Fishing and Marmite

Hi all,
The drawing on the left is from my angling book and more information can be found at the end of this post.

It's been a very busy week but my eldest son popped by the other day and we talked a lot about work. He and his brother for that matter both take after me in so much as they are very hard working. However, there the similarity stops, because unlike them, I always found time for my hobby. I would, weather permitting, fish at least once during most weeks of the year and more than likely it would be twice a week in the summer.

Okay you can call me a male chauvinist pig but I believe that if a man's been working hard all week just to get a box of coco-pops on the breakfast table, he should be entitled to some relaxation. And when it comes to relaxation, fishing has got to be a whole lot better than gambling and kerb crawling. I tried the latter once and it played havoc with my knees.

You don't have to get your violin out at this point unless you really want to, but in those days it wasn't enough to just put four and a half days in as most do now. I'm talking five full days, Saturday mornings and three nights overtime during the week.

Who could blame me if I wanted to go fishing on a Sunday morning with a bunch of my mates. Some weeks it would be a pleasure session whilst on others we would take part in a fishing match. We all lived for those few hours when we could sit in the fresh air and take in some pleasant scenery.

Chuck in a bit of friendly banter and a few fish and one's batteries would be refreshed and be ready to do another week at the grindstone.

My first wife understood my needs, well I thought she did until one night when I came home from graft-city to find she'd done a runner.

Anyway, neither of my lads have followed in my footsteps when it comes to hobbies. It's a shame really because I would have liked to have seen them put a few trophies on their shelves and doing something other than work.

I suppose the reason they never took up fishing is because I took them with me several times when they were very young and impressionable. These weren't proper week-end fishing sessions but events that were crammed into a summer's evening when I was on babysitting duty. They weren't actually babies of course they were a bit older than that but still a handful on the canal towpath especially for a man like me who must've been awol when they were dishing out the patience.

The truth is that when my wife was working a twilight shift in a local factory I would take my lads with me down the canal to go fishing. Trouble is it wasn't a pleasure session I was actually using these outings to practice for the local championship which was fished over a series of matches during the summer.

Anyway, I suppose they were bored and I was bad tempered through having to look after them and that was it, they were turned off the best sport in the world for life. Fishing I suppose is a bit like marmite you either love it or hate it and they definitely didn't love it.


It's a shame they'll never know the pleasures of the rod but every cloud has a silvery lining, I did manage to go on and win that championship for two years in succession. Here you can see me being presented with the championship trophy. I'm the fellow on the right sucking on the pipe. Fishing apart it's only after having a heart attack and being forced to give up smoking that I have realised how silly it was. In almost every photo of me that I can find, I've got that stupid thing hanging out of my face. I obviously wasn't as clever then as I thought I was.
To see more information about my fishing book or download a sample click here.