My nonattendance from the canal-side in the years since I stopped angling appears so odd to me now. I used to adore it so much, particularly because my other activities tended to be at the violently energetic end of the spectrum, playing as I did rugby, football and cricket for different school and village sides. Having the opportunity to grab my fishing tackle, jump on a bike and ride for the ten minutes to travel to the local fishery and spend a few hours silently sat with a rod in my hand and watching a float on the water was a joy.
When I left 6th form college, “by mutual consent” as the football slang has it, following the first year when it was clear that I’d mucked about too much in the 1st year to have any likelihood of passing any A levels at the end of the second, would have been the ideal time to relax in spring and summer evenings with my fishing tackle instead of poring over some economics homework.
And since I was working, in a department store caf, I was earning and had more cash on the hip than I’d ever had previously and a day off during the week which would have been useful to get out to the fishery and have a few hours if not an entire day angling with the place almost to myself. Even better, since I was working in Guildford, going to the fishing tackle shop could have been easy and I could have had pints of maggots to drown. This was rare before I left college because our village didn’t have a fishing tackle shop apart from a very small part of a shop had a limited choice, and certainly no live bait on offer, and to go into Guildford and back having visited the fishing tackle shop to get some would have taken ages and wouldn’t be worthwhile.
In later years, I worked for a large utility company in Staines which had it’s own fishing lake and yet I never felt the urge to finish for the day, get the casuals on and spend an hour down there after work. Even dumber, less than fifty meters across the road was the Thames which has some superb fishing that went completely ignored by me, especially as by then I was paid really good money and had the chance to get some really fabulous fishing in the fishing tackle bag.
In later years, again I was employed by for a firm that had it’s office right on the towpath, and quite often on breaks a gang of us would go and sit on the steps on a nice clear day and watch people fishing, and as an alternate week saw my shifts terminating at 4 o’clock, it would have been very simple to pick the fishing tackle out of the car and see off the day with a couple of hours fishing. I may have enjoyed the job more too, thinking about it.
Naturally other priorities present themselves as you go through life. After I left 6th form I enjoyed pubs in quite a significant way. Ladies were never a challenge of course, I don’t ever remember any throwing themselves at me and imploring me to ravish them, so that generally would not have been an obstacle to deciding on a days angling, but it just seemed that at that moment I’d put the fishing tackle away and forgotten about it.
That’s different now though. I do have the need to go back, I’ve had my fishing tackle out to check it over and see what needs to be changed, which is the majority of it, and I’ve been finding places to go and what I need to do in order to have permission to fish there, so hopefully I can renew some of the enjoyment from my younger days.
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