The View from Atop the Hill, and Other Stories

The first post from Idler's Quest for some considerable time and it has little to do with Mr Jeffrey Hatt Esquire, the proprietor, and his fishing exploits.

Exploits! Which and what piscatorial activities are these he speaks of now, you may well ask?

Well, since New Year's Day and my last missive they've consisted entirely of selling redundant sea fishing tackle on eBay. I haven't whet a hook or wet a line in all that time, and quite frankly, haven't had the urge to bother to try.

I thought the floods entertaining though. I liked Colnbrook resident, Asif Khan, blurting "It's something out of a horror movie," and yes, plagues of locusts journalists are very frightening in full swarm, aren't they? But particularly loved Chancellor George Osborne's statement that, "rain is not the fault of any one person". A classic slice of politicianese double-speak, but wrong, wrong, wrong.

Oh yes, George, it was one person's fault! It's Mother Nature who should be named and shamed for her excessive behaviour and made to pay reparations in the form of a nice hot Summer...

Good grief, I'd've hated to have had to live through such a winter confined to the upper floors of my multi-million pound Walton-on-Thames riverside pile and do fear I'll have terrible trouble selling the once charming and secluded but now miserable and remote Somerset Moor's weekend hideaway bungalow now or at any time in the near future and get back even half what I paid for the place, when and if I ever manage to flog it off.

Good job I shack up in my main residence. Longford Manor, for much of the year. The crumbling old edifice is also sited nearby a river, albeit a very small one, but was erected by Georgian builders circa 1815 who had the good sense to calculate a decent elevation above the high water mark laying its foundations firmly and squarely upon the moral high ground from where successive residents have always enjoyed looking out the top floor windows and down upon poor people suffering the predictable annual plight arising from the ill-judged situation of their mean abodes just a little way down the hillock.

Bottom of our road during an early 20th Century flood. Poor people's children look on terrified, and aghast...

Daniel Everitt, Duke of Stoke and landlord of the Lure of Angling Inn down by the banks of the River Sowe (into which my own local trickle itself flows) has kept his feet dry and been industriously busy with a mind freed from the worry of pending insurance claims. There's a story unfolding over there that I think you should run over and take a butcher's hook at ~

One Last Run

The tale of George (no, not you, Osborne...) and his desperate quest to end a terrible run of blanks, it involves Esox lucius, and so, as with all good piker tales, I guess there'll be a leviathan coming along at some point...

I think the next episode is due quite soon so get the first under your skin before the next arrives through your letterbox.

Avon Perch and Bream — Glad I've Had Enough of This...

"Ooh, it looks nice, don't it? " Is what I said to Martin on arrival.

And it really did look pretty good considering recent weather events. Cold, warm, dry, wet, icy, mushy, topsy turvy, you name it, we've had it. Why, we even had a rare winter thunderstorm the other day with really heavy hail that for a brief moment transformed Longford into a passable imitation of the winter wonderland we didn't get for Christmas.

The water was a really great colour. Not yet bottle green but sandy olive green and fining down well. How could we go wrong here today?

First cast into my current favourite pool, I had a bite on ledgered bread, the bait I always start off with just because I think it tells you the most about prospects. It's a diagnostoic bait where rivers are concerned because in my experience, if dace, chub and roach and the like won't bite on bread you can be sure you're not going to have an easy time of it with any other bait, or any other species come to that.

Second cast I had a small chub of a pound and a bit, so things really were going to go well.

Then, after a few more taps on the tip the skies darkened, the wind began to howl, the rain began to fall when the the tip fell still — well, not still as such because it was bouncing about in the rest — but certainly not bouncing to the attention of fish.

Then it came down in a massive and surprising torrent lasting all of twenty minutes, the brolly flapping, rain drumming on the canvas, and me holding on to the pole hoping no bites would come now because I'd not strike them if they did.

They didn't, and when the rain passed and the wind calmed they didn't return.

Martin hadn't fared so well, either. His day had started as mine had. A few encouraging bites on maggots but then nothing after the welcome cessation of unwanted precipitation. It seemed we were in for a tough one and as it transpired, so we were. I didn't have another bite in the next three hours and nor did he.

In the end I decided to go all out with worms and try for a perch. Worm being the bait of choice for the desperate because when nothing else will work, they just feasibly might...

That's when I found I'd left my river float tube at home and brought the canal one instead. Luckily it contained a little perch bobber amongst the other useless-for-purpose ones, so that was pressed into service. It just about worked. The water in the pool was a good ten feet deep and the tiny thing was strung a long, long way above the low slung bulk shot necessary to have the bait near bottom in this swirling eddy.

It ambled about for an hour before it finally did something positive. I struck, and a fish was on, which turned out to be the target species — a very welcome perch about a pound in weight. Naturally, I thought it would be the be the first of many but I thought wrong. Its shoal mates had other ideas and the next hours passed by as fruitlessly as they had before.

Then the sun came out blasting the land with fantastic low shot beams of light turning the far bank reed beds incandescent orange. All very pretty, but who cares when there's no good reason to enjoy the spectacle? Without fish to catch along with them, Mrs Nature's sublime lighting effects are just so many coffee table photo opportunities.

But I took them anyhow!

Martin came downstream to join me.

I took pictures of him — then him and me — then me and him — then me myself —and when bored with the exercise went back to fishing.

The perch bobber went about its business, as before. It was kind of relaxing watching a float do what a float does without the prospect that at some point in the foreseeable future it would be doing what it should. And then, about ten minutes after deciding I'd had enough of watching it do what it shouldn't, it dragged under.

Amazingly, the onerous chore of pulling the rig free of a snag turned into the pleasant throb and the enthralling job of a good fish to bank. And it did feel a very good fish too, and it really didn't feel anything like a chub either, and that meant it had to be a perch, and then I got a little worried!

When I saw the broad yellowish flash of an enormously deep flank, way, way down in the pool, I went a little wobbly...

Blimey this was a good perch! A bloody huge perch!!

But, of course...

It was only what I'd least expected!

Ah well...

In the closing moments of a long, grim day, a slim three-pound bream — that for a few exciting seconds really was a fat five-pound perch — made me glad I'd had enough of this.

26th November

Morning, 26th November 1976. Two days into my 15th year imprisoned on planet suburbia.

Outside, a familiar noise. Ford Cortina. Starter motor wheezing. Vain attempt to cajole unwilling engine into life. It goes on and on, until eventually, it stops. Battery flat.

Later in the day a second raucous racket will be unleashed.

I haven't heard it yet. Neither has our hapless Cortina owner who's now attached jump leads to his battery out a neighbour's gaping bonnet, nor has our unwitting helper holding the engine at constant rev to provide the necessary spark of life. Not one between us have the slightest clue that by tea time our whole world will have changed irrevocably, but in the meanwhile...

Coughing carbs, wheezing starters, humming motors.

For a few brief hours they remain the sounds of the streets.

I don't remember if I ever heard them again after that day. Fuel injection eventually consigned them to the aural dustbin, but they seem to have passed into history that very afternoon when sonic petrol directly injected into the flaccid veins of our moribund culture yanked us straight out of stumbling zombification.

I remember the import of that epic hair-raising roar "Rrright — Now, hahahaha..." as if it were yesterday, 37 years on and 52 years of age.

Radio to reel-to-reel. Erasing whatever went before. Who cares what ever it was?

The furious blast rewound, rewound, rewound.

Unbelievably. At precisely 2.09. End of bar six during the elevated stomping march of the middle-eight.

The strangest thing...

There's my name! And it's unmistakable!!

"Oh — Jeff Hatt..."

Rewind.

"Oh — Jeff Hatt..."

Rewind.

"Oh — Jeff Hatt..."

Rewind.

"Oh — Jeff Hatt..."

............!

Fuck?

Morning, 27th November 1976. Escape planned.

Skinny black drills, sharp toed black brogues, black shirt, thin black tie — irregular issue.

Bathroom, mirror, scissors. Hack off the locks, soap up and spike.

Set out for school... 

Confidently late — no excuses.

Canal Roach — Math Matters

Finding roach on these canals of mine is not an easy task. You might think fish to be spread throughout the entire length of one like currants in the proverbial bun and I think that's how canals might appear to be to those who've not experienced them before, any peg looking much like any other. That's not the case of course. Just as with any other watercourse they are found in certain locations...

The trouble with canals, at least those I fish, is that there's no way to know where a shoal of roach might be if you don't either catch them or see the visible sign of them. And that's a problem because they very rarely show themselves, you certainly won't be able to spot them with polarising sunglasses, the only time of year when they are visible is when basking near the surface during the hottest days of summer and catching them doesn't really tell you the extent of the shoal located unless you catch a lot of them.

And that rarely happens!

It's akin to fishing a motorway. And that's exactly what they were built to be — jointing sea and navigable river into a great new framework of man-made waterways linking every city in the land one to another, they were the late 18th Century's major arterial routes — the blood supply of the industrial revolution.

Winding their way through ever changing scenery —  just like motorways, between junctions all canals are exactly the same the entire miles of their length. Narrowboats and trucks both demand that.

Life would be made very difficult for those that use them if it were not so...

It certainly makes life difficult for the would be roach angler, though. Uniformity is our bugbear and where to fish for them may as well be decided on the toss of a coin.

Far bank cover has nothing to do with where roach live. It does with tench who patrol along the far bank just as crows search the hard shoulder in search of carrion. Cast as tight as possible to it and if they're there or thereabouts then given time enough you will catch them.

But roach live in the boat track — the fast lane. The only cover that matters to them is the depth of the water over their timid heads.

At least that fact reduces the problem of location because the far bank can be ignored and effort concentrated where it matters but it also expands the problem by denying the angler any sense of place.

The boat track is very, very long and utterly uniform in width and depth. Any part of it seems as good as any other...

But that's not true at all. Certain places are much better than others — but for no reason that anyone has ever figured. And that's why canal anglers are number crunching maniacs hell bent on bean counting each event of every second of each session and calculating their way to success. Only numbers can tell them where they should be fishing, and only numbers can tell them why.

Ask any canal angler and they will concur.

It's math that matters...

Success is the product of pure calculation!

I haven't fished for their roach properly for two years now. I began catching them on bread in 2011, quickly discovered that it was most attractive to 'other' species who liked to swim right against the far bank, fished there for them and because roach were rarely caught that close and shallow, I stopped seeing them.

In the meanwhile I've lost sight of their ever shifting locations.

Having embarked on a new mission for the Winter to come, their present locations are what I have to find. You may have gathered that efforts so far have drawn blanks. Interesting blanks of course, as all blanks are, but blanks all the same. But blanks make numbers, therefore they are good work.

In the long term...

Though they're driving me up the wall in the short!