mindful that that would be my best chance of a take. i wanted a fish before anyone else arrived and then i would retreat to the cafe and a fry up. i didn't have a touch all morning, the wind got up and carried the sound of church bells over the bracken, seven, eight, nine o'clock. by eleven the place was packed again and the sawdusts were hauling them out on halibut pellet long lines. having watched a noddy land a fish and then conspire to allow it to slither back into the water with the hook only to be played in again i slipped away and was home for lunch. at least i'm bringing the average catch down to walker levels.

dave steuart was a good london writer - wrote books on roach and had a tackle shop in twickenham. a lot of his old customers come to the stall to talk about maggot baths and bait droppers. steuart's still alive, living down in hampshire. his wife kay was a tarn ghost in the sixties, got a great pic somewhere of her behind a pair of mk iv's. coolness personified.

thanks for the spec for one true void - can't wait - when's the publishing date? we having some kind of celebration? maybe the rod rests won't be empty in the next swim - a lot depends on the stall takings and book progress. can smell that french cider already. don't stop cutting the grass on the landing strip just yet.

herbert jenkins and other lost fifties publishers on the birdtable

ja

Catching The Eight 30

2007-08-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

ja

wouldnt mind a soaking to fish a river like the kennet, though here the huisne could do with a roving by the likes of you and that perfection. you might get to take the same picture again, plenty of undiscovered chub under the parsnips. i'd coached mike walker in the art of pursuading you over here with talk of carp like pumpkins, but your tea kettles and bread punches must've gone to his head, or you spotted the hook. cant get bob on a boat neither. ten years of tea and lies and postal orders but the nearest he's got is a passport form which he's rolled his boilies on the last 5 yrs in any case. so your leave is really cancelled? well if it means the london book will get to print, then i'll put up with empty rodrests in the swim next door come november on walker's pitch. your waterlog "white house" article, and all your london gospels, is enough to stop the olympics. bob's right when he says you're the only contributor to waterlog who's doing anything important. the rest of them are just your tributaries flowing in all directions. your london book will turn even sinclair and ackroyd into lost becks disappearing down a thames sewage gully.
work has had me in snags all week. 7 days between outings, watching the rain dribble down the window, going outside like getting a slap with a wet cloth. by thursday, all fighting waterproofs wounded and down to the reserves, i found myself doing battle again. completely ambushed by a delivery of stair rods early afternoon, laure phoned with a get-out clause: could i drop her sproggs at the nogent swimmer and she'd pick em up later. well, if they wanted to get wet twice... the carp rods were still in the back of the vehicle, so in the downpour i left them there, squeezed the kids round the fishy pong and dropped them off. by rights i should've driven home again, but "the rods were with me". the way home goes past the gravel pit. my baits were rotton from the week before, the windscreen was a bathescope, but i'd left the logic at home. short shopping detour, a bag of frolic from leclerc to bait up with, and a little zip up case for my new digital camera, and i parked up beside the church and walked the mile round the pit in my t-shirt: best to keep the dry clothes in the rucksack for later. low-down anti-gypsy barrier means i cant get the land rover into the lane anymore, let alone down to the carpark; nearest slot's beside the church, an extra 400 yards walk.
fucking sick of waterproofs that melt like pva, and pva more water resistant than my army poncho. set the rods up squelching, then stood like a marsh duck till the five o'clock downpour began to ease off around 8. till then the morale was no fitter for the purpose than the pva. i put the dry clothes on, born-again, running on instinct at least. for 3 seasons i'd seen a good fish top in the same place 20yrds out, always the first up of an evening, always about 8 o clock. saved up this swim till i needed it, and today seemed right to put a bait there. i was just doing the settings on the camera when the run came at 8.30. 35lb mirror. didnt jump this time:

lit the stove too that night, but not for the first time. all the summer's corks long burnt and up in smoke through stove-pipe hat, the summer of rhumatics and trench foot and carp blowing water spouts like whales one over the plimsol line. i must've caught that carp as it was putting it's clock forward, half way through its tail turning orange.
it's the time of year too when i have to bushwhack into my caravan, the vegetation up & over, way into row F:

feel like a castaway in the wind in the willows myself, till the first cold snap will me unpacking the moleskin long johns and the weasel fur mittens.

goretex gift voucher on the birdtable

dp

Wind In The Willows

2007-08-24T10:11:00.001-07:00

dp

parsnips on the bird table - dig for victory. every car boot here is like a harvest festival. deformed roots and cans of baked beans left by the altar. a feast in a time of famine. lost time, lost fish, the theme of the season so far. having bumped that common at bushy i went to the wasing estate on the kennet as a guest of roy, who has a weakness for good floats and a nose for barbel. never fished that stretch of the kennet before. what a contrast to bushy, a private estate rather than a public park, a wildwood with downed trees, reed beds, water meadows and moss covered bridges. no sawdust specimen hunters here, just the wind in the leaves. the river twice the width of the loddon with half the depth in places. didn't know whether to trot for dace, or weedle out chub with breadflake and lobs. went for the chub and lost a good 'un in the tree roots. then i lost the afternoon as the rain came down in a deluge. put up my b james kennet perfection, a john richardson avon and managed a perch, my first fish of the season, only a few ounces but celebrated nonetheless. in the swim with the fallen tree, then a chub no bigger than my little finger, a fat headed circus freak gudgeon that swallowed a lob and after that a couple more perch. it rained and rained and rained. a few claps of thunder. roy had a barbel and lost another. the river came up by a foot and by the time we left in the gloom the track was flooded. corsa just made it through and i never wanted a land rover so much in my life. a pint in the pub by the railway crossing and then the drive back into town. took three days for my gear to dry out.

mick walker came to the stall yesterday for a cuppa - good to meet him, he was trying to persuade me to get on the ferry but i've got pieces to write and an autumn of auctions. not to mention the london book. reading sinclair's edge of the orison, 'in 1841 the poet john clare fled an asylum in epping forest and walked eighty miles to his home in northborough. he was searching for his lost love, mary joyce - a woman three years dead.' the new victorian big emptiness. just like bushy park once the holidays are over and the carp's fins are turning orange. tell bob to look out for the stove pipe hat. northerlies for three days here, first fire of the autumn last night and august isn't out, old coal and the summer's corks.

phoenix on the birdtable

ja

Napoleon's Eyewash

2007-08-22T01:36:00.001-07:00

ja

the last week has disappeared like an old master under new daubs, a clean sweep like your long shingle beaches. in other words, lost time, lost photos, lost fish. from your ballad of the back-roads i can't believe our bumpers didn't cross. except for the mackeral, we were in the same kind of land-warp. 2 friday teatimes ago me and laure took off for the loire on impulse, packing the streamlined version of the 4-day kit: tent, rods, box of matches and a corkscrew. we made beaugency by 8 under skies like a mafia thug's windscreen. the loire was high and belting and we pitched our tent on the embankment ridge and drank napoleon's eyewash from a green bottle. the next 3 days we navigated the dead arm of the loire, a basket weavers dream, a wadi of whicker saplings and ridged tracks where only land rovers dare to tread. we bucked in low box for miles alongside a wild river still running at spring levels. chub who haven't seen a fishing box since genevoix's day and carp rolling mid-stream who've never even seen a chub.

we chilled the wine in the landing net and laure gathered driftwood and built the fire in a rondel of stones. she sharpened roasting sticks from saplings and we ate grilled sausages and baked spuds. the sun came out and bomber harris spotted the smoke and sent faith, hope & charity in jospehine's montgolfiers as i trotted for dace in an evening feed.

came home to cold rain and dropping temperatures, the pit carp on autumn pay, only turning up for piece work on night shift now. took a hit-and-hold leather from under the trees on penelope pit in a big wind the other night, but blanked on the town pit after running into fellow poachers at midnight, fording the margins with buckets and nets, crayfish mafia as suprised to see me as i was to see them. a man and his 2 sons, an upbringing to save the world from your cider mutants. we swapped notes and passed like herons in the night back to our business. there were carp shelling the margins like lazy artillary from the ridge, but nothing on target.
still on photographic ration pack: the good camera turned up 3rd time lucky off ebay but with the wrong battery. former good one came back from kid's summer camp broken beyond repair, and the cheap substitute which took the above is no more: it went for 10 euros at a boot sale in the rain. i'll be sending in sketches of my fish, chalk outlines on the murder mat.

first parsnips on the bird table

dp

Nelson's Blood

2007-08-22T01:35:00.001-07:00

dp

poacher's pond looks a goer, well worth getting on a lysander but don't wait for me, get in the reeds and get the eels in. i could be over in the autumn but the big push might be in the spring. must be a few wildies laid up in the silt, too. perfect for corn on a size six. after bushy park i took flight up the A11 to north norfolk, big skies, wide marshes, long shingle beaches and ancient oak woods. village after village with one pub and a pond full of crucians. bookshops and barrels of ale. grass growing down the middle of the road, colonies of sparrows. stayed for three days and mapped estate lakes for the winter, climbing red brick walls and taking the back roads. yellow corn fields against black skies, thunder storms on the beach, driftwood fires and mackerel boiled in a bucket. drank nelson's blood in burnham thorpe, then to the beach at cley in the dusk to take mackerel on a single spoon, the sniper's supper, the one eyed admiral's feast.

lady hamilton on the birdtable

ja

Cider With Mutants

2007-08-09T07:47:00.000-07:00

ja

your dawn dispatch took me jolting over the ruts down memory bus-lane, the summer dawns in a london park. there is no city scum more stiller or the need of a fish more depressingly urgent in the world than in a london park at 6.30am as the sun comes up to sour the stomach. and to come so close to going home for breakfast john. hooking dogs and ducks and having hyperactive commons fed on burger buns tailgate old mens' floats is a great part of the game and i'm pleased to see you've kept that tradition alive. you did very well to get a take first time on. i want to see your float as much as a fish on your mat.
bb's words are gospel here too, engraved on the rod butts. more If than but, i'm not a dawn angler. unless the wind is slapping the boards, i can't fish through that sense of diminishing hope you get after the early morning bubblers have dispersed and the fry huddle the margins for the day. your photo fixes that classic atmosphere beautifully. the rising sun sours my stomach and blears the eyes and suddenly the rest of the day has to be endured at half-mast. i like getting to the water after tea with the wind at full flight, an hour away from a nice shade, hopes building as the fish start showing and smelling out the groundbait. unlike the mornings, time is on your side and every blank hour means the next hour only brings you nearer that first pull on the tip. my whole life is based round avoiding other anglers & kids & dogs(no cider mutants in france) and that's another fact which makes evenings my domaine. the world disappears into a black hole till that little red light comes on...
the last two trips to penelope pit didn't pan out like that. the solitude was there but the fish were turning on sixpences. cast a yard wide and they won't play. yesterday afternoon i tried getting there before six when they give away their positions for the coming hours. only there was an air raid and i just got the anderson up in time. must have been bomber harris come back to finish off the snipers. a hundred thousand tons of ballbearings hit the water just as i got the second rod out and had my feet up:

h2o bombs or a leak from a lead research factory which even downed a few swallows attacking from below. the anderson was still leaking after the last air raid but i managed to get the pva saftely away so it didnt fall into enemy hands for a meltdown. trouble is, a straffing like that kept the fish in hiding, probably till dawn when you should've been there to take over the quill watch with a chick-pea. by midnight i was in full winter gear, 2 carl-forbes under fleece and thinsulate and gortex and dri-plus and just the gloves missing. i drove home scattering rabbits and knowing i should've put the right hand rod 3 feet to the right just before black-out.
with autumn just over the hill i'm taking one more 3-day trip with laure on the off-chance this friday, rods in back and mais in bucket, over the loire & just beyond, before watching the local leisure waters empty of their campers and become fishable in solitude again after august 15. this is your cue, of course. i've given up trying to get bob over to france. i've added one intriguing little water to the list. this one is half a mile down the lane from me, a poaching job, an acre of rush fringed pool owned by some parisian git who comes for 2 hours a year just to walk his dog round it for ten minutes then phone up the garden care to cut the brush back and mow the grass. this could be the lost moat from roger deakin's garden. i've long thought of poaching it, thinking it maybe a rudd haven. so i sat by it the other night at sunset to see how the land lay, seeing as the pond is visible from the lane(following spy-photo taken mid afternoon in drive by shooting):

as the moon rose red, so did the carp. double or quits. i'm putting in the mais for a week down by those rushes where even bomber harris wouldn't find me after dark. the dummy run on that red moon night was accomplished with avon wrapped in a groundsheet and done up with bale twine, worms in pocket. twice had to throw the rod in the ditch and whistle on my way down the lane as the local farmer stopped to shake hands and inevitably said: taking a stroll? ten minutes with silver paper and a size 10 in the margins produced a little rudd. i'm thinking of putting an dead rudd eel rod out too. something tells me there's an elephant's trunk or a teenage mutant swimming round this place. what do you think? worth getting on a lysander?

black out drapes on the bird table

dp

Sawdust Specimen Hunters

2007-08-08T22:46:00.001-07:00

dp

finally made it down to bushy park yesterday, to the leg of mutton. left home at half five and was on the water by half six. an august mist coming off the bracken and the water like a stew. carp all over the place. the sun hot even at seven. i fished chick pea on a goose quill that john richardson made - copper wire and all. think the carp wanted to take the float more than the bait. got plenty of liners. was tempted to fish on the top but there wasn't a ripple in sight. just good to sit by the water and drink tea. by ten the wind had got up and the fish had gone down. i switched to a leger - 1/4 ounce arlesley and long tail and had storming take. back-winding for jesus, bottle top butt-ringer. a good fish, a common probably set off down the other end of the pond running the clutch. not wanting it to cross the lines of the two old boys fishing next to me i clamped down and the hook pulled. that was it for the rest of the day. the only unhooking i got to do was taking a size 4 out of a dog's jaw - a discarded link tied to an 1 ounce lead. the owner was fairly sanguine when he had every right to be furious. despite the legion of rules the baliff didn't show up and by the time i packed up it felt like shooting apples in a bucket - a cheap fairground ride. i committed the cardinal sin of staying beyond midday and the pond filled up with kids on holiday - sawdust specimen hunters developing boilie related psycosis, name dropping the big carp in the heron and teenagers out of their heads on cheap cider. i vowed not to go out of the house for a week and sit in the garden reading bb - confessions of a carp fisher. he had it right when he said, 'early morning and late evening will find your carp addict abroad - during the midday hours he is not visible, having left the waterside. so then after a long apprenticeship, he takes upon himself something of the character of the carp - he is most active at sunrise and sunset, and the midday hour knows him not'. i'll be back there over the coming weeks but the midday curfew will be observed. i just wanted to fish but the place i should have fished was really the moat in roger deakin's garden. i remember my visit to his house in eye in suffolk a few years ago. the moat was like a medieval stew pond. you could have fished it forever and blanked for eternity. it would have been paradise. he left the house unlocked and we went inside - i was with his friends paul and sarah - the kettle was still on the stove and there was an unfinished manuscript on the table. probably the book that's just been published. there was an abandoned railway carriage in the garden. no sawdust specimen hunters, no teenage mutants, no dog snares. nobody at all.

a dream of solitude on the bird table

ja

Penelope Pitstop

2007-08-07T01:13:00.000-07:00

ja
commiserations that blighty has its foot in its mouth again and your chub get the knock-on. all the more reason to go bushy tailed down to the heron pond where it's all mouth in margins when it rains, bob reckons. and i should've guessed dcarl-forbes wanted those copper fittings for his tench rod and not his home-perm salon. you're right, he was a man after my own heart. his "small stream fishing" was meant for my childhood on the kent ditch.
i write in haste to get back to the swim pictured below:

i call it penelope pit because it's a scruffy ex-ballast hole about 12 acres beside a route nationale like whacky races. full of neglected carp because the small town the other side of this 24hr lorry race is all but underwater itself, in a contained way, with a canal, the river and about 10 other pits all more conducive to french leisure angling. it's like bomber harris missed the V2 launchers and left 20 holes at random which filled up with water from a standpipe leak, one pît for every street, fishing under the streetlamp instead of bouncing a ball off the wall. penelope pit is free and unpatrolled so i can fish undetected several hours after dark. when lorries come off the roundabout i light up like a roman candle for two seconds in the glare but the fish are used to it. these are dexie's midnight runners. the one below gave me one bleep at 12 by the church clock in a deep margin the other night. called it i-leeny:

photo quality has hit an all time low since laure's 11yr old girl took the good camera to holiday camp and i had to buy a cheap 20 quid 1mega-pixel stand-in at the supermarket on the way fishing, 3 battreries per shot. you can see i've got the carl-forbes roll-on up to my neck. fish might've gone 25. i've ordered 2 proper cameras off ebay recently and both were knicked in the post. got a refund and ordered a third. in the meantime, expect carp that look like holiday snaps from dan dare's paradise lake on mars.

mutley on the bird table

dp

The Carl Forbes Kent Copper Ferrule Roach Perfection

2007-08-07T01:11:00.001-07:00

dp

thanks for the despatch. the ghost of david carl forbes has cast its shadow over the whole week with giant roach swimming down the flooded streets. they rescued a shoal at worcester cricket ground. have you still got the chit dcf signed? did it make it onto the wall of fame in the caravan? he's a hero in all senses, a man after your own heart - sturdy says of him 'he cared passionately about such things as the desirability of organic farming and over fishing the sea by ruthlessly efficent deep sea fishing. his son carl recalls that he learned a lot about the desirability of natural farming methods whilst going fishing with his father who knew at least one local organic farmer with land adjacent to the edenbrook in kent. in these convictions he was perhaps somewhat ahead of his time'. perhaps your barn is not as empty as you think.

great shot of your land-rover, built for road trips. landscape like the lea valley before and after the olympics. you serious about buying the boat shed? shame you didn't meet my scouse mate tony crosbie at emma peel lake. he lives in japan and has just named his new born son elvis liverpool crosbie. probably feeds him on boilies from a vending machine as well. how's the 600 page edit coming along? i'm trying to clear the decks and buy myself some time to fish in august and september. bushy is on hold until my new permit comes through - which will hopefully be monday and now the foot and mouth which threatens to shut everything down. was up at woodys of wembley last night dropping off a couple of rods for restoration and they had a great 8 ft carp stalking rod - split cane, intermediates - benwoods of london for a oner. you ever heard of them? they're a new one on me. was sorely tempted by the rod but cash tight as ever. might have to go back there.

in my search for the history of the thames professionals mark the zim put me onto some footage he shot. it's amazing - bream like you've never seen before - go to you tube and type in 'underwater thames weirpool'.

fire on the horizon, dead cow on the bird table

ja

Marc Bolan's Coup De Peche

2007-08-07T01:09:00.000-07:00

ja

my old woman would've called david carl forbes a smarmy git. the white roll neck jumper and winkle picker waders, golden wonder cheese and onion farts, vimto in the haversack, the joiner in the white mini who runs off with the dowager's daughter when he comes to fix the weatherboards. in 1976 i was working in the village builders merchants when dcf himself walked in and bought a boxful of copper fittings. all the plumbers looked like him and they were all on "cash only" so how would i know. the drill was to ask them if they wanted a ticket. if they didn't you negotiated a price and put the fiver in your pocket then rushed down maidstone angling centre come saturday for some sealey flashpoints and an ounce of efgeeco or a rubber V for your back rodrest. david carl forbes said yes to the ticket and thus i discovered his name. only afterwards did it click. same with the archbishop of canterbury who came in for a palette of bricks, yellow flettons they were. no ticket too, so he wasn't patching up the cathedral himself. (i've seen french mayors going round the commune with a bucket of tar filling up the holes in the road themselves to save rate payers money. ken might like a bucket of tar and a brush). point is, if you had david carl forbes copper fittings i might understand why you abandoned a quill start on bushy for a night in special ops on dambuster lagers. me, i went on armed tour, laure navigating, the spring-hanger bushes so worn they were sounding like bomb-bay doors closing on the chassis. we were three days on roads an axle wide, rabalais country, dropping through lost valleys into the loir where every crossroads looked like the one that killed camus as he travelled to paris in a traction avant with his manuscript in a cardboard suitcase.

the first pits were carp infested but booby-trapped with internal security regulations and 1 metre 9 anti-gypsy barriers too low for the landrover even minus roofrack and wheels. the leisure pit was windswept and weedy, slimy balls of poisson-chat tumbling through it like u boats on meltdown. the loir beside it crashed down a weirpool made of old chateau walls and fallen willows, the chateau spike-topped with rotton wooden shutters hanging on with one hinge. we took a room in the one bar/restraunt left standing, part of the chateau wall, a village where every garden shed is a medieval tower with battlements. chilled muscadet, rabbit and mushrooms served by a 12 year old kid, the same wallpaper they lined camus' suitcase with, and in the morning a breakfast of home made jams in mouldy jars and coffee you could paint the railings with, all for 25 quid. old france, the one with dubonnet still painted on the gable ends of roadside cottages. the one sarkozy is going to wipe out in the affluenza wars to come when i'll be pouring boiled porridge off the battlements of these gutted chateaux and
taking to the water mills as the tear gas drifts over the pool like a tench angler's final dawn.

we backtracked down the loir past miles of "coup de pêche", riverside allotments with dilapidated sheds and old platforms, the gutted mills like this one, smashed windows and collapsed pontoons. these "coup de pêche" are the remnants of the industrial ethic, the working man's swim for life, passed down from father to son, where after a hard week assembling dynamos you drive out to your pontoon beside the river and fill a bucket with bleak and gudgeon while parafin-stove pam fries them up for supper. these allotments have begun to fall under sarkozy's plan, becoming real estate for the urban spacemen, with their tinted windows and supermarket fishing kits, the concrete poets. but for the moment the old boys hang onto them like old shutters on a single hinge, sitting out the five o'clock shadow on an old metal tractor seat bolted to a wobbly pier. the best i saw was the one with an estate agents sign on it. a green shipplapped boat shed on stilts with the cabin up a wormholed ladder. the whole structure had shifted sideways in the wind and the vines were holding it up. the swim was on a slow wide bend, the far margins backed onto wheat fileds, lily fringed, slow and deep, overhanging willows and and an upended poplar. inside the shed the canvas chairs were shredded by the moths from camus' suitcase. an old mitchell 300 box on the plank for a table. dead metal from flattened jerry cans once lining the balcony lifted and clapped in the wind. if "one true void" sells 100 copies i'll go back there and buy it. i'll assemble dynamos at night if i have to. a gravel pît not 100 yards away, a 2 star munciipal campsite with one swiss campervan in the height of the season. the campsite manager had never seen a bite alarm before and was more than baffled when he saw me lob out a pva tube full of pellet. i should have read the signs. he'd never seen a fish come out either. a 10 acre gravel pit with 6ft margins and juicy looking islands, and no signs of ever having been fished, 10 feet from our tent. he did say he'd heard that someone caught a perch... i sat it out till the moon came and went. like being back in 1976, i could've sat there six months without a run. not even the switch of a tiny roach. coming home yesterday through more lost valleys i saw a sign with an arrow pointed down a track: "carpiste". we found an acre pond in the trees. it was like a digital generated carp lake, there were backlit carp suspended over the water everywhere you looked, bow waves like the d-day landings. at the snags end we found 3 lads from liverpool shell-shocked by their bivvies. the one i talked to could hardly speak, just kept murmering monsters, monsters... they were starving after 6 days without food. all they'd come with was a barbeque and burgers but they couldn't cook it since it'd pissed down all week. too scared to leave the place and go two miles down the lane to the nearest village where they did a 9 euro 4 course "plat du jour" and sold bread and food just like liverpool. monsters? i said. runs every 10 minutes, he said. the lad on the end, he's had a 60 pounder. who owns it? i said. he didn't know, just some bloke comes round every day for the 160 quid and two shower tokens... there was another one, just down the lane, top secret, he said, weird place, the english aren't allowed to fish it. so me and laure left the poor souls back-leading in a trance and sending their bait boats into the heart of darkness. down the lane we found an old turreted manor farm with an estate lake behind electronic security barriers. i managed a spy photo on the wonky zoom before the lurchers caught their first whiff and rounded the "no day fishing" sign.

the french waveny? u.n.c.l.e hq? this is where they should've shot the prisoner, with dick walker on special effects, emma peel on the bait boat.

three days well spent, i'm desk and garden-bound for a day or two. a 600 page novel to edit just came by stevedore and wheelbarrow, but that i can take on the next leg of "the man with the camus' suitcase".
dont let another book keep you from bushy. take it fishing.
copper fittings on the bird table
salut
dp

Tax collected, belly's boiled, parachute packed, fishing gone, rolled into a ditch

2007-08-07T01:06:00.000-07:00

dp

should be at bushy park quilled up in the margins but got sidetracked by the purchase of a david carl forbes book at the market yesterday and ended up in the golden heart and then the cafe de paris at a 1940's burlesque night for my good friend dominique presley's 45th. full of junior dick walkers waxing their moustaches and comparing notes on anson shelter installation. more strippers than a hitchin specimen hunters christmas party. it's all carl-forbes fault, someone wanted to know why he was so important and i said he was the marc bolan of angling. that started a discussion that began in the east end and ended up west. it was the car crash that did it and the reverence in which he's held. the golden age of roach fishing - mid 70's. hope the pits have been kind. got thames professionals piece to write. their ghosts spread over the south by the floods.

u-boat on the bird table

ja

eggs collected, bait's boiled, land rover pakced, gone fishing, rollin' on a river

2007-08-01T00:28:00.000-07:00

Dexter Petley