Fishing Frenzy

My absence from the riverside in the years since I ceased angling appears so weird to me now. I used to adore it so much, especially because my other endevours tended to be at the violently energetic end of the spectrum, playing as I did rugby, football and cricket for different school and village clubs. Having the time to pick up my fishing tackle, jump on a bike and ride for the ten minutes to travel to the local fishery and have a few hours gently seated with a rod in my hand and watching a float on the water was a joy.

When I left sixth form college, "by mutual consent" as the football slang has it, after the 1st year when it was clear that I'd messed about too much in the 1st year to have any likelihood of gaining any A levels at the end of the second, would have been the ideal time to spend spring and summer evenings with my fishing tackle instead of slaving over some economics homework.

And because I was working, in a department store caf, I was earning and had more cash on the hip than I had ever had previously and a day off during the week which would have been useful to get out to the lake and have a few hours if not a complete day angling with the place almost to myself. Even better, as I was working in Guildford, visiting the fishing tackle shop could have been simple and I could have had pints of maggots to drown. This was unknown before I left education as our village did not have a fishing tackle shop apart from a very small part of one shop had a limited selection, and definitely no live bait on offer, and to go into Guildford and back having visited the fishing tackle shop to get some would have taken hours and was not worthwhile.

In following years, I worked for a monolithic utility company in Staines which had it's own fishing lake and still I never felt the urge to finish for the day, get the casuals on and have an hour down there after work. Even sillier, less than 50 yards across the road was the Thames which has some fabulous angling that went utterly ignored by me, especially since by then I was earning really good money and had the opportunity to get some really great fishing in the fishing tackle bag.

In later years, again I was with for a firm that had it's location right on the towpath, and quite often on breaks a band of us would go and sit on the steps on a nice sunny day and watch people angling, and as an alternate week saw my shifts ending at 4 o'clock, it would have been very straightforward to fetch the fishing tackle out of the car and round off the day with a couple of hours fishing. I might have enjoyed the job more too, thinking about it.

We know other priorities appear as you go through the years. After I left sixth form I discovered pubs in quite a major way. Ladies were never an issue of course, I don't ever recall any throwing themselves at me and begging me to ravish them, so that generally wouldn't have been an obstacle to deciding on a days fishing, but it just seemed that at that moment I'd put the fishing tackle away and forgotten about it.

That's altering now though. I do have the desire to go back, I've had my fishing tackle out to review and see what has to be changed, which is the majority of it, and I've been checking places to go and what I need to do in order to have permission to fish there, so hopefully I can rekindle some of the enjoyment from my formative days.

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