The gift of spring

The season’s first trout ignites every angler’s passion and serves as a reminder of even better times ahead

- LAURENCE CATLOW

I remember hoping, in the concluding sentences of my previous article, that by the time you found yourself reading it I should have caught the first trout of the season and that for a time at least it would have made me feel young again (Catlow’s notebook, 21 April).

Well, I managed one part of it. Something like a week before the article appeared, the first few trout of another season had indeed found their unwilling way into my net; in fact, a round dozen of them had done so, but the truth of the matter is that not a single one of them made me feel a year, a month or even a minute younger than I had been feeling before they came along. Instead of this they achieved something much more important, for singly and together they made me feel serenely content to be 71 and to be standing or sitting by the River Tees a mile or two above High Force with a trout or two in my bag and the hope in my heart of a few more still to come.