Letters From Arcadia
‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ ja tench of old england, the long trunk road south, a bucket of john barleycorn and a pond in the corner of edmund blunden’s eye. every july should have one. the french july is no cobbett’s ride. it’s a state funded month of shit by a lake, freedom to litter, a [...]
Letters From Arcadia
‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’ DP Whilst you were searching for a still beating heart of darkness wrapped in a metal edged cardboard box at the back of the Orne wardrobe I’ve been out doing vanishing tricks in the B.C. Baitdropper, the underwater Vauxhall Verne, loaded with a ballast bucket of lobworms, a crate [...]
Wardrobe Up The River Orne
 ja so much for the glorious then, the tragic dawns of the heath robinsons, where no contraption ever made will bag an underground tench, if that’s where they’ve gone, flushed down sherlock holmes’s plot-hole or in a wicker basket round the back of a polish deli. fewer tench under gordon brown, more bolt-riggers on [...]
Buster Crabbe’s Baitdropper
DP It was too much, the wait for the beginning of the season, the false alarms, the rumours, the pictures of fat birds from France and the people who went over the top too early only to be shot in the back of the head by the baliff or sent to Porton Down to be [...]
Pilgrim’s Progress
ja that really was me on the speaking tube, live from walker’s pitch as carp made weirpools over the baits. the last thing either of us expected, because as you know: i’ve never owned a mobile phone nor never hope to own one because when i’m away from home i’m fuckin fish-not-phonin the nokia baked-bean [...]
Birdman
DP Have you really been down at Walker’s Pitch or was that phone call from closer to home, a sweetcorn can on string from the top of the Heath? Good to hear your dulcets. Last week John Richardson and I took the close season pilgrimage to the Creel where the lost Leneys of Frensham stared [...]
Taught By The River
ja once more you stalk the concrete brooks, shadow fishing, casting at the moon. is that the thrift shop where i used to get my breeches and elliot symack knitware? in my day there was a tackleshop in kentish town. john’s tackle? for close season junkies, sundries for the vulnerable, beside a petrol garage after [...]
Drive-By-Chicken
dp whilst you were perfecting the art of the drive-by, french style, i was out wandering the old english close season, the only map the one i was making up as i walked along. leaving the heath behind i headed down the hill past the ghost site of fields tackle shop on highgate road the [...]
Mowing Days Are Here Again
ja since your last glimpse of the winter underworld on the heath, the green fuse blew. from squelcher to scorcher in a week of spawning bream. grass growing under your feet as you mow, the oaks beat the poplars into leaf and there’s cuckoo spit on the willows. spring like a rapid deployment force in [...]
Cabbage Is King
dp since mansfield left highgate has gone downhill to kentish town. the hero of the hour in the village is cabbage a staffordshire terrier whose ears and tail were severed by a teenage gang to make him fit for fighting on the thirteenth floor of some nowhere block. cabbage fought back and is now in [...]
Caught by the River