Last night, at Hampstead’s finest watering hole The Stag, Andrews of Arcadia put together an evening’s entertainment in support of the latest issue of An Antidote to Indifference. It was fantastic – a packed house on one of the most miserable days of the year.

Talks on the night came from this site’s Robin Turner and friends Will Burns and Charles Rangeley-Wilson on the subjects of Orwell, Sebald, pubs and Edward Thomas.

Glorious music was provided by Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou.

The latest issue of Antidote is available here. Thanks as ever to the mighty Neil Thompson for the photos. See you at the next one.

being the first letter from the camembert, written on solar powered quink:

ja

as i write, things fall from trees in the new equinox. yellow morning leaves on the yurt roof, the thud of acorns on corrugated iron; pigeons felled by hunter’s popguns, conkers crushed on the lanes, the first wormy chestnuts in a chunky spread. not least the trees themselves, top heavy from months of deluge, thumping to the ground, autumn’s dying snap so sudden that death creeps by without cracking a twig:

in other words, nature settles up before it’s time to live on reserves. arcadia has become a quarterly, a four seasons letter in which i thank you for your patience. the chalkstream of consciousness is not, alas, an aquifer. it ran dry after your classic sandwich-board from port eliot, propped against your tent which looked, from here, like angling legends hq stitched from canvas salvaged off dick walker’s barrage balloon. whilst you’ve sailed four wents with the river since, here the words in french arcadia flowed slow as the medway in a summer of mud. forty days it rained. blight upon the spuds, tomatoes like lepers, slugs big as marrows-within-marrows, but mushrooms all june and ever beyond:

the yurt and its dominion took an unexpected dose of trench rot in july. an emergency skin of roofing felt saved it from perishing after leak traumas like a breeched dam. hatching swarms of flying ants made the caravan a locust bed, so while the yurt was down and getting wetter, i lived six weeks out of a bivvy, cooking under makeshift roofs on the open fire midst a carousel of bats and drunkard stag beetles careering home like bumper cars on ice. as ever, writing and fishing were the victims of toil. just a handful of rapid evenings, long away games on the syndicate where north easterlies kept the carp off the rocks. just two fish made the scales, either side of 30:

as september bows out with custard yellow suns glinting off the solar panel, hornets on suicide watch and the wild boar readying to run, i prepare for cold snaps in the chilling fields. the stove already smoked a dummy run:

the wood shed is cobbled together from builder’s flotsam:

and the kitchen is pallet-chic and fruit box frippery, beachcombed by laure from round the back of supermarkets:

yes, it’s yurting for boys, building the ark down arcadia’s end. solar hook up is miraculous. so miraculous i’ve turned power freak. one 60w panel provides the 12v juice from a 60ah battery: lights, laptop and LPs. long wave radio 4 on a solar transistor. the archers by live rays from outer space, by just pointing the radio at direct sunshine. extra lighting by crank-up dynamo lamp and an led box with a seperate mini-panel. sunrise and sunset now have electrical significance. dusk sees me collecting apparatus from the sun trap, winding the dynamos and flipping the power station on till lights out. my message is “get off the grid”. make europe clockwork. bring back national service as an eco-force of dynamo winding, pillock-prevention army. a conscription of steam punks & dynamo kevs with solar sandwich boards could save the world. half an hour of electrical production a day per citizen is fair exchange for leaving your modems on all night.

the mushroom revival continues to delight. even if the sudden heatwave warns the forest floor to get a grip and slow down for the next autumn turning. we’ve never seen the like. every bolet in the book through august, girolles in ditches like a champagne glass lorry overturned its load. pieds de mouton like the flock of ages, like desert islands big as a discus, and yesterday, not ten yards from my woodshed, the massed choir itself, the black brass section of the reaper’s satanic mills band, trumpets of death big as william brown’s deaf aunts’ hearing horns:

all-day mushroom omelettes and electrical sonnets on the birdtable

dp

We began publishing the correspondence between Dexter Petley and John Andrews back in May 2007 making Letter From Arcadia the longest running feature on Caught by the River. It’s made for a fascinating archive and you can go back to the very beginning by clicking HERE.

We began publishing the correspondence between Dexter Petley and John Andrews back in May 2007 making Letter From Arcadia the longest running feature on Caught by the River. It’s made for a fascinating archive and you can go back to the very beginning by clicking HERE.

2011 programme now available to download from the festival website.

ja

french arcadia is lifting its antimacassars. apologies for the months without word or picture. whilst you were drinking winter tea at the dog track sunrise in efgeeco city, i was detained in my own labour camp, serving time on piece-work, funding the war on want. now time thickens around the seasonal pleasures; carp fishing in a lingering twilight after a day at the potager; driving home with the moon squashed on the windscreen, midnight frost under torchlight while cooking on an open fire to the tune of a nightingale.

the quick bitter winter is all but forgotton. life has been outside since april, blurring the lines between decorum and savagery. the months of frozen wood while building the yurt ring and terrace on the edge of the forest; planting more fruit trees and fighting off the deer who come to get drunk on the buds; and all the quotidian haulage of transferring the garden from caravan plot to the field. henceforth french arcadia will be signalling from this dome i made from a first world war flying saucer:

a green top is being sought, mostly in vain. you probably know where all the green canvas goes. in the meantime, camouflage duties to appease the squeamish conformists and collaborators who creep down the lane. a new law to make yurts illegal has been dropped by the senate, so my criminal defence is trompe de l’oeil and the mayor’s one grace: my right to a tent and nothing else. the yurt remains, under french law, a tent. but putting one up is not camping. without navvies, you’re juggling with plates and the walls of jericho. until the tension ropes bite, it’s a house of cards and haul away joe. now steady as she goes, it’s like living in a three master cathedral, the creak of rigging at vespers and the sun glowing behind the canvas at evensong as the birds fly in through the open crown, swing on the ropes and flip out the window.

the garden is where it’s lost and won, as cursed in old testament, lean and dry under hot winds and high pressure. a soil test might have saved watching the spinach and garlic wither yellow for lack of nitrogeon. the drought reaps the rest and the dreaded day of saint glace wiped out the green beans in a night of cold terror as my teeth clacked in the bivvy miles away in enemy country.

it’s this i shall be writing of in future signals, if ever it rains again; sessions on a syndicate water i’ve stumped up a wad of euros to join, not only to escape the beer can tossers but to concentrate intelligence on 60 old, dark hulks laden between 30 & 50lbs apiece. carp who’ve seen everything and heard all the jokes. a small pit, no more than 3 hectares, in enemy country as i said, department 28 eure et loir, a land of bad drivers and ill-bred youth where the millers cheat you of your flour. but the privilage is a padlock and key with the place to myself on weekdays. the boss took some pursuading to let me join. the usual pride and prejudice, all english are carp thieves. i spoke my piece and showed some chequebook. he was soon displaying photos of his helicopter on his iphone, proof of my bona fide established because i had an old land rover and had once parked it next to the range rover of an ex-guitarist with peter frampton, in the bricomarché car park at la ferté macé. this guitarist now breeds koi carp in his french chateau. the boss, who is called mr bollinger, you can’t make this up, purchased one of these koi carp for 10,000 euros, this being the kind of thing that passes between friends with helicopters and chateaux. needing somewhere to put it, he found a local gravel pit was up for rent, 4,000 euros a year. it had a bailiff, and thus the syndicate was born as a payback scheme and a liquid safe for his fool’s goldfish. mr bollinger himself dabbles with rod pod and barbeque some weekends. other members fish seven per swim on saturdays and scare the daylights out of the fish. the four pages of rules and the envoironmental charter we all have to sign means nothing to the twenty-eighters of eure et loir. the french flout the good rules, and stick to bad ones. i should have known, just to lower expectations. but despite doldrums and dead-weather heat waves by day and cold misty nights, a few fish knew the score on my trial run.

elsewhere, last summer’s campaign still pays out in loose change. arse pit fish woke early in a spring which arrived before the tables had been set, and a raw wind 39 suprised me at teatime back in february:

spilling over into march, rising like new moons and foragers in the blue evenings, a portly 38 at last knockings:

until the garden quits rehab and looks well enough to keep me fat through winter, the angling is on standby, by invitation of the weather only. a few showers latterly fallen have eased the temperatures down but air pressure is stubborn above 1015 and the carp remain stately in their quarters. the legendary bob arrives appropriately on june the 6th, this time with his brother alan who has his own place in angling history. there is a chapter in chris yates’s “casting at the sun” where he and alan are fishing llandrindod wells in the sixties. alan last fished when his swim looked like a set-piece for andrews of arcadia. you probably have his bottle tops in your cellar and his low water salmon hooks are keeping up your braces.

as june is nigh, i expect you’re rubbing brasso on your tench tackle, so it looks its best for the glorious. i’ve missed your pikey rambles and your inn-side glimpse of angling’s juke box jury. i look forward to your next dawn chorus as the tench bubbles close in.

new season on the bird table

dp

dp

whilst you have been burning tyres to keep warm and to keep on rocking in the chub free world i have been struggling to get back from the county of norfolk. having returned from salt park to arcadia N6 in the late summer i realise now that i left something on the fen. an intangible something that struggled to get back along double backed roads and black soiled fields. near the place close to the chip shop in the village where bible john dwells on the banks of the old nene navigation, cutting lino whilst rufus the ruffe barks at the moon, even at midday. we went back up there, the empress of arcadia and i to fish the dyke and drink fen wine when the clocks went back. instead with the yard full of gallon tins of gentles delivered by the ghost driver from murgett’s maggotorium we got high on ammonia and ended the day with hands that glowed from chrysalid dye. my keepnet was as good as made of marble whilst bible’s was a harvest water festival, a shoal of rudd, a cheerful perch and a roach well over an imperial pound. scales on it like bread tokens from heaven. caught in a thunder storm of hail that cast a veil over the baptist church and woke up the zander.

the dyke is frozen now and the skaters have taken to it. within the frozen stumps of the reed bed sits the pike that bible saw give him a follow last week on the twenty foot and which turned his guts to a bucket of ice.

jardine snap tackle on the birdtable.

ja

We began publishing the correspondence between Dexter Petley and John Andrews back in May 2007 making Letter From Arcadia the longest running feature on Caught by the River. It’s made for a fascinating archive and you can go back to the very beginning by clicking HERE.

John Andrews has opened up his scrapbook.
Find it here.

ja

whilst your fishing trips haunt the back-roads of old england, mine seem to take the brash- roads of new france. is this because gravel pits have no history? your coastlines and rivers ebb and flow by coaching inns, horse-troughs and a host of local ales in old brown bottles. my pits have cans of desperado, dual carriageways and all the french cafes are shut. in other words, the poetry is leaking out. just going to a river is to travel the byways to the oldest thing on the map. some of the pits i fish aren’t even on the old maps i use. and the names on my tackle conjure up an urban brawl, not the art of angling on walden pond: riot big pit, euro warrior, strongbow… we’re folding a dog ear on the current page of that book, confessions of a carp slut by dp.

so i’m taking the winter off, going back to the rivers, fishing for the venerables of the middle eure. dust the avon down, unwhip the rusty rings, oil the centrepin, brush up the barbel rigs. to mark the decision, in the spirit of a resolutionist, a born again chub-rocker, last week i took off for the final seven day session of the year, one last boilie binge on a 120 acre public water three hours down my own byroads, through colombage villages leaning round the farmyard, chestnut crush and the first muds of autumn, across newly ploughed plains where overdressed pheasants fled hunters like there’d been a raid on a coquettes’ night club; past vineyards where they hod the last of the grapes from the trailors in pouring rain, backing old paraffin tractors into the arched doorways of vaulted caves.

the big southern blow failed its promise and the rain hammered on the bivvy door for three days and nights. by day four i was coughing like a walrus with trench flapper. there were moments when the downpour eased and the long tailed tits came, hopping in the air on invisible stepping stones. i’d sit by the rods and think if it were always thus i wouldn’t need to go back to the rivers.

in the brief passing of dry cloud, fish moved, spume-burst like depth charges half a kilometre upwind. sunday teatime, i imagined my baits at forty yards might not be anywhere near the fish, my close-range theory slowly self discrediting. this was a tournament caster’s water. where the excorcet leads and compressed air boilie launchers whistle and thump from lines of french battalions friday afternoon to sunday dinner. since the abolition of national service, the carp lakes have recruited these frustrated milatirists acting out the training camp romp. you don’t get them on the rivers… but it’s teatime. their convoy has departed. i’m pleased to say that one of our number made it home. 47 pounds of fitting end to the carp troubles:

the cauliflowers of crackerjack fridays big as pumpkins, ceps like dutch miller-women among the ferns and fallen leaves, bar billiards in the moss and butternut squashes like old mother bells and soda syphons; all these things to gather, prize and hoard as the jays conceal their acorns in the splits on fenceposts. far from the retirement riots:

blockade on the bird table

dp

We began publishing the correspondence between Dexter Petley and John Andrews back in May 2007 making Letter From Arcadia the longest running feature on Caught by the River. It’s made for a fascinating archive and you can go back to the very beginning by clicking HERE.

dp

thanks for your pj o’rourke style reprise, your notes from hell’s french vacation. whilst you were having your high summer week of forties and fortitude, of boilies and being boiled, we were up in north norfolk searching the salt marsh creeks for bass and being swallowed up by big skies. the days spiked by sunset suppers of w.i. pies, pigeon and ale on shingle steeps and at long tables, friendships made and renewed, walks across ancient harbours, byways and waterways, chasing the surf as it retreated out across the north sea to nelson’s desert, salt park, a place to get lost. the big estuary of the east, the map marking the difference between land and sea torn up like last year’s spent auction slips, a cloak of night drives along fifty miles of coast road, through 2am moth storms and sudden frets, tearing up the back lanes of a landscape long gone to the sound of church bells silent, their peals stolen by the drowned. a week spent viewing england through the bottom of a looking glass, the landscape unfolding like a betjeman poem written on barbiturates, a vision of woodcuts and wrecked ships, cod holes and roadside stalls, bass chasing phone calls and car boot makeshift shopping malls. a week of glorious days that flew, washed down with black tea and buckshee wine.

a longing to get back there on the birdtable

ja

We began publishing the correspondence between Dexter Petley and John Andrews back in May 2007 making Letter From Arcadia the longest running feature on Caught by the River. It’s made for a fascinating archive and you can go back to the very beginning by clicking HERE.

ja

thanks for the holiday snaps. those slippery mackerel, glossy pimps who get away with it. surf mods, tide greasers, the spod bucket’s too good for ‘em. you’ll be back with the pike soon, wiping mackeral gizzard off your swiss blade on frozen grass. but while you were fighting on the beaches, i was still on blitz duty, fire watching on arse pit. this week’s letter is a ps, the what happened next bit of the pit & the pendulum.

the heatwave has simmered down to an autumn stillness, wasps gouging eyes in fallen mirabelles, the first dead leaves clot widening margins. thoughts turn to firewood and cider, and bankside peace when boulder-throwing, wrapper chucking kids are back where they belong, knifing each other in the playground.

but back in july, the heatwaves are on a high tide, evolved mosquitoes with bolt cutters come through the netting at night like pirates on blood money. i’m scratching, bleeding and sweating through late afternoon. still buzzing from wednesday’s 32, thursday’s angler has far to go. by half nine the lines were still dead in the water. i pulled the third rod in, stripped down to twilight management. last knockings when the tip pulled round and a junior common played a blinder on his first trial.

friday, i’m a friday’s child; the one day a week i get to see the ley lines under water, when the scales fall from my eyes. friday is fish day; it must have rubbed off, carp divining, urgent calls to the water half way through evenings begun elsewhere. this was another emergency call-out. there was carp song coming down the wires, sky like a bush-fire, so urgent i was there mid-afternoon, shade as hot as sunlight, water as boiling as the air. i set up on the island, right in the enemy camp. a risk, on their heads, under the rod tops. my thinking was a tactical version of impatience; nab one off the point then withdraw to a safe distance and nab another as they regroup and drift down the margins. soon as the lines were flying up and down i realised the error. the carp were mobbing on the bait and surfacing in water shallower than their girths. even slack and pinned down, pectorals raked the lines up. hidden back among the trees, i’m springing out like a spider every time the buzzers whine and the indicator flies up. a big common and two mirrors roll in a ball over the left hand rod like a cartoon cat fight. they all look over 40 but one is a lot bigger. the sweat runs into my eyes and nothing i can do washes out the salt. that’s when the common tried it on. 37, in its fire shield livery:

monday, i’m back after leaving well alone the weekend. there was no sunday litter in my swim. it was all elsewhere, with the 30ft high bouncy castle they’d inflated by the swings, with the kids on bikes, the hoodless hoodies, mean without the means. they ignore me and reserve their admiration for the hand brake turns underway in the carpark. on the point, carp muster nudging thick oily rings as they touch air. passing ducks take a wide berth. poplars rustle in the first breeze for a week. i lean back for a decent wait but spring forward at a half-take on the middle rod before teatime. the fish swings up the margin looking for a passage out. rod creaks in the cork like rigging on an away breeze. three kids on bikes pull up behind me like the carp police. they watch in silence, voices buried in their throats like hands in pockets. i grin and bear it. fish come off when people stand and stare. the fish is running the snags. full welly till it rolls in the net. three mobile phones are sending bulletins home. i try and slap a d-notice on it. tell them it’s only ten kilos. but they’re easily bored by carp care and total lack of violence. the fish has belly and plimpsol line and cargo and goes 37 too.

i wait for their dads to come with carp rods but they’re watching “foot”. the world cup is still on. the bouncy castle is flat. deflated for its own good. i’m getting away with it, fishing unmolested, all i ever ask. someone walks a dog. two grim faced campers leave their van on the campsite after supper for a dogshit tour of the island. an old duff and his grandson come fish spotting, satisfied by sun perch. they don’t see the carp tail big as two lily pads flick ten yards from the silly perch. it’s 8.30, on the brink of idyll – just me and that carp. only this is arse pit, public nuisance number one. no peace with the wicked… the beat up colourless nevada, slagmobile for ratbag family, breaks through the barrier and drives as far as it can get to me. it’s come to collapse your world. it’s like a tumour after remission, a war poet getting killed the day before armistice. within minutes it’s a dump. this family is not in the tufty club. two chipbag brats, pastis dad only 21, married the teenager next door who kicks the rubbish under the car. the 3 year old, shaved head and dressed in camo smashes the fishing poles against the lit barbeque. the wind picks up. the swim’s gone quiet. the carp stopped singing. roll on friday.

when it comes it’s another 32 degree sweatshop. by evening the island is a boot camp of teenage mutants. 3 tents, 2 bivvies, skinny girls with piss dad-off toddlers. the dads line empty beer bottles along the waterside and shoot at them with airguns. shoot and swig, their dogs bark at me across the divide. lord of the flies himself is an axe weilding cave-mouth specialist in anti-carp behaviour. topless with his pants showing, a “watch me” twatt who comes up with a gag every few minutes till he’s reduced to pointing the airgun at his wife’s head for a laugh. the girls collect firewood in plastic bags behind me. they stink of fags and shower gel and i mask my face till the air is breathable again. fire lit, dogs tied to a tree, they settle down to grill their meat. just enough peace for the carp to nudge their way down the margins under the back of the tents. i’m leaving it late, but the friday factor is at work. even when axe-dad throws a grappling hook into the tree above my left hand bait, i believe only in the bobbins. he cracks off a branch and drags it to the fire like a caveman dragging his girl by the hair. before she burns, two bleeps, bobbin tight and the rod top pulls round. the fish stays put. underpants is back with his rope. my line is tight to just below his feet. he sees nothing. i’m standing thirty yards in front of him, in the water with the rod doubled up and a boil like a washing machine under his nose, but he’s not of my time. he’s away in 2010bc. the fish moves off and power-kites at will. i net it as the third branch is stolen off my tree. first of the friday forties:

three weeks passed by. beans to bottle, grass to cut, a smattering of summer ceps to winkle out along the verges, first spuds by the barrow load; three weeks of sleeping in the bivvy down the field, weasels dancing in the moonlight, breakfasts in the dew. the swallow in my cellar dumped all four of her second brood on the floor, impatient to get going with the others who waited on the wires. arse pit in august was urban retour, fear of litter, tosser-phobia. imagine my suprise. municipal rage had stumped up a maze of electronic gates, security barriers and inpenetrable fencing. the tossers were sulking in supermarket carparks elsewhere, admiring the rubbish and the skidmarks. by 6.30 the gates were locked and i was alone, my exit and entrance a bridge of fallen pylons over the river. the water is down a foot, temperature drops, yellow grass. my rodrest holes are still there. likewise the friday forty, picking up where i left off, like a bookmark halfway through a summer read:

it’s a work in progress, arse pit. as i write, another friday tremour on the ley lines making me rush through the day. the willows turned yellow last weekend, the poplars are in their underleaves. morning mists (you remember the chateau lake we didn’t know was there?) and this year’s robin moving in for a winter let. in a way, the story’s over. the sociology diminished with the new security. footpads only, trapped like dogs in a pound. when netting a 28, two of them tried to mug it for their barbeque. holiday anglers came and went, leaving their groundbait bags and coils of line as a souvenir of their visit. ducklings grew, surviving the daily blitz of rock grenades. the popcorn buckets and coke bottles still drifted with the wind and the kebab shop clutter was on the rise as a new wave of mobylette cadets passed their driving test.

it was friday the 13th. national holiday weekend, the final push before the functionaries go back to work. i usually shrink to the woods and re-emerge waterside at the dead end of august. six pm and i’m cocking an ear round the commune in dread of the annual family discos or the village grilled pig, all night ball and fireworks. but all is mute. the weather has rallied behind my flag. grey, chilly, passing showers all afternoon. five minutes and the gear’s in the van. by seven i’m setting up in the swim. everyone’s indoors. even the suicide bikers who wheelie a ton on the pit stretch as a point of honour, in memorium for a dead kawasaki terrorist. the first take comes within the hour, two gentle bleeps and a nod on the rod tip. not up for the fight, it too was on a quiet night in. blocked intestine, carp piles, anus like a wine cork so it’s down in weight. it should be an upper 40 but i settle for 44, your favourite weight.

last knockings, i hit another fish. it rolls along the bottom at will, picks up the other line. i turn the buzzer off, pump the fish back out and play it to the left. the other spool still clicks and whirrs. this pit where i’d once done sixty blanks on the trot and i’ve two 40s on at once, three in one evening, there’s no poetry covers that…

summer’s down now, like a power cut. daylight is thin yellow in a rapid autumn. my friday second sight comes in forth. evenings on arse pit are winding up, scratching for stragglers around darkfall, two blanks in three, still thirties but the unspawned bellies have flattened out and the forties are 35s again. but the party’s over. field duties before rain bogs the wheels down. still no word from the tribunal, so exploiting a loophole i’ve ordered a mongolian yurt. the mayor’s own words – the right to a tent. french law, for all its sarko rot and napoleonic absurdities, got this one fairtrade. a yurt is considered a tent. i may still be challenging the law with a wooden groundsheet, on the level:

by the new year, you’ll find me there. with a new birdtable

dp

We began publishing the correspondence between Dexter Petley and John Andrews back in May 2007 making Letter From Arcadia the longest running feature on Caught by the River. It’s made for a fascinating archive and you can go back to the very beginning by clicking HERE.