vapour trails

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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