Dazzle!

Fisherfolk must know a thing or two. We spend all day near or on the water not doing much which gives us time to think, possibly too much time. This should explain why there are so many experts in fishing, so many people offering advice and the benefits of their wisdom. The cosy inertia of the river bank affording the space needed to provide reasons, or excuses for one's success or failure. The long, cold winter giving the time to write it all up as blogs or articles in Trout and Salmon. I hope that sometimes all that thinking time can spawn something useful.

I hate fly fishing art on the whole, it's impossibly naff at times but most commendably, often worthy of a place in the Daily Mail's "Not the Turner Prize". There is possibly no genre more worrying than hyper realism. All that copying is just a little unhealthy. Fishing art is more often than not just naff and twee.
Today I came across this cracking painting which has changed my mind about fishing art.

   Sedges,  Norman Wilkinson  (1878-1971) 

 It manages to be realistic without being kitsch and I can almost cast to those rises. It was painted by Norman Wilkinson who, as it happens, was an early camoufleur; a gorgeous word for a practioner of camouflage. Already recognised as a pretty decent artist, during WWI he was in the Navy. During that time, he persuaded the Admiralty to adorn their battleships with his "Dazzle" patterns with the aim of making the outline more difficult to trace and hopefully confusing German U-boats.

Dazzled Ships at Night, (1918) Norman Wilkinson Image copyright of the Imperial War Museum

After the Wars, he turned his attention to providing awesomely groovy images for government posters.

I like to imagine that he came up with the idea of dazzle during an evening with trout bursting to the surface as the sunlight casts strong shapes over a river's ripples. The overall effect causing him blinking confusion as to where to place his fly; or at least that was his excusing for missing the rise.

On Apathy

So, yesterday I joined thousands of public sector workers in a day of striking. I even decided to march. I shan't go into the whys and wherefores here. This isn't a political blog. I will point out though that for a person who was once a member of the Oxford University Conservative Association going on strike was a pretty serious and uncharacteristic thing to do. I will caveat that piece of information by saying that I became a member largely because they gave you free port and cheese on Sundays and champagne once a term. Needless to say, the quality varied. It also seemed a very glamorous and very "Oxford" thing to do which for some reason felt important. I didn't like the people mostly because they were careerist swine with the gift of the gab but lacking principle. This is a statement I can apply to most members of any Oxford student political party I came across.
Anyway, my day of shouting and marching ended with a trip to my Local Fly Dressers Guild. I truly love going. It's a winter escape from it all. No one speaks of anything serious and a lot of me likes the fact that the whole atmosphere is one of little boys comparing their air-fix models. What matters most there is what you use for your wing-post. This sort of thing gives me perspective. Indeed fishing is what keeps me stable, solid and generally on an even keel. Fishing, my family and loved ones are what matters. So, on the whole, I am unbothered and don't have causes. Part of me had always worried about this. I wondered whether my general malaise, sense of bonhomie and my very British trait of not liking to make a fuss would have prevented me from joining the Suffragettes or say standing up to Hitler. Marching yesterday made me feel good. It reminded me that I do have some principles. Brilliantly and eloquently it taught me that somethings do matter more than fishing.

On Family.

No chaps and chapettes, I haven’t given up. I haven’t even been ill. I’ve just been busy with things apart from fishing and this has left me uninspired to write anything funny or even sensible. I still don’t have a lot to say. Well, not about fishing. My final trips of the season were not my most skilful.

There is one moment worth mentioning. If cleanliness is next to Godliness my mother is the Dalai Lama. She, is, in a word, ironed. Wonderfully, she has a grid plan taped on the inside of her cupboard so that she knows what’s inside her identical shiny storage jars. It seems needless to say at this point that the spices in her spice draw (all in identical mini jars) are kept in alphabetical order.

We arrived bankside, as a family, just before eight o’clock in the morning. None of us had ingested sufficient caffeine to quite greet the world properly yet. My mother inspects her creel.

Ma: “Oh my God”

Me: “What?”

Ma: “I can’t touch it. It’s, just too horrible”

I looked inside her creel. I could smell it before I peered inside. It had the odour of bread but evil bread, bread that had festered inside the pantry of a serial killer. Where this smell came from is a mystery, my mother is not the sort to mix her picnic with her fishing gear. She has special cases for that! I looked closer. Her creel swarmed with hundreds of squirming, writhing, white maggots. I laughed, thinking that nothing worse could happen to one so immaculate; but my mother was right. It wasn’t even funny. I cannot express quite how grave the situation was.

Ma: “I’m throwing it away, I can’t use it”

Pa: “For heaven’s sake girls what on earth is going on?”

Me: “It’s fucking horrible, it’s filled with maggots, it’s beyond redemption. It’s Satan’s creel”

Pa: “Oh, give it here, that’s an expensive creel you can’t throw it away”

Ma: “I just can’t Tom. I’m not touching it ever, ever again”

We held this discussion as my mother and I wiped maggots from her reel. I could feel their wriggles as I crushed them between the tissue paper. They had slithered themselves all the way down the line right into the backing.

My father took one look at the creel and without saying a word he took it away, far away.

Pa: “That creel has been taken by the Dark Side, let’s not go there again”.

We were all a little traumatised. I think we all fished in a slightly cagey way and we had some but not huge amounts of success. The creel went into three, tightly-knotted black sacks and was deposited in the public bins of a remote village. I still shiver when I think of the maggots pushing and humping themselves all over the contents of the creel.

Anyway, as an end of season post I dedicate this one to my parents. For countless reasons they deserve it and far, far more.