Coldwater

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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