Telling Stories Rhymes with orange by Savs

I sloped off upstream and out of earshot of the mumbled stream of profanities that were being directed at me. I hung my head hung low and was feeling pretty shamefaced about the whole incident. Despite having apologised sincerely, profusely and repeatedly the Supermodel was having none of it. I explained, in some technical detail, the deficiencies resulting in my awkwardness with that style and length of rod but he simply shook his head and spat expletives that, rather disturbingly, attributed to the character of my mother certain unwholesome proclivities.

I held my rod out to him and offered to sort the mess out but he just stood there on the bank shaking his head and growing increasingly incandescent with frustration. To be fair, I had left a rather ugly knot in his expensive and meticulously prepared leader. In fact, the last time that you might have seen such a knot was when that blind kid who, being too goodnatured to process sarcasm, came stone last in competition at an international Boy Scouts jamboree.

To the Supermodel’s dubious credit he’s certainly quite something of a multitasker. As he worked his way deeper into the complex mess that he held in his fingers he continued upwards into my family tree, cursing each of my antecedents along the way. It was going to take something special for this storm to blow over, I could just sense it.

If you judge a day by the inclination of your quarry to impale themselves on your imitation then the day was indeed a memorable one. The Artisan and I each hooked and landed several substantial browns in the time that it took the Supermodel to complete his labour and to catch up with us. A lesser man may have grown in annoyance as a result of our good fortune but he took it as a good omen and muscled himself upstream towards the sparkling head of a long pool. Netting enough quality fish in half an hour to eclipse the sort of return that would ordinarily be sufficient to constitute a “good day” restored his mood to its natural equilibrium.

Midday found us clustered at the tail of a small run, no deeper than your thigh and no bigger than a single garage. The Artisan picked his way through it methodically, with each cast landing maybe a foot longer or wider than the preceding one. He took four or five from the typically unexceptional hole and then joined us where we stood to one side, munching on sandwiches.

Competitive angling (and don’t kid yourself, unless you’re a Zen monk all angling is competitive) is a game of accumulating whatever small advantage you can from 1% improvements in technique or craft. My particular 1% advantage is foundationed on my not sharing obvious hotspots with my adversaries. So, throwing my crust into the grass and pulling my fly from its tender, I stepped into the recently vacated run and drifted my pattern through an oval of water that I had noticed earlier was slightly greener in tint than the water around it.

Despite a good mess of fish having come from the run the take was immediate and there was a distinct weight on the other end of the line. The brown held firm and then tore off downstream. I turned it and the Artisan began a complex landing manoeuvre, almost as though he had been suddenly afflicted with an unusually virulent strain of St Vitus’ dance. He twirled and he whirled, while holding a sandwich with his mouth and with a fruit juice in one hand while the other flailed a net around his head. For an accomplished musician he displayed a dire dearth of rhythm. His colleague was equally of no practical use and just stood in the way, barking instructions and spraying breadcrumbs. When the leader wound itself around his ear the fish mercifully shrugged off the hook and saved him the ignominy of the nickname “van Gogh”.

And that’s how these things go. Most days on a river are singularly lacking in the notion of poetry that has so insidiously sought to attach itself to every aspect of this pastime.

Perhaps it is a reflection on my character, but I rarely see anything but the most vague sniff of poetry when I’m fishing. The closest that I recall was a recent late afternoon of sublime dry fly angling on a perfect stream against the most incredible sunset. The poetry of the session was sullied, as is so often the case, in its dying moments. Ambushed on the return walk by a pressing call of nature I found myself clenching various parts of my lower body while trying to run up a particularly steep incline. Ain’t nothing poetic about that. (A fact that can be confirmed by the janitorial staff who witnessed the incident and immediately petitioned for danger pay.)

Okay, I’ll give it to you that there is some poetry in the gentle art; but it’s only to be found in the most fleeting moments of what can only be called grace. Moreover, these moments of grace are only evident to those who spend a bit of time, to quote a friend, “chasing squirrels”. Grace is manifest in nature, and any firsthand experience that we have of it is purely coincidental.

Grace is almost never occasioned at the hand of the angler. Sure, the gentle unfolding of a perfect loop (I’m not describing myself here) could have those who are so inclined reeling off a few lines of verse, but it seems hardly worth the trouble. The perfectly dragless, tip-toe drift of a dry (still not me) will have some among us reaching for their quills - but isn’t this all just a little mundane? Obvious? I mean, the only word that I can think of that rhymes with “riffle” is “piffle” and that’s probably as much as you need to remember if you are moved to write piscatorially-inspired poetry.

Only the other night I downloaded from cyberspace to my iPad a much vaunted book that I have been aching to read. Imagine my horror when each chapter was prefaced with and contained hackneyed strings of vaguely related words that in some angling circles have come to pass for poetry. My issue with this, to quote Morrissey, is that “it says nothing to me about my life” – and that’s kinda the point of poetry, isn’t it?

Let me demonstrate to you what I mean. I have chosen a haiku to get the act done as quickly and painlessly as possible:

Yonder nebs a trout Deliver your cast with grace Not right on its head, you chop!