Dipteran Dreams or Cycling to Work along the Thames Towpath

The truth of the matter is that buying and owning houses is not conducive to fishing or writing. Most weekends last season were spent traipsing through beige houses with beige carpets and bedspreads that were probably owned by beige people.  People of Surrey, you should know that you can buy things from places other than John Lewis- liberate yourselves! Yes, we’ve moved to Surrey. As a Cricklewood girl, leaving Zone 2 breaks my heart but moving to Surrey has meant I’m near to work and we have more than one bedroom and a fair chunk of garden. We bought the only house that wasn’t beige but that means it's a bit of a wreck- it’s full of potential though. Indeed it’s nothing but potential. Our minty green bathroom is downstairs and is bigger than our nicotine yellow kitchen. Nothing is insulated and our ceilings are weak. When we moved in every possible surface was covered in excrement both human and animal and everything else was covered in grime. Nature surrounds and invades us. We are still blessed frequently by the presence of false widow spiders but the two snails eating the dried piss behind the bidet were bid a crunchy farewell. It’s now clean but we have years of work ahead.Apart from its absence of beige, I love this silly terraced cottage because it’s near the river. It strikes me that I’ve often settled for living in places where the river defines the town. In York, the Ouse dominated the city; it was a wild river. My evening walks were punctuated by the sounds of pike gobbling things, its dark waters barely tamed.

I now own a bicycle and the bright evenings and mornings mean I now cycle to work along the river towpath to Hampton Court Palace where I work. I’m very spoiled. I’m not speedy; the shower situation in my Tudor office is a bit dire; so I strive to achieve nothing more than a lady’s glow rather than a horse’s sweat. It’s a pleasant enough four and half miles of river. The Thames is not a beautiful river. It lacks the stunning elegance of chalk streams. Chalk streams are the lazy Hollywood starlets of English rivers. The Thames by contrast is a working river, the actress’s cabbie.

For millennia the Thames has been carrying things, precious cargo, royal princes to their palaces and a heck of a lot of sewage. Even here, in Surrey, warehouses and factories protrude from the banks. The weirs and locks scream of industry, the river’s flow made even more workmanlike by steel and concrete interventions.

Reservoirs tower over my commuter stretch of river, they are both threatening and comforting. One day, when my garden is filled with poppies and salvia it will need water and if there is ever an earthquake, I will probably drown.

The sounds of splashing oars, rowlocks, sliding seats, officious coxes and grunting humans greet me daily when I cycle to work along the Thames to Hampton Court. My stretch of the Thames is littered with boat-houses. I’m filled with happy memories of pimms, champagne, the Bodleian and boys in  lycra. 

It’s an idyllic commute and I’m enjoying the achy stiffening of my chubby legs, they will get stronger and hopefully a little leaner. I’m enjoying seeing blossom and wilting daffodils and streaky patches of young bluebells. What I’m not enjoying is cycling through clouds of itchy midges. I keep swallowing them as I trundle along the towpath. This is rather horrid, and as I spit out the small and pathetic corpses of dead dipterae I am reminded that on other rivers there are flies hatching and trout rising and I`m not there.

On Sea Trout

Sea trout have always seemed like a magic fish to me.  Their whole life stories are a mystery because there is apparently no real difference between their silver loveliness and a chubby, brown river trout.  Apparently, a bog standard trout will suddenly get a wanderlust and for no particular reason, head out to sea. Some years later, on a whim, the trout will return, prodigal-like to their birthplace to breed.  Yes, the sea trout is the mystic of the river, the aquatic equivalent of the moon-gazing hare.

My father told me true fairytales of sea trout fishing in Ireland, where all nights were a success because every night, like clock work, he would be accompanied by a furry faced otter. The first time my father took me with him was in Northumberland; I can’t have been much more than 12 years old. I was entranced by the flitting birds and confused by my hurting ears. My father mentioned slowly that they were bats and that the pulsing, repetitive stinging in my ears was their echo locating clicks. The whole evening was eerie. I could only think of vampires in the darkness.

The second time we went to a famous pool on the River Itchen. Monks from a different age excavated it as a pit to net salmon and sea trout. It forms a perfect circle reminiscent of standing-stones. I was an older and possibly surlier teenager and I think I was just about to start at University. I thought I was so damned smart. I read Hugh Falkus cover to cover sucking information from it. Needless to say, in that freezing cold night that poured with rain we caught bugger all. Falkus had told us that in those conditions it would be the case and so it was. Mr Falkus had, however, neglected to include any help or hints of any kind as to what to do when nearly two hundred swans (I counted) cover every inch of the pool and treat it like a cheap hotel in Benidorm.  There was no room to swing a cat and certainly, my duffer skills of an inept student didn’t allow me to cast anywhere with any success. It was as if the trout had conspired and cast some dark magic spell to smother the water with white birds. Their hissing and aggressive, magnificent wing-flapping gave the swans an air of guardianship.

All in all I was pleased to return there this year. I felt I had unfinished business with swan lake.  The conditions were kinder, the weather was good, the tide was right. My father, our friend and I were so excited. I felt edgy and clammy and our conversation almost turned to shouting with all the nervous energy.  We set to fishing, excitedly assembling our gear and casting into the inky pool full of hope.

That pool, for all its mysticism is intimidatingly urban. You fish under the glare of streetlights overlooked by a Brutalist tower block.  Police sirens and the wail of ambulances accompany the hoots and tweets of birdlife.  We were joyfully swan free.  However, to be honest, I still don’t know what I am doing and neither really did any of us. As the hours passed our chum who wears dodgy waders hooked in to a silver beauty. As a band of amateurs, landing and killing the trout in the dark became a team affair. I made artless lunges in the dark with the net. Once netted our friend walked 20 yards away from the river in order to claim his prize and avoid it spilling back into the water. My father made the deathblow. He and I spent the rest of the evening green with envy, sour-faced and fish-less. However, by morning I think I understood more about how to catch sea trout; how your line and the tide and the currents need to be forced to conspire together to snare a moon trout.  As the sun rose, we bundled ourselves into the car and I was dropped back at work. I was able to snatch two hours of sleep on the sofa in my office. I wrapped myself up in discarded silk damask from the Haunted Gallery and close my eyes. My sleepy mind clouded with desperate longing to return and catch a sea trout, the spookiest of fish. 

England

It’s that time of year again. It’s easy when it’s cold and drizzly and miserable to charge through your inbox and manically type out reports. It’s not so easy to type when the sun streams in through your window and there’s a pleasing combination of freshness and mugginess to the air. Any fisherman knows that on the river right now flies will be surfacing and dropping and trout will be rising. It’s agony but it’s also blissful because I am reminded why I love England so much.

The physicist is now a Tier 2 Migrant Worker. It sounds so dodgy doesn’t it. Despite being an American with a shared language and history he is navigating the nuances of this country. In England, you are instantly pigeon holed by your accent, your dress and indeed by what supermarket you go to. People in England are even judged by their carrier bags. God help you if you are seen with a Lidl or Aldi bag, indeed you are judged if you have any carrier bags. I know that our jute bag with the name of a vegetarian restaurant in Brighton instantly screams “sodding, vegan, yoghurt-slurping hippie”. Equally, my Jockey Club canvas tote bag marks me out as a toff. I also admit that I enjoy going on the number 16 bus carrying a Christies carrier bag pilfered from work. I like the thought that people might think that I actually shop there. I wonder also whether this marks me out as a target for thieves.

What I am saying is that the English are frightful snobs. So it is entirely unsurprising that when my husband and I went fishing together recently, we would get into trouble.  I am a girl and therefore a rare and weird occurrence on the river, I also never wear nasty over priced fishing gear. My husband, new to the sport, doesn’t own any. So, as it was threatening to rain, he sensibly wore his warm, black leather jacket. We must have been a sight, as my husband is rather tall and very blonde. The lovely bailiffs mistook us for a pair of Eastern European poachers and came charging up to check us out. It also didn’t help that I filled out the book wrong.  It was soon sorted out and I admit, I felt like saying, “Don’t you know who I am! Don’t you read my blog?” Then I realised that I haven’t written for so long that I am now anonymous in the fishing world.

It would be easy to get grumpy. However, this weekend we went to our fishing club’s open day. My husband tried out three shirts and wore his tweed jacket to establish himself as a decent country gent. I helped on the tea stall and baked cakes to show just how perfect an English housewife I am. I also learned that a mere teaspoon of insecticide leeched out into the water can destroy all fly life in the river for thirty miles. Our rivers are so precious and delicate and the bailiffs were really just looking out to protect the waters they have been charged with guarding.

There is an election on Thursday and the main talk is about immigration and each party is claiming to be more patriotic than the next. Some talk about preserving England from foreigners. I have to say though that preserving England has less to do with preventing a few more languages creeping in on my commute. England is green, dotted with fluffy lollipop trees, scored with clear rivers filled with trout and bouncing with flies. That tiny teaspoon of poison and the frightening amount of phosphates leaking into our rivers is a far more dangerous threat.