MUCH of history can be explained by Mankind’s pursuit of the new and it strikes me that some of the nuances of angling’s appeal derive from a constant mixture of novelty and the familiar. Its experience is a stipple of energy and stimulus, like a Pointillist painting; as with love, fishing is ‘a many-splendoured thing’.
I was thinking of this towards summer’s end, when I had an invitation to the fabled Naver—a river where I had never yet managed to swim my hooks. Although I have been blessed with fishing in some 40 countries, from the Arctic Circle to the South Seas, the fin-feverish anticipation of visiting ‘pastures new’ (in this case, treescapes and gravelly meanders) was still as delicious as plunging one’s spoon into a freshly opened jar of jam.
Angling’s geographical spectrum is nowadays astonishing and (except in Covid times) has been expanded by entrepreneurs to cover much of the globe. In any fishing hut, you will hear folk discussing their wish list and, before I hand in my dinner pail, I hope to visit Chile, Bhutan, Brazil and Tasmania, as well as further acquainting myself with New Zealand, Montana and the outlying Seychelles atolls. I guess it’s only a matter of time before some tour operator begins offering trips to the Bay of Rainbows on the moon.
Some of my travels have seemed genuine explorations. In the early days of fishing off southern Cuba, the guides were still working out the flats and, when chasing giant trevally off one Tahitian motu, my boatman admitted that he didn’t even know what lay around the next corner. On the Kola peninsula’s River Umba in Russia, many of the salmon pools still had no names, and my Venezuelan canoe-paddler in the jungly creeks where we were hunting tarpon had never before seen a fly rod.
Denne historien er fra October 20, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra October 20, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
