Getting it...

You'll have to forgive my last post, I'd bought and attempted to read the Angling Times and it sent me round the bend, provoking a frothing at the mouth rabid reaction that had to be cured by purging myself.

I have no idea where this rage originates, but I think it starts somewhere deep in my reptilian brain stem and once the chain reaction is under way, cannot be rationally controlled. Blue is what sets it off, the blue of a match angler in fact. And shape, the shape of carp anglers mostly. Then, when these two primary stimuli have collided, and caused a suppressed flight or fight reaction ready to erupt at the slightest provocation, all it takes is some hyperbolic heading or the crazed name of some article of tackle or new fangled bait additive to produce the startling and often physically debilitating end result.

Why match anglers are blue is the same question as why Ferraris are red. Either could be any colour of the spectrum, but they usually ain't. If I could afford a Ferrari I wouldn't buy a red one (if I would buy one at all, which I wouldn't because I don't drive cars, only bikes) and if I had to buy one on pain of death I would buy one in British racing green with an off-centre white stripe down its back, drive it once, or rather have myself driven in it, and then immediately have it sprayed red and flog it off to some muggins who desperately needs a Ferrari, and only a red one. Don't these red Ferrari owners realise that every time they venture out on the roads, no-one who rubber necks them is actually admiring the car (let alone the driver) but on the contrary, they are someone like me who wonders why Ferrari owners are such styleless nerks? I'm not for one moment implying that match anglers are styleless also, but I'm not not saying that.

Carp anglers must wear either baseball caps or bobble hats, both remarkably unsuitable for British fishing conditions as they give either partial or in the latter case absolutely no protection whatsoever against rain or bright sun. Indeed the bobble hat positively soaks it up! They wear camo in amounts from some to total, and must pose with fish held precariously at arms length and toward the camera, giving not the intended effect of a fish of gargantuan proportions, but conversely, an angler with a rather too small head, an effect in no way diminished, heightened in fact, by the size of the fish and the preferred choice of hat!

If I ever catch a forty pound carp I will pose in the only way fit for someone who has just conquered a levaithan- with the fish on the floor and myself standing erect with rod in hand and a good wide brimmed summer hat on my head - like Miss Ballantine with her British record salmon, in fact. This would be employing irony, the best possible shield, to deflect any future brickbats...

I digress, before I even get down to what I want to say, which is spawn...

The pursuit of roach on the canal has turned all funny, where they were, they are no more, and where they are, I don't honestly know. I do know where the perch are though - they are where the roach used to be! Lots of them too, and it has to be the rites of Spring that is driving these fish around. Apparently, with roach the males turn up at the spawning ground early sporting breeding tubercules, and wait for the girls who, like all females must arrive fashionably late for anything, including sex. On the downside, the spawning is often so vigorous that most of the girls suffer some damage in the frenzy, which explains the parlous condition of the very short, fat, probably spawn bound and approaching two pound female that I caught a few months ago (with such a remarkable fecundity she must have be the target the last year for the most laddish of the boys) and it can be so violent that a proportion are actually killed in the act. Actually, it transpires that such fertile females are extra choosy when it comes to the lads - she wants tubercules and big uns, the rougher his skin the better, so it's no surprise that she had large patches of missing scales on both flanks...

Then, whilst walking Molly, I witnessed an extraordinary thing. Raw fish sex. A large female and a small male ruffe were performing up the side of the concrete canal wall, presumably the female ruffe deposits eggs in the green algae that lines it and the boy does his thing on them. They were very amorous, and I got my camera out to shoot a video, but they scarpered before I could. Shame, I could have sold it on to Ruffesex.com...