press release:

Aldeburgh Music is hosting another cross-arts winter weekend, following on the success of the After Sebald weekend last year, which featured, among many others, Patti Smith.

On Saturday 18th and Sunday 19th February, Aldeburgh Music is taking to the waters, in an event curated by Gareth Evans that celebrates the cultures of place across the UK and beyond. This year, the weekend navigates the artistic exploration of rivers, shorelines and the ocean in film, literature, art activism and performance.

“I’m delighted to be working with Aldeburgh Music to realise this unique weekend event,” said Curator Gareth Evans. “Snape Maltings is the perfect venue, both geographically and creatively, to realise this distinctive exploration of the waters. A remarkable assembly of innovative and imaginative artists will be presenting their striking readings of the waterways, coasts and seas that define our planet and our lives.”

On Saturday 18 February there will be a day-long enquiry into the meanings of water, with presentations by a number of acclaimed writers and performers, including Robert Macfarlane (The Wild Places) on the much missed and loved Suffolk-based author Roger Deakin, followed by a staged reading of Deakin’s Waterlog by tenor Mark Padmore and actor Stephen Dillane. A presentation by Jay Griffiths will incarnate the sea and its mysteries, while the country’s Eastern Coast will be charted by writers Jules Pretty and Ken Worpole, alongside the photography of Jason Orton. Meanwhile, the internationally influential critic and film-maker Noel Burch will also be introducing the UK theatrical premiere screening of his important documentary essay film, The Forgotten Space (co-directed with photographer Allan Sekula), which follows the high seas global supply chain our consumer lives so depend on.

The evening of Saturday 18 February sees the multi-media, work-in-progress premiere presentation of Swandown, a remarkable feature-length film collaboration between film-maker Andrew Kötting (Gallivant) and visionary writer Iain Sinclair. Taking a Swan Pedalo from Hastings beach to Hackney’s Olympic site via the South Coast, the inland waterways of Kent and the Thames estuary, the duo make a suitably English voyage into the heart of place and politics. With soundscapes from musician and artist Jem Finer (Longplayer) with Kirsten Norrie, and the startling pinhole photography of rising star Anonymous Bosch, this is an event not to be missed.

Taking the Waters continues on Sunday 19 February with a showing of the late Derek Jarman’s iconic shoreline feature The Garden, to celebrate what would have been the late, great artist and film-maker’s 70th birthday (on 31 January). The event concludes with distinctive presentations from artists Ben Eastop, Rachel Lichtenstein, Manu Luksch and Simon Read, all of whom have worked in striking and innovative ways with water as a location, a source of meaning and a site through which to imagine the futures of community and belonging.

For more information, visit aldeburgh.co.uk.

In the South of England, there are ambitious plans to bring the Wilts & Berks canal back to life. Info can be found HERE.

In East London, this Tuesday, it’s the launch of Big Waterways Clean Up on the Lee Navigation. More on that HERE.

Thanks to readers Nick Regaard and John Goodman for bringing us the news from their regions. We are always happy to hear about your local waterways. Whether it’s in need of help or the story is a positive one, please get in touch. If we can help in any way we will. Drop us a line at info@caughtbytheriver.net.

An extract from Jon Berry’s new book A Train To Catch:

If one journey typified the travels of adventurous Victorians, it was the grand tour of Scotland. These were not the third-class day trips enjoyed by ordinary Thamesmen, but extended excursions for the moneyed gentleman hunter. Shotguns, servants and rod boxes with Pall Mall addresses would be loaded on to the north-bound trains, with stags and salmon waiting dutifully at the end of the line.

That is how I have always imagined it, anyway, and the literature of the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries suggests there was some truth in this. The writings of T. H. White, Frederick Aflalo, Captain Albert F. L. Bacon and countless others record an age of endless salmon and wild moors, peat-fired lodges and wisened ghillies in kilts, and a world of rigid class distinction where everything – including the salmon – had its rightful place. The Grand Tour was as much a part of a wealthy gentleman’s life as his London club, his alma mater or his mistress.

A century ago, seven different rail companies puffed and bellowed in to Scotland, and local branch lines often provided stations within walking distance of favoured salmon pools, lochs and lodges. For the Victorian angler with sufficient funds, it could be easy. Today, the Anglo-Scottish border is crossed only by the East and West Coast lines, and the network beyond Inverness is fragmented at best. Ticket prices can be outrageous for those who cannot book months in advance, and the reality is that it is cheaper to travel from England to France for its gigantic carp and catfish than it is to take a train to Scotland and try to search out one of its dwindling stocks of salmon.

Bloated Gallic cyprinids were not part of angling’s golden age, however, and therefore have no place in this story, and so I booked a return ticket to Perth. I’ve long regarded this delightful town on the banks of the Tay as the gateway to the highlands, though locals would suggest the real mountains begin farther north.

My plan from there was loose at best – it was the beginning of August, and I knew from previous experience that the grilse might just be running up the Cromarty Firth, past the Black Isle and in to the Averon. This, as always, would depend upon whether there was any water in the river, and I wouldn’t know that until I got there. If the water was low and the salmon were in the estuary, there were trout in Sutherland that I knew I could catch, mackerel off the pier at Ullapool, a ferox-fishing ghillie on Loch Ness I had long wanted to meet and a deep limestone loch full of ghosts in the far north at Cape Wrath. My car was back in Wiltshire with a flat battery and perforated exhaust, and so the entire tour would rely upon trains, buses and the kindness of others. To complicate matters, Vic had decided to come with me to take photographs and see what all the fuss was about. We had two weeks in front of us, and only the vaguest of itineraries – up the East Coast and back down the West, with two travel rods and a rucksack full of flies and spinners. There would be no servants to carry the equipment, no loch-side stations and only an outside chance of a wisened old man in a kilt to net our fish. This was a Grand Tour, proletarian-style.

The east-coast line to Inverness is one of my favourites. The mountains grow and darken once Perth is left behind; low-lying farming land gives way to the slate grey vista of the sheep crofter, and the old iron rails, which have carried fishermen in to the north for over a century, cross countless burns and rivers. I travelled this line many times as a boy, always on the night sleeper from London with brother and I squeezed in to a single bunk, and was in my ‘thirties before I did so in daylight. It is a journey which, for me, encapsulates all that is Scottish and special. Only the Kyle of Lochalsh line, which crosses the Highlands from East to West, rivals it.

The construction of the east-coast line was late by the standards of railway mania, but it still met with considerable opposition. In 1892, the introduction to The Wild Sports and Natural History of the Highlands had the following to say: The railways driven far into wastes of trackless bog and heather, now admit countless tourists to the most retired districts. Their taste for shooting and fishing, and the charm of a freer life than can be found in the great cities, have planted castles and shooting lodges all over Scotland. But it has pressed with great severity upon all wild life especially birds and beasts like the osprey, kite and pine marten, that are rapidly approaching extinction.

The ecological impact of the railways in remoter regions was something that I rarely considered during my journeys, though I probably should have done. The benefits of the railways, for me, always outweighed the losses. Trains democratised travel in an age when the poor got a rough deal in all other aspects of everyday life, they brought fresh food to regions that had previously gone without , they mobilised a workforce and enabled the creation of a football league. Trains opened up an island to its inhabitants, and only rarely did I consider the cost. The castles and shooting lodges which once outraged locals are now part of Scotland’s romance, and any environmental consequences have long since been surpassed by the effects of motorways, North Sea oil-drilling, air travel and an endless stream of 4x4s along the A9. If Victorian railway mania carved up the British countryside, subsequent generations have managed to screw it up beyond all recognition. It’s no defence, but it is the truth.

If the landscape had been ruined, it didn’t appear so from our carriage. Vic was entranced, and so was I. The rivers held water but didn’t look especially high, and we saw anglers everywhere – in the Garry and Tummel at Pitlochry, in the Spey at Kingussie, and on streams and burns whose names we didn’t know. Vic pointed out that none of them appeared to be reeling in any fish, and so I explained that this was Scotland, and that they were fishing for salmon and that sometimes these salmon weren’t in the river, and when they were in the river they weren’t really supposed to feed. ‘I see’, she said. ‘So why exactly are we here?’

A Train To Catch is published by the Medlar Press.

An extract from Jon Berry’s new book, A Train To Catch:

The Wessex rivers owe much to the railways, and may never have flourished without them. Until the final years of Victoria they were ostensibly salmon rivers, but that changed in the 1890s when two fishermen – the Gomm Brothers – used the new railway network to transport Thames barbel to the Dorset Stour and Hampshire Avon. On later journeys the wooden barrels in the freight carriages contained carp and tench and silver fish, all captured from the waters around Staines by rod and line. The extent of their activities is shrouded in some mystery, but there can be little doubt that these two Londoners, working in league with a local hotelier called Newlyn, did much to transform two of the south’s premier salmon rivers in to equally desirable coarse fisheries.

Their actions were timely; the Thames was about to enter an extended decline, and Midlands anglers were already deserting the polluted Trent. England’s fishermen decamped to the Throop and Royalty fisheries in numbers, and the London and South-Western Railway took them there. Within forty years, the Royalty was home to record-breaking barbel catches, and the early morning train from London now brought biscuit tins full of maggots from Midlands bait farms to meet demand in the tackle shops of Ringwood and Christchurch.

And so the south-west line from London brought the fishermen, the bait, and even the fish themselves. For all these reasons, only a day after washing Southsea’s sand from my shoes, I took the early morning Maggot Train from London to Christchurch, the harbour town where the two great rivers of Wessex meet.
I packed a split-cane Avon rod, a favourite centrepin and some floats. Nigel at the tackle shop had told me when I’d booked that the silver fish were shoaling up below the weir and there was a reasonable chance of sport from them, and perhaps the big perch which had followed them there. I also took another old railway guide to read on the train, and so the final slow miles through Sway and Brockenhurst and Hinton Admiral were given over to Fishing in the South by J.W.G. Tomkin. The author researched his book in 1934, and the Southern Railway Company published it in the following year. Curiously, no mention is made of Tryon’s record barbel, but his notes on Christchurch are otherwise detailed.

Quite recently it has been found that the lower reaches of the Avon hold immense barbel, which actually average from 6 to 7lbs., in the Royalty Fishery stretch at Christchurch. The nearest station is Christchurch, which is five minutes walk from the water and about ten minutes from the centre of the town.

Accommodation is plentiful and varied, but it may be noted that the King’s Arms Hotel caters especially for anglers. The telephone number is Christchurch 69 and visiting anglers may be well advised to book in advance if they intend to stay there. The special tariff for anglers is 15/- per day all-in, including an excellent luncheon basket for those who intend to take their mid-day meals by the river.

Little has changed. The Royalty’s reputation as a venue for holiday anglers is a strong as ever, and the infamous crowds of the ‘thirties are there, three or more generations on. The tackle shop is still there, though it has moved from the bailiff’s hut to its current premises on the high street, and so too is the pub – albeit re-named The Royalty Arms, and with a hand-painted sign which shows Royalty hero Jack Harrigan with a 13-pound barbel in his hands. Suburbia and industry has gradually enveloped the land around the fishery, but many of the landmarks which Tomkin would have enjoyed are there still – the bends of the House Pool, the reinforced banks of the Piles, the secluded Parlour and the great iron bridge over the Railway Pool, on which a commuter train once stopped and allowed its passengers to watch one of Wallis’s companions land a monster.

It is all too tempting to get swept up in the history of the place when fishing the Royalty – I certainly do – but the challenges facing the angler are very real, and wholly modern. There are the poachers in the harbour at Mudeford who net the salmon and sea trout before they enter the river, and who are hunted themselves by police using night scopes and walkie-talkies. Then there are the perennial threats to water quality of low summer flows and pollution from local industry. Talk of mink and otters is common, though the current management do much to moderate predation. Finally, there is the challenge of the fish themselves – these are canny creatures, well-versed in bolt-rigs, back-leads and other traps laid by twenty-first century specimen hunters.

The barbel were not to be found in the Top Weir. Nigel assured me there would be a resident fish or two in the white water, but that time might be more profitably spent trotting maggots down the far bank from the pitch known as Jack’s Corner. According to the local sage, the rest of the barbel were further down the fishery between Trammels and Harrigan’s. The first afternoon’s fishing confirmed this – the roach and dace came readily to maggots, while the cries of successful barbel hunters could be heard in the distance. I was particularly pleased to catch some roach; the Avon was once famed for them, but like many rivers has witnessed a decline. Mine were bright, scarlet-finned fish, and the biggest topped a pound.

In the evening I set up my leger rod, and waded out in to the froth. Nigel had suggested I bounce a cube of luncheon meat around in the white water, allowing the undertow to whip it back up under the sill, just in case a barbel was foraging. One certainly was. It weighed eight pounds and put up a thumping fight that would have reduced my old Wizard to splinters.

The train journey home the following morning was slow, but that didn’t matter. I thought about the Maggot Train and wondered what had happened to all those biscuit tins – were they ever returned to the Midlands bait farms? Was there a stockpile of them hidden away somewhere in Bournemouth, rusting away and reeking of another generation’s sawdust and ammonia?

The flat scrub of the New Forest gave way to the over-development of Southampton, and then the tracks swung north to Eastleigh. There, the train sat still for almost an hour as undisclosed problems up the line were resolved. I watched the ‘planes landing and taking off at the adjacent airport, and remembered the ill-fated local campaign to rename it Matt Le Tissier International.

The diesel engine finally grumbled back in to life and pulled us forward, towards the Itchen valley and beyond. Ahead lay more delays, more platform coffees, changes at Basingstoke and Reading – and then twelve weeks of teaching. Dreams of record barbel would have to wait.

A Train To Catch is published by the Medlar Press

Trout is all from Rolf Nylinder on Vimeo.

from the Frontsidefly blog.
A little edit from upper Vindelälven. Enough said! the song is “The Tallest Man on Earth – Love is all”

Hampshire man Matt Hamilton showcases the wealth of wildlife at Ichen Navigation.
(from the BBC Nature website)

by Robert Mann.

One hundred years ago, George Harris, fisherman and hedge-layer, of King’s Caple, Herefordshire, and Frank Bailey, from the neighbouring village of Hentland, made what was for them a momentous journey to London. They went up to the House of Lords to hear the Law Lords pass judgement on an appeal which, apart from having potentially serious consequences on their livelihoods, had become something of a cause célèbre, both locally and nationally.

The story began a few years earlier in 1906 when they were sued for trespass by the Earl of Chesterfield and a Mrs Foster, local landowners who owned several miles of Wye riverbank between Ross and Hereford. George Harris and Frank Bailey had been doing what they’d done for years and what their fathers and grandfathers had done before them, namely, fishing for salmon. The landowners claimed exclusive riparian rights; the fishermen claimed that as freeholders of the five parishes of the Manor of Wormelow they were in possession of an ancient right to fish the Wye.

The first court found in favour of the fishermen but the landowners appealed and had the ruling overturned. Facing financial ruin, Harris and Bailey took their case to the House of Lords. The legal fees were considerable and many villagers and well-wishers contributed money to help pay their fees. At the same time, the local gentry, horrified at the idea of a precedent which could dilute the value of their fishing rights, rallied around to support the landowners. The battle lines were clearly drawn.

After all the legal toing and froing, by the summer of 1911 the seven Law Lords who had heard the case were ready to give their judgement. Or, at least, six of them were – one, Lord Kinnear, was absent from the House.

Each of the six Lords gave detailed reasons for their rulings. In support of the fishermen, the Lord Chancellor had no doubts about the legality of their right to fish. He wrote, ‘It has been proved beyond doubt that freeholders within five riparian parishes (King’s Caple, Hentland, Sellack, Ballingham and Bolstone) have been in the habit of fishing within the stretch of water for centuries, not by stealth or indulgence, but openly, continuously, as of right, without interruption’.

He even went on to speculate that the right to fish may have originally been granted to these villagers by the Crown in return for military service – a not unusual arrangement in the Middle Ages. The Manor of Wormelow was part of Archenfield, a shadowy area between the Wye and Monnow, which for many years had neither really been part of England nor of Wales. Into this tiny ‘buffer state’ there were frequent incursions (Owain Glyndwr may himself have been killed within Archenfield in 1416) and so the Lord Chancellor’s speculations were entirely feasible.

Summing up the case, he said, ‘Now, My Lords, there can be no question about the view which Courts of Law entertain in regard to a claim of this kind. When long and continuous enjoyment is established, a lawful origin will be presumed if it is reasonably possible …… this appeal should be allowed’.

Lord Ashbourne, agreeing with the Lord Chancellor, cited a ‘mass of old documents’ which he believed indicated that a fishing right existed, ‘possibly before 1297′. A third Law Lord also found in favour of the fishermen.

However, three Lords decided to reject the appeal. They argued that no real right ever existed and that the fishermen had merely been tolerated by the landowners. They pointed out the vagueness of the old documents – who, exactly was entitled to fish? Some ancient documents implied it was the right of all the inhabitants of the Manor of Wormelow, others said it was only the right of the freeholders and their servants. Other papers referred instead to the Hundred of Wormelow or Archenfield – were the Manor and the Hundred coterminous? Such were the niceties that led them to find in favour of the landowners.

So, three Lords for, three against. The seventh, and deciding, Law Lord, Lord Kinnear, was still nowhere to be found. The proceedings had to be postponed until the following day. One can imagine the tension – all the protagonists (it’s said that this was the one and only occasion in his life when Frank Bailey wore a neck tie) and reporters had gathered to hear the final conclusion of a case which had by now dragged on for five years, only for them to be told they’d have to wait yet another day.

Eventually, Lord Kinnear did deliver his verdict, but not in person. He did it by telegram to the Lord Chancellor. Without giving any reasons, he simply stated that he rejected the fishermen’s appeal. ‘One wonders whether in English jurisprudence there is any parallel for so fateful an opinion being conveyed in a sixpenny telegram’, said the Hereford Journal.

There was much condemnation in the press of the Lords’ verdict. ‘The rights of the poor, though centuries old, can be destroyed by a legal quibble …. the decision is certainly a proof that grave injustices are possible under English land laws’, stated the Manchester Guardian. The Morning Reader referred scathingly to the minds of lawyers, ‘steeped in a thousand devices of the books for entrenching private property’. The Daily Chronicle said it would like to, ‘lay the idle fishing rod over the backs of the judges who draw some £50,000 a year for their ignorance of the law’. The Daily News was quick to point out that the four Lords who rejected the appeal were all Tories.

But, apart from the anger, the press also communicated something of the sadness of the verdict. These were the words of the Hereford Journal, ‘One feels with regret that another little bit of Old England has disappeared with the shattering of the long cherished tradition that the dwellers in these five Wyeside villages enjoyed extensive privileges over the waters that course through their midst’.

* * * * *

The story I heard as a child, told to me by my grandmother, who was the granddaughter of George Harris, was that the reason Lord Kinnear was not present to deliver his judgement in person was because he was staying at Brockhampton Court, a country house not far from King’s Caple. This was the home of Mrs Foster, the landowner who, along with Lord Chesterfield, had instigated the original court case. I do not know whether or not this is apocryphal but I think it matters little because, without doubt, it is poetically true. The landed gentry closed ranks and the villagers lost an ancient right.

Even with their outrage at what they saw as a travesty of justice, the liberal commentators of the day with their unshakable faith in progress, would have dismissed as ridiculous any notion that, one hundred years on, Britain would still be ruled by the same privileged elite and that the gap between the haves and the have-nots would be increasing steadily. On the other hand, I suspect that George Harris and Frank Bailey would hardly have raised an eyebrow.

Robert Mann is the great great grandson of George Harris. He lives on the banks of the Rio Genal in Andalucia.

The introduction to the catalogue for Kurt Jackson’s exhibition of recent works, currently on show at The Redfern Gallery, London.
By Robert Macfarlane

‘As I watch the world’, wrote Nan Shepherd in 1945, ‘it arches its back, and each layer of the landscape bristles’. It’s a typically brilliant observation about observation from one of the last century’s least-known great writers. For Shepherd, ‘landscape’ is not something to be viewed and appraised from a distance, as if it were a panel in a frieze or a canvas in a frame. It isn’t the passive object of our gaze, but rather a volatile participant – a fellow subject which arches and bristles at us, bristles into us. Too often, ‘landscape’ is still understood as a noun connoting fixity, scenery, an immobile painterly decorum. I prefer to think of it as a noun that contains a hidden verb: landscape scapes, it is dynamic and commotion-causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives but also instant by instant, incident by incident. I prefer to take ‘landscape’ as a collective term for the temperature and pressure of the air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock and soil, the sounds (birdsong, wave-crash, road-roar), the scents (kelp-stench, car-diesel, the coconut of gorse) and the uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres that together comprise the bristling presence of a particular place at a particular moment.

The bristling of landscape is Kurt Jackson’s subject as an artist, and his brilliance as an artist lies in the success with which he represents his subject in what is, at last, a static medium. Look for instance, at the painting entitled…No, hold on, that won’t do – let me try again. Don’t look at, but watch for a few minutes his painting entitled ‘St Agnes’. The foreground is a furnace, blazing with a gorse-gold that scorches the eye and whose heat is felt in the heart. Beyond that, or rather simultaneous with it, is the incandescence of the sea’s own metal, and within that is the hard black whale-back of St Agnes itself, resilient in the fire, and through it all float the sounds that are faintly jotted in the sky (‘Wind Blow Cow Moo Gull Cry’), and about its edges play other aspects of the moment of record – a sense of peninsularity, of the land both sloping away and fading out at its edges.

Afternoon rain and flowing tide. Mouth of the Stour, October 2010, mixed media on paper, 57 x 62cm

All of this goes on – or rather is going on, for the image itself continues to be an event – and acts upon its watcher: an action-painting response to the action-world. If there is a story to the painting it is that of ignition bringing about combustion: the burn of the gorse causing the sear of sea and thus the whole painting acting as a vast fiat lux – but, again, story is the wrong word, for story functions sequentially, in an orderly fashion, and this painting does not tell, it blazes. Elsewhere, the landscape literally participates in the work. Look at (watch) those star-splodges in the sky of ‘Afternoon Rain’, and you quickly realize that they are the afternoon rain, that Jackson has let the raindrops crack upon the canvas, and that it’s rain that’s making the running, co-authoring the image.

The paintings exhibited here constitute an autobiography of a kind, except that they tell not Jackson’s life-history, but his life-geography. Five of the most important locations in his life are represented, each of which has come to possess some kind of territorial imperative for him. The first is the River Stour in Dorset, which winds through Blandford, the town on Jackson’s birth certificate. ‘This is the Stour,’ reads a precise and revisionary jotting in the corner of one painting, ‘this is where I was born.’ The painting is superb: slow waters running deep, the idle glide of the surface, ducks reversing the flow and leaving white wakes behind them, a scatter of birdsong from the bankside trees.

Then there is Ithaca, mythical Ithaca, as realized in the Mani region of Greece to which Jackson first travelled aged twelve, driven there in an old land-rover by his father who had – like so many thousands of others before and since him, including me – fallen under the spell of the prose of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who lived in Kardamyli and wrote so bewitchingly about Greece in general, and the Mani in particular (and indeed anything else he chose to contemplate). Four years after his first visit, Jackson hitch-hiked back on his own and wild-camped for the summer on the beach. More recently he returned again with his own children, and then again with his wife to make paintings like ‘Olive grove full of asphodels and bird song’, in which the asphodels stand – or ‘strike’, perhaps, because nothing ‘stands’ still in a Jackson painting – in the foreground, and the spray-cloud above the trees is at once the leaves of the olives and also the stippled noise of the birdsong.

The third place – type of place, really – is the deep and fast-running rivers of France, to which Jackson was first taken by his parents as a child. Camping on the banks of those rivers, he received his first schooling as a natural historian and zoologist, with the landscape itself as his teacher. The French rivers – in these paintings as in life – are vigorous, charmed and charged: the energetic cousins of the slow, steady Stour.

The fourth and fifth locations in Jackson’s life-geography are in the far south-west, the region with which he is most associated. There is Priest Cove, tucked into the side of Cape Cornwall (Pen Kernow), where Jackson has for years worked in a hut-turned-studio given to him by local fishermen. And there is St Agnes, one of the Scillies: a transitional place, combining as it does the Mediterranean magic of Ithaca and the Atlantic asperities of Cornwall. St Agnes, like Priest Cove, is often bathed by that bright Atlantic coastal light which – due to the absence of particulate matter in the air – falls with a lucidity that can feel, when one is within it, close to a moral quality. Looking at the St Agnes images, though, I am reminded of the island-visions and mirages that have haunted the Atlantic coasts of Britain and Ireland since at least the sixth century: dream-lands (The Islands of the Blest, The Fortunate Isles, Hy-Brasil) shimmered into being by sea-haze, sun-glare and longing.

A life in five places then: the birth-place, the magic isle, the river, the work-place and the promised land. But these locations, in Jackson’s paintings, are not forced into subservience to their artist and his biography. These are not the places that he has come to know; rather, they are the places that have come to know him. Again – as so often – Nan Shepherd has it right: ‘Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker. This is how the Earth must see itself.’ That seems apt for Kurt Jackson, whose paintings, it sometimes seems to me, are as close as we can come to ‘how the Earth must see itself.’

Recent Work is on show at the Redfern Gallery, Cork Street, London until January 26th. Click HERE for further information.

By Michael Smith.

The following piece was commissioned for this year’s Richmond Literary Fringe Festival and was given its first public reading, by Michael, at the launch party that we hosted together a week or so ago. To hear it read by the author in his distinctive Teesside lilt as our boat cruised down the Thames, the inspiration for the prose, was truly memorable.

1
When the sun gets low above the estuary, glowing against the fishermen’s huts and the flat walls of the winding alleys, and the same hazy glow lingers round the isle of Sheppey in the distance, I am caught with a strange and familiar sensation of wishing that I could be in all of these places at once, that I could know them all, like this late syrupy sun knows them all, that I could dissolve into its sweet golden gaze.

I think about this, wending down those alleys to the chippy, then gazing out across the water eating my fish supper in its paper; I digest the thought slowly, walking back to the hut, while the sun burns itself out across a lovely red western horizon, lingering in pools that glow like embers across the dark silty spread of the mudflats.

Beyond the hut an enchanted waste stretches upriver as far as the horizon… the indescribable beauty of magic hour on the estuary, the unfathomable and exquisite feelings it evokes; the tide goes out, birds seem to walk on the water, the sea and land melting into each other, caught in the same glow as the luminous rosy sky; strange chunks of concrete rubble, old defenses fallen back into the sea; a high tidemark of innumerable bone white cockleshells; the charcoal black skeletal remains of piers like rotted wooden ribcages or bad blackened teeth peek out of the water, clustered together like Neolithic earthworks, Shore-Henge; these water-lands are wastelands, the ruins of our own civilization, here where the Thames gives way to the sea and the vast blue world beyond…

2
An off-peak return to Essex, the train track following the lines of force, the vector of escape, a colossal infrastructure of flyovers and feeder roads that spill out from London along the A13 like greedy tentacles searching for food up the estuary…

People speak on mobiles in muscular African languages as the East End subsided and sank into the soggy, forlorn looking marshes of the Essex hinterlands. The rain came down stronger. Hundreds of bright corrugated container units stacked like rusty Duplo bricks sped past the window, hundreds of units full of the stuff that makes the world go round, before it finally comes to rest in the self-storage sheds that sped by the window afterwards…

Gliding by a vast, city-size tumor of depots, oil drums, cool stores, the co-ordinate of optimum transit and distribution, a confusion and crazy sprawl of flyovers, the 24-7, 360º radiation of tankers, freight, white vans, all clustered round the place, or more accurately the structure, where the Thames and the M25 intersect: a bridge arching over the sprawling, inhuman vista, a bridge of such truly monstrous proportions it induces equal measures of wonder and dread.

“Next stop, Grays,” the train’s posh sex android voice announced… an inhabited settlement in the thick of all this, called Grays? I’ve got to get a look, I thought, and jumped off the train prematurely, into the pissing rain, and a nasty argument between a methadone addict with hands like shovels and a weaselly slip of a ticket inspector.

I saw a sign for “Grays Beach” – Grays Beach? You’ve got to be kidding, I thought, and followed the signs to a little path that led down to a totally deserted sandy kiddies’ play area nestled below landlocked oil rig structures that were either architecture or industrial technology or both – funnels and power grids and enormous cylindrical drums dwarfed a spider’s web climbing frame, a pirate ship, damp sand, and nobody at all to be seen. Kids actually grow up here, I thought. It seemed incomprehensible.

The low sub-base rumble of the Chinese super-freighter bringing in all this year’s Christmas junk slid into dock like a shifting tectonic plate; I scrambled down to the shore to get a better look – although, I don’t know if the word shore accurately describes it, it was more a bank against the waters almost entirely made up of tango bottles, diamond white bottles, all the plastic by-products of the petrochemical complexes in the background. The river seemed dangerously high, like it wanted to burst its banks and wash all this away, a natural corrective to our wasteful ways: if we’re a kind of virus, we’ve clearly gone full-blown – at some point, something will have to be done about us.

I eventually ended up back at the station. It was raining, just like when I arrived. Grays is always gray, Rainham is always rainy, Mucking is always mucky.

Foulness, Gravesend, Shivering Sands, Roach Creek… names that stalk the nameless, primordial darkness that haunts the estuary, that permeates this landscape like a mildew, a damp that gets into the joints, the very bones of the place… it all only heightens the sense of a terrible and awesome mystery being revealed in glimpses.

“Thames” meant “Dark Waters” in the ancient language – dark ancient artery of a dark and ancient empire; dark majestic river god who’s chosen race once ruled the earth. “The Thames has known everything,” said Rudyard Kipling; I wanted to know the Thames; I wanted to follow these Dark Waters, wanted to know them in all their changes: watery wildernesses, bleak container ports, windswept Edwardian seaside piers; dark waters all the way back to the Tower of London, gothic, gargoyled, all the way upstream…

3
Tower Hill: The old offices of the Port of London Authority, a strange masonic ziggurat from the golden hour of empire, the grand old order on the wane, looking out across the docks, governing proceedings with its all seeing gaze.

I decided to jump on a river bus. Sailing under Tower Bridge, the edge of a magic circle that encloses central London, its skyline nestled there inside it like the crown jewels sparkling on the silvery river; the Monument, the Gherkin, the Nat West Tower; to see the city from the water – I got a lump in my throat, thinking to myself: it’s mean, it’s relentless, it grinds you down, but god, I love this city, always did and always will; I’ve loved it more than any friend or any woman; I love this city and I never want to leave it.

Canary Wharf looms into view downriver, raised on its water like some mirage of the future, some fortress city. What’s it winking at? The power behind its pyramids and towers seems far more cloaked and esoteric than the ziggurat of the Port Authority, far shadier than gunpowder, ivory and slaves, the strange cargo of its old docks.

Beneath the steely majesty of its edifices, the suits glided through the sandblasted piazzas like baddie programs in The Matrix. News Corp was up one point. Anglo American was up 2.76. I have absolutely no idea what this means. If money is the god of this place, then the suits are its priestly cast, and their abstract financial operations are the esoteric rites of its high unfathomable religion.

Clouds rise at triangular angles off the blinking pyramid itself – Canary Wharf creates its own weather, just as it creates its own financial storms and cycles. A final rosy sunburst brought golden glints out on the Thames, while the lights of the Leviathan began twinkling – lights on the Millennium Dome, lights on the towers round the blinking pyramid, lights on City Airport planes coming down to land over the sugar factory at Silvertown, big brown mountains of the stuff coming in to dock on supertankers… they open up their cargo doors as they drift upstream, and sundown is saturated with the golden smell of molasses, of sweetness and light, and it seems to me that the Thames becomes the Nile, the Ganges, the World River, and on this World River, glimpses of a World City being born, an emerging estuarine civilization that will eclipse all previous London’s…

4
I crossed the heaving scrum at Leicester Square, a swirling, churning sea of sight seers, followed the slope downwards, riverwards, did a dog-leg into St Martin’s Lane, under the awning with the light bulbs like the baubles on the trimming of a birthday cake, and instantly I was twenty years old again, fresh faced and entranced, in love with London. “I love living in a place like this, where theatre awnings shield you from the drizzle under a glowing line of big round theatre lights,” I remembered mumbling to myself, in a Tuesday afternoon daydream all those years ago; I remembered London’s exoticness back then, and its enchantment: the feeling of being in a magical other place, back then when it was that to me, when I didn’t know where I was going or who I’d find there and this city was all mystery and promise and future. To be young and in love with London: disbelief was suspended, what went up didn’t necessarily come down, and London seemed like the great good place where everything was possible.

Lost in these memories, hugging the stately, dream-like elegance of the Garrick Theatre’s curve, I wended my way down to the river, as I always seemed to, lost in the folds of the metropolis, lost in the bosom of mother London, while the streets of the West End sloped downhill like tributaries to their inevitable end…

I found my way across Charing Cross Bridge, to sunset on the South Bank beach, the sun a column of burnished gold leaf across the silvery leaden water… A man making a giant sand castle which will take him long into the evening to finish, an obsession; a weather beaten man who looks like his wife left him a long time ago and now he’s way beyond any of that, just him and his sand castle and the London sunset…

I walked along a dirty tide line, mossy stones, Victorian pottery fragments, an old blackened timber jetty, the squawk of gulls winkle-picking in the wet mud, the smell of muddy sea shore… and then it struck me: The Thames is a sea, an eternal sea, the sea where little England meets the brave, wide world; Old Father Thames like Old Father Time, and my time here, or yours, all just eddies in its slow, stately flow; and generations of us come and go, searching for this funny kind of life we look for and find in London.

I have a feeling that man has been making excuses for coming home empty-handed for tens of thousands of years. In an age where ‘just being there’ seems to have become the mantra for the type of angler who appreciates, amongst others, Bernard Venables and Chris Yates, and who approaches his fishing with a more traditional outlook, why is it we still need a reason to explain a fishless foray to the waterside? Perhaps it’s a throwback, one of those strange anachronisms, to an age when if we came home empty-handed we may well have been going hungry; when instead of a conciliatory shrug of the shoulders, and post-mortem over a pint or two, there were accusing looks from spouses and children facing another meal of berries and roots.

Perhaps there’s an element of machismo to it. Typical Neanderthal-like man, can’t bear to admit he’s been defeated by anything, let alone a dumb old fish. In his book, Trout Bum, John Gierach talks of the ‘myth of the smart trout.’ He may have a point. Compare the size of a trout’s brain and that of our own; in theory we should be able to outsmart a fish every time. Our brain is several thousand times larger, and has a million complex complications whizzing across neural synapses every second, while I calculate that fish probably have a maximum of three things going through their minds at any one time: food, danger, sex. Having said that when you consider the result of all those millions of complications in the average, male, angler’s brain: food, beer, sex, it suddenly doesn’t seem such an uneven contest. Perhaps that too is the reason the female of the species often make such good anglers.

There’s an undercurrent running through ‘normal’ society that anglers are either mad, stupid or both; I think it was the comedian Steven Wright who said there’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot. Many people find it hard to understand exactly what it is that drags us, time and time again, to the waterside. I must say I tend to disagree with the assertion that we’re all certifiable, but then again I suppose I would. However to illustrate my point I remember a conversation I had with a colleague a couple of years ago. I’d just returned from a week fishing on the Hampshire Avon, and she couldn’t understand why I would want to spend a week on the banks of one the most beautiful rivers in the country; surrounded by otters, kingfishers, and a myriad of other wildlife on the edge of the New Forest; almost completely – apart from the pub over the road – cut off from the rigours of modern society, and with no one but myself to answer to. In the next breath she described to another colleague how she’d spent her Sunday. It had consisted mainly, from what I could gather, of spending three hours watching the Eastenders omnibus edition even though, unbelievably, she admitted that she’d actually watched every episode during the week anyway! And the woman had the cheek to suggest that I was the mad one! I’m of the opinion that watching Eastenders actually destroys brain cells; never mind alcohol, or tobacco, mindless drivel like that should carry a government health warning.

I enjoy being at the waterside more than anything, and genuinely get a huge amount of pleasure from ‘just being there.’ And yet I still feel the need to explain why I didn’t actually catch any fish even to brain-dead Eastender-devotees. That doesn’t happen on every occasion I hasten to add, just, well, occasionally. So – probably like anglers of all persuasions up and down the country – I’ve developed a mental library of excuses with which I can explain to non-fishers why, on any given occasion, I didn’t actually catch any fish. To that end I’ve developed, almost sub-consciously, an array of excuses that mean I’m rarely, if ever, stuck for something rational sounding if I ever face that most meaningless of questions: ‘Oh you’ve been fishing? Catch anything?’

If I thought it would do any good I’d quite happily tell them about the evening I was crossing a stream when a big dog otter broke the surface not six feet from me, turned to throw me an indignant glance for disturbing his fishing and then swam towards me and actually underneath the bridge I was standing on; about the dawn on a local estate lake when the roe deer emerged, like actors in a ghost story, through the folds of mist that had gathered like a curtain between the lake and the trees behind me, to stop and stare almost over my shoulder, seemingly willing my float to disappear almost as much as me. Instead of these things, or the countless other special moments I’ve had when fishing, I usually give them something from one of my four main categories of excuses: weather related, bait related, tackle related, or miscellaneous. I don’t have the space or the inclination to go into any detail here, but suffice to say there are sub-categories, and subdivisions almost ad-infinitum. An example from the weather-related category I have used on more than one occasion is the wind. There can be too much of it, not enough of it, or it can be from the wrong direction. I’ve used all three. Not enough wind – when I was fly-fishing a still-water for trout; too much wind – when I was fly-fishing a still-water for trout; wind from the wrong direction – when I was fly-fishing a still-water for trout. A classic from the miscellaneous category was the time myself and a group of friends went for a quiet drink the evening before an early start on June sixteenth one season. I can vaguely remember the doorbell going the next morning, but the rest of the day’s a blur. I forgot to take anything to eat or drink, and by eight I was asleep on the back seat of my friend’s car. I didn’t catch anything that day, but it’s an excuse that, on its day, can be a winner.

Having read this article back I’ve come to the conclusion that I may come across as some sort of appallingly bad angler with a drink problem and the tendency to tell compulsive lies; some of my friends might even agree with that assessment. Why we fish is inherently, deeply, part of who we are; it’s entwined in our DNA. Why I feel the need to make excuses to people is something that reflects poorly on our TV-obsessed culture. Come this Sunday though, I can assure you I won’t be stuck in front of the television.