AS I NOTE in the acknowledgements this book contains a mixture of new essays and writing of mine that has appeared in various publications over the years. The new pieces are in the main, the longer pieces. The shorter pieces, though not exclusively, are from The Times.
All of the latter, no matter where originally published, have been amended in some way, whether to include points that I did not have the space to include first time around, or to take account of new information, or to accommodate changes in context or circumstance. One or two have been completely reworked.
Because these pieces were individually written for publication at different times, each needed to be self-contained. One consequence is that from time to time information that appears in one article to make it complete appears in another for the same reason. I thought it better to let these very occasional, minor duplications stand than to introduce cross-references which, in my own reading, I tend to find a distraction.
In choosing what to include I have tried to convey something of the diversity of angling, its practices and its refinements; of the absorptions and passions it gives rise to, the places it takes us to, the literature it has stimulated and the threats to it that crowd in all around – many of them, it seems to me, alarmingly unnoticed by the average angler on the bank. Mostly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the book reflects my own greatest interest – fly fishing for trout – but there are enough other subjects to justify, I think, the generic title my publisher suggested.
The pieces do not appear in any particular sequence: indeed, with minor tweaks I have let them run in a broadly alphabetical order. As I wrote in the introduction to my previous anthology, Trout etcetera, I dip into collections like this as though into a bran tub and I am not deceived that my own work will be treated differently by others. However, I began with ‘One Long Morning’ because I wanted to convey, at the outset, something of what the experience of fishing means to me and does for me. I have ended with ‘Angling and the Future’ because it self-evidently looks ahead.
I hope that readers will find both essays of interest – and maybe the odd paragraph that comes between them.
Brian Clarke
July, 2007
THE appeal of angling is about as easy to define as beauty or truth. We might as well try to weigh what fishing does for us, or measure it with rulers, as reduce it to words – especially for someone who has not fished. To get any sense of it at all, a non-angler would have to be in the one place he cannot possibly get: inside our heads. After all, that is where the real action is.
There are not many places in Britain where the water is as bright and clean as the day God poured it, but this is one of them.
The road winds down the valley, hemmed in by hedges. Over the hedges, unseen and mostly unknown, the little stream flows scarcely casting-distance away. Looking at it over the old iron gate where I parked the car, I could see how short the fishable length is: maybe 300 yards from the wood just behind me to the place
