ja

your blue-knuckle crevace de coeur set my dinner cold. jack london turning in his grave. frank barlow on ice at the hippodrome. here we kept the sledges loaded and the braziers lit. the way to the lake still ditched in old grey coats of last year’s decomposing snow. arse pit like a fishmonger’s slab, hailing bream eyes, skirts of frozen wave round tree stumps,
sheets of ice-drift catching on the lines.

fishing with ancestors, you can hear the water creak like a longboat after dark, you walk on pressed air freezing into sheets like snipped up basildon bond in the first wink of moon. an origami of snow in a footprint. a sky with its throat cut.

then spring blew off course all weekend, crash landing in a norman field.
winter letting go, a bored pitbull that’s already had your bones out. pond green as a billiard baize, algae vandalized by a passing heron. the solar fountain spouted through the ice on sunny days, the cat’s bar stool, four paws of fearless billiards where tigernut stooped to drink:

you’ll get your fishing now. on march the first, magpies ran along the road, picking up their fallen nests. a jay with a stick too long to take off. over wind busted water, the creak of rusty swan wings. the crocus joins the snowdrop. the muddied lamb, the daffodil thumbs up along the banks. a bee on the scrounge. i filled the flask and went up arse pit. it had taken flood with tidelines a yard wide after the hurricane. spring ripple, purple catkins, blackbirds on the fife, water temperature up three degrees to six. teatime when i placed the baits, thump down hard on the plateau, the old gravel road to home. tea with the cup lid tight, still in gloves, sun behind a net curtain, not even a roach on the shy.

been through it a hundred times and packed up beaten. but things happen on march 1st. 6.15, still daylight, two beeps on the left hand rod, bobbin pulled tight. gloves off, the combat honourable, sullen as memorial day. the first fish of 2010, an old friend, third visit, a st david’s day 40:

wind in the willows on the bird table

dp

dp

whilst you are surrounded by snowdrops here it is only snowfalls as the ice age of arcadia takes hold, threateningly for good. the ponds are ice soup and the riverbank has gone, washed away by one cold brown onslaught. the heath is more glass than grass, more water than walks. arcadia is not in aspic it is in ice. even the afternoon sunshine is a mirage, the doorway back into the wardrobe is nailed shut, we are lost, we are narnia forever. the rod rings iced up, the silk line snapping in the wind. rumours of pike growing beyond record size abound as do rumours of people seen fishing in places where the temperature sneaks above a single degree. but they are only rumours. there are more empty pegs than occupied swims as the bream cough settles like a bad weather front over the valleys and tempts the blind man to draw red crosses on front doors. birdsong deceives in the early morning as frost is scattered by the snap of roller doors on house clearance vans and totters search the bags of rags for single fen skates and fur capes. firewood is the new currency, traded in alleyways and hidden by tarpaulins in secret hollows. behind crittall that creaks in the dead of night under moons never brighter the forgotten parts of london shiver and in caravans down lanes by the vale of health black smoke puffs out from wood burning stoves. but fish we shall! if not within days within weeks, before the axe of march 14th falls, before the first primrose pokes its head above the earth and we no longer check the diesel in the morning.

the last of the rations on the birdtable

ja

ja

thanks for pulling the black-outs down. feared arcadia was in aspic. or you’d missed the last chub before christmas, not tunnelling out of highgate to a waiting troika. your s&r was like a smuggler’s beacon on the romney marsh. i couldn’t do one; accident in the word factory, fingers lost in the eulogy compressor. hazard of a pen-slinger. no shadows, no looking back. as the world turned to a pillar of salt, we looked on, and stayed away, keeping our reflections under a hat. 2009 was the year of mass hypocrisy.

during that late decennial landscape by findus, the lakes all shuttered in bullet proof ice, arse pit stayed water longest, ridgebacked in everlasting wind. always the last to ice, those end of the line carp just beating the rush-hour cold:

carp in december, they were still on the bars, helium santas warming their fat. fairy lights on the rod rests. it was looking good for a christmas forty till hell froze over. two weeks of glass trees, a fortnight of deafening snow, the way to stop aviation, keep the skies quiet. seven days under a drift, guessing where the carrots were under three feet of snow, the cat in his sleeping bag of four season fur, the only grit up here was the true grit you needed to shit outside in minus 15:

melting snow for water, shouldering the door open every morning as the wind piled it up again. when i ran out of wine, the butcher came up from the village on his quad, two bottles of pinard and a kilo of sausages.

your arcadia came with the slush, flowing up ditches, first snowdrops, starlings at muster in the fields, shell-shocked pheasants standing in the lanes at hunters’ retreat. waters have risen, four extra feet on the pits, the rivers which died in summer are back on the map. cat ice on the water buckets every morning, new line on the spools, down to the last fuel stick in the handwarmer. keeping your seat warm in the renault for 2010.

dog fights over the birdtable

dp

for all those of you who may be preparing to travel to spitalfields tomorrow i am afraid to tell you that due to an outbreak of vicious bream cough in arcadia i will not be there but will return as usual next thursday 4th february.

in the meantime to sate your appetite i am pleased to announce the secret winter sale at www.andrewsofarcadia.com exclusive to signatories upon my e mailing list.

should you find yourself idling on the pages of my site please note that the prices there displayed can be discounted and you alone may purchase until 28th february this year at the following:

allcocks aerial popular £252
hardy tin & contents £99
hardy bamboo rod case £108
hardy three drawer gaff £40
brunswick brothers button £40
laa geen cup ticket £18
aldenham reservoir pike permit £36
brighton palace pier association register £45
madresfield estate letters £22
1910 allcocks pike gag £40
metal edged cardboard boxes – a collection £86
a e verona of calcutta mahseer lures – a collection £385
bernard & sons brass reel £122
georgian anglers wallet £40
abu smoker £32
huntley & palmers creel biscuit tin £158
allcocks streamsearch float in original packaging £22

good afternoon

john

andrews of arcadia
vintage fishing tackle for the soul
spitalfields antiques market
commercial street
london E1
thursdays almost without exception
07.30hrs – 15.30hrs
07980 274383
www.andrewsofarcadia.com

The Frost Fair Thaw

dp

the frost fair on the heath has finished, the fires on no 2 pond have been extinguished, the birdmen have put away their costumes for another year and the fieldfares have left to roost deep in the woods having spent days feasting upon apples in the open. no 2 has been frozen since before christmas day and shows no sign of thawing completely. under its sheets of ice the bellies fins of fat carp turn a bright orange and their fins a dark red. shoals of roach bunch up until they are nothing more than an underwater disco orb turning slowly in the depths. in the margins where the water comes back to life in the middle of the day pike stir from under a bed of silt. for two weeks we have done nothing but light fires and go rasputin hunting in the cut off places where the map maker forgot to tread. at night in the glow of flames the fox cub comes to bark and the owl swoops down on frightened rats. all around the heath is come to life and the city that tugs at its fringes is forced to retreat back south towards the river. the river through which we watched the fireworks on new year’s eve from the roof of arcadia through an old pair of army binoculars and drank champagne in the bitter cold. a few more days and the first cast of the year will be made, taking bread downstream to the waiting mouths of the hungry.

cake on the birdtable

ja

ja

sad times indeed, when the like of mr rickards is taken by the black pike. your obituary is tolling round the french hills, it being pike time in the pools and the ossuaries. rods inverted. cane denis pye 78s snapped over the knee; beanie off to the man who gave “the fishing box” an honoured review on fishingmagic – i’m just pleased he was still alive to read it and find his kindred spirit in najard the great piker.

the autumn is slow to kill off much else this year. a ream of tempests, the barometer needle jammed at the bottom the last three weeks of clemency. i note that in your last arcadia a swarm of harlequins made a chineese wedding of your threshold. almost to the minute i was fishing the final day of indian summer down in the wooded pool, poised to make the last cast of october when the spool turned red and my t-shirt looked peppered from a twelve bore firing miniature mushroom pellets. beswarmed in lady birds. i’ve seen them nest in stephane’s kitchen. i have them overwintering in every crease of sprout in the garden. hookless mepps or pixie paper weights, another tryphid from the garden centres.

i did cast, a guess even in polorised glare, harlequins bursting off the spool or shooting through the rings; the lead clipped a bush and went down hard in a sure spot. for once the cup of tea on the knee produced a tick-tock slow lift on the bobbin. 27lbs of sunny snaps:

my annual mushroom bulletin has been postponed due to an explosion, a mushroom cloud over the forest, whicker stretcher bearers carrying away the severed ranks to bag up and stock in the upright mortuary, the good white pike in the cellar:

it was prophesied. swarming cepes, isaiah the fly-agaric, ezekial’s vision: the oak tree roots were conveyer belts of cepes, the portly bordeaux, penny buns unsullied by maggot or beetle. the long hot summer, a good september rain, an early fall; the optimum for mycological abundence.
…We are so many…
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.
(Sylvia Plath, Mushrooms)

and then, as if the mushrooms had been indiscreet, there were poppies actually in flower in the muddy ridges on remembrance day, cepes to attention opposite, tin hats on.

as i write, november gales knocking on the stove pipe, the caravan takes a pasting. winter on arse pit has begun with a string of blanks already. last one should’ve had a pot:

i hear you’re going fishing friday. the french say merde instead of tight lines. will it be pike? the wind has knocked my bird table over, snapped the post at ground level.

vive la birdtable

dp

dp

hearty thanks for your telegram from a distant european autumn. a welcome message of solidarity dropped in an empty bottle of pelforth, left on a table outside the bar on the corner of the boulevard of broken dreams. back in blighty it is not mushroom clouds that fill the mind but hordes of invading harlequin ladybirds, dozens and dozens of them filling the afternoon and evening air, crawling in the through the windows at night and buzzing round the flat at all hours. like a hatch of signal crayfish with wings. they cover car windscreens and swarm over the branches of dying elms. great sport for the cat but killers of our native ladybird. the harlequin bring with them a curse on the summe that has stalked every angler’s step, a season that has yet to start, the poisoning of the trent, the closure of highgate no 1 because of an algae bloom that lit the night up with a green glow turning north london into a b movie out-take. the thames is at its lowest for a century a stagnant pool at laleham where in previous years it roared over the weir. its tributaries down to a level of inches rather than feet. november just around the corner, the tench are getting fat and the grate has yet to be swept out.

imminent flood on the birdtable

ja

the third and final installment:

The Loch of the Green Corrie has a silence that is not silent. Lying there I can hear air drift through heather and over rock and water. Air and invisible streams are gathered and reflected back by the slopes that soar around us, as though we lie within a giant ear. It’s what used to happen when the needle came down on the record’s empty grooves: the sound of presence.
Its surroundings are without trees or shrubs, but there are tiny flowers hidden among the heather. Devoid of animal life, but we have seen many tiny frogs on the way here. No songbirds, but twice a hoodie crow has drifted over, offered a harsh kaak and was gone.
It is very still; the loch and the hills aren’t going anywhere. Yet the water still shifts up and down on the pebbles below, the coarse grass stirs, clouds re-form even as we assign shapes to them. Peter turns another page of Autumn of the Patriarch; Andy flicks at a bluebottle, props himself up on his elbow and stares at the loch as if he could will fish to rise.
This place is as stripped of decoration as a Free Presbyterian church.
Yet MacCaig and AK MacLeod, both devout atheists, had loved it beyond all other places. When Norman’s body could no longer make it up here, he attended faithfully in his mind. The light in his eyes, when on that last occasion I asked him what his favourite spot on Earth was, and he finally answered ‘I think it has to be the loch of the Green Corrie,’ shines on the water here.
I should have guessed the loch’s virtues would be subtle ones. MacCaig liked austerity, the classical over the flowery and romantic. The plainness of this place of water, stone and turf offers not so much sensory deprivation as amplification. Eyes, ears, body itself, have to tune to nuance, to the tiny splash of pink flower, the single distant croak. Perhaps that heightening is what MacCaig so valued here. It certainly wasn’t easy-to-catch fish.
Andy stirs. ‘Right, I’m going to the side Peter was on, where that big one rose.’
Peter grunts, marks his place with a blade of grass and puts Marquez aside for later.
Clearly we are going to be some time here.
Just for a change, I snip off the Blue Zulu – never believed in that fly anyway, why would a fish? – and tie on something grey and greenish as being in tune with our surroundings. I get up stiffly, flex my right shoulder to work off that stab under the shoulder blade, and go back to work again.
Fair enough, I think. If this was easy, it would mean less.
An involuntary cry from Peter. His rod is curved. Then another cry, the rod straightens. His shoulders drop.
‘Curses,’ he says.
‘Big one?’ Andy calls.
Peter shrugs.
‘So-so.’
‘What did it take?’
‘The Pennel.’
Andy quickly takes in his line and kneels over his fly box.
We fish hard, in silence, keeping an eye on each other. One of Norman MacAskill’s few offerings before I left Lochinver was how inventive MacCaig was with the barbs and insults when someone failed to land their fish through slowness or inattention.
‘Sometimes in Latin or Greek, which was not fair. Mind you, he lost a few fish himself. Then myself or AK would tell him off in the Gaelic.’
‘Did you talk a lot on these trips?’ I asked in the hope of more stories.
‘No, mostly we fished.’
I’m haunted by the knowledge that the three of them, MacCaig, MacAskill and AK, came here, as we three are here now, some thirty years later. They came, as we do, to be out in the hills, to fish, to be in each other’s company, mostly wordlessly. They would have been the age we are now. I can almost see their shades quicken in the stir of air over the grass, hear them in the chuckle of water by my foot. Time passes in cast and retrieve. Light on water, cloud reflection and sunlight broken on the water. The sense of where we are, where this is, is sinking in. We are absorbing it, though it feels as though the place is absorbing us.
The afternoon wears on. Mist crawls down over the shoulder of the hill and slithers over the grass to us. A breeze comes with it, and within minutes fingers go white. There have been no more rises. Peter’s nibble is as close as we’ve got.
With hats and fleeces, we take another tea-break, huddle out of the breeze and discuss it. We have covered the entire loch. Nothing is happening out there. We have attended and done our best. If necessary, we come back tomorrow.
‘One more hour?’ Andy says. ‘Let’s really go to it.’
We get stiffly to our feet, flex knees and fingers then pick up our rods and take our stances around the loch. Standing on little promontories of pleasure and fatigue, poised somewhere between faith and hope and doubt, we send our wavering lines out over the water.

“from Powerlines. adapted from a passage in Andrew Greig’s forthcoming book ‘At the Loch of the Green Corrie’ to be published by Quercus in Feb 2010″

‘Powerlines’ is on sale in the CBTR shop.

(continued from yesterday..)
We were so eager, fresh to the place, wondering who was going to be first to catch that fish for Norman. A single fish, caught by any one of us, would fulfil the mission, but it would be good to be the one who caught it.
The first ten, the first twenty minutes passed. The sun came full out. We shrugged off our fleeces, tied them round waists and continued. Andy sighed and moved further along the bank; Peter stepped out onto a rock and cast further towards the still centre of the loch. Caught in a swirl of inattention, my cast tangled.
I knelt on the coarse grass, squinted at the pale fine line. Took off my glasses and looked closer – my father’s gesture, one I was starting to make more often, like that soft involuntary sound as I stood up or sat down.
I got lucky. It was only a fankle, not a bourach – the dowdy mid-fly and the radiant Blue Zulu had involuntary mated in a tangle of metaphors. I cut off the mid-fly. Keep it simple.
A cry from Andy.
‘Rise!’
I looked up in time to see the ripple spread.
‘Big one,’ Peter commented. I got my line out with fresh urgency. It helped to know there was something down there.
Another rise, this time not out in the middle where Peter was casting, but in close.
‘Tiddler,’ he commented.
Then another. I caught the flicker, then the small plop came in on the breeze. It was close in again, in the shallows on Andy’s side. He cursed quietly but we were all cheered by the action, and religiously shifted our casts to the shallow margins.
For a while, nothing much happened.
Busy casting, it took some time to realise the loch had gone dead. For an hour or more there had been no further rises. Not a bite, not a nibble for any of us.
Peter picked his way along the shore towards me.
‘It happens sometimes,’ he said. ‘If you don’t enjoy fishing when you don’t catch a fish, you shouldn’t be a fisherman.’
Andy shrugged and took his line in. We sprawled on the little promontory, ate flapjacks and drank tea, and looked at the loch. The sun came out again, the cool wind dropped. For a while we just lay and looked and no one said anything. We were, I believe, entirely happy.
(to be continued tomorrow).

“from Powerlines. adapted from a passage in Andrew Greig’s forthcoming book ‘At the Loch of the Green Corrie’ to be published by Quercus in Feb 2010″

Andrew Greig. A brief biography:

I was introduced to fly fishing by my friend Mal Duff, for whom it was his greatest passion after mountaineering. When he died on Everest, my apprenticeship was incomplete and still is. The great Scottish poet Norman MacCaig, a very accomplished fisherman, shortly before his death in 1996 asked me to fish on his behalf in his favourite place on Earth, the Loch of the Green Corrie in Assynt, Sutherland. ‘If you succeed, I shall be delighted. If you fail, then looking down from a place in which I do not believe, I shall be most amused.’ This quest led to several trips with friends to Assynt, which in turn has grown into a full-scale book incorporating fishing expeditions, elements of biography, memoir, history and geology, plus musings on friendship, poetry, mortality, love and malt whiskey. At the Loch of the Green Corrie, from which the following pieces are excerpted and slightly adapted, will be published by Quercus in 2010.

Andrew Greig is the author of six collections of poetry, the latest of which is This Life, This Life: New and Selected Poems, published by Bloodaxe Books. His six novels are That Summer, Electric Brae, The Return of John McNab, When They Lay Bare, In Another Light and Romanno Bridge. His latest work of non-fiction is Preferred Lies. He lives in Edinburgh and Orkney.

As has been documented many times before, it was really important to Andrew (Walsh, partner in crime) and myself, that fishing was a big part of CBTR, as it was the ‘going fishing’ that fired us up to start this in the first place. So therefore to have input from two of angling’s most original voices gave us the confidence we needed to go forward.

Next week see’s the publication of ‘Powerlines – New Writing From the Water’s Edge’ (Two Ravens Press), ‘an anthology of exceptional writing, which just happens to have fishing in it’, edited by Dexter, and described by Chris Yates in his intro as ‘..a collection of unique, superbly crafted fishing stories, which takes the ancient form to a new and fascinating level’. As well as Dexter himself, it includes writing from John Andrews, David Profumo, Andrew Greig and others.

We have a lot to thank Dexter for, so it’s an honour to be able to support the release of this new book and his publisher has kindly given us the ok to run a serialisation of one of the chapters. I have chosen to go with one of Andrew Greig’s. The decision was made partly because it involves fly-fishing – something that we don’t have much of on here – partly because it has introduced me to the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig and wholly because I like it a lot. We’ll run an extract a day for the rest of this week and some biographical info on Andrew tomorrow.

We have also got some copies of the book ahead of publication and you will find them for sale in the shop now.

Jb on the birdtable

First Cast at the Loch of the Green Corrie. By Andrew Greig.

We drop our packs on a little promontory at the north end of the Loch of the Green Corrie and stand there, absorbing our surroundings.
My first reaction: it’s not pretty. Nor particularly green. When MacCaig said it was his favourite place in all Assynt and asked me to fish here on his behalf, I’d imagined some blue jewel cupped in a green setting, a radiant brooch pinned high on the bosom of a great hill, looking out over a monumental gathering of other stellar mountains. But despite the coarse grass that grows among the boulders and bedrock, the overall effect is grey and austere.
We are very enclosed here. On three sides, slopes fall steeply to a rough fringe around the loch. Down the slopes across from us drape shrouds of grey scree, probably quartzite eroded from the summit. Now the sun has gone in, that scree lends the clear water its colour. There are no flowers, no blooming heather, no trees, bushes or bird life. At 1,800 feet, the breeze is strikingly cool. If this is the Green Corrie I’d hate to see the Grey one.
Shrugging on his fleece, Andy hunkers down at the water’s edge, dabbles his fingers in, licks.
‘Perfect alkalinity,’ he pronounces. ‘There are definitely fish in here.’
We get cracking.
It’s a bit like when you meet someone’s new love, I think while tying on a new Black Pennel fly. You look and listen, and wonder what the fuss is about. He or she seems a perfectly ordinary person. This seems another Highland loch, a bit more remote and bleak than most. It must have hidden charms. Or maybe it just has loads of easy-to-catch fish.
I go through my small fly box and pick out a Blue Zulu as the bob-fly, the one nearest to me. I select a nameless dowdy bit of fluff as the mid-fly, aware that Peter and Andy already have their lines out. We all want to be the first person to catch Norman’s fish.
‘If you catch a fish, I shall be delighted. If you fail, then, looking down from a place in which I do not believe, I shall be most amused.’
I hurriedly attach the cast to the line. In this cool breeze there is no sign of any bug life above or on the water. Maybe that’s what MacAskill meant by it being no use if the wind’s from the East, the chilly direction. And these flies look like nothing that ever flew or swam. I have to trust that trout, like ourselves, rise to metaphor. Or are instinctively curious.
I stand on a mossy rock beside the promontory and trail the flies in the water to get them wet and heavy. I can see all the stones on the bottom, never clearer. Andy is already working the shore to my right, Peter on the other side. Their lines roll out straight and silent, drop lightly onto the bright choppy surface.
My fishing apprenticeship with Mal Duff had been entirely from boats, where casting is less critical. But maybe I’ll get lucky. At the very least I’ll learn and get better. Hoping Peter and Andy aren’t watching, hoping that the invisible dead aren’t watching, though in my mind they always are, I murmur For you and set the line flying.
(to be continued tomorrow).

“from Powerlines. adapted from a passage in Andrew Greig’s forthcoming book ‘At the Loch of the Green Corrie’ to be published by Quercus in Feb 2010″