letters to the editor

I've been reading the latest issue of Improve Your Coarse Fishing, 'Britain's best selling fishing monthly', and particularly enjoying the letters to the editor. There's one from Malcolm Wiltshire, who reports using some of the tactics recommended in the magazine and landing 'a blood-warming catch of 40lb, including seven bream to 5lb and dozens of roach to a pound.' The editor responds by congratulating him on the catch and adds, 'It goes to show you can never be absolutely sure what your day holds'.

I wrote here about the trope of the 'day of fishing' (not the morning or afternoon or couple of hours in the evening) and here it is again - the day seems the natural unit for these pithy comments about the character of the sport. And I'm also interested that the moral of the story is taken as being 'you never know'. I suppose that's one way to read the original letter. It was a very cold day in the middle of winter and no one thought the writer of the letter would land anything at all, but, in fact, he pulled out a catch that was enough to 'warm the blood'. Isn't it a matter of skill to know which bait to use, though? Certainly, the letter was offered in gratitude for good advice. Yet Kev, the editor, has turned it into a kind of hymn to fortune. Tyche is at work here in the fishing venues of Sussex.

In another letter, Les Major tells a story that also feels familiar. He describes the process that the angler goes through to prepare:

You spend hundreds of pounds on fishing gear, read the fishing magazines, learn all about how to use the best baits, what depth to fish at and whether to try the Method or hair-rig a bait. Then you sit there and wait, and wait and wait. Not even a knock.

But then, as he tells it, a group of 'youngsters' show up. They have only one rod, no hook - they borrow his, no bait - they borrow his, and a strange technique - they do odd things with the float. But they hook a fish immediately and have to borrow his net to land it. This sounds a lot like the incident in Washington Irving's story, 'The Angler', when the narrator and his friends go fishing in the Upper Hudson Valley and are completely out-classed by an 'urchin' with an earthworm as bait and a bent pin as a hook.

Actually, the two versions of the trope aren't told for the same reasons. Irving's story has more to do with the lack of worldliness shown by the narrator and his friends. Everything they know, they know from books and, in fact, the narrator himself prefers to retreat back into reading after just half an hour on the river. But the letter in the magazine, although it does include a reference to reading - 'you ... read the fishing magazines' - seems not so much about self-satire as a comment on the mysterious matter of fishing itself. He ends the letter with the question, 'Should I ask these lads how to do it?', and Kev doesn't offer a reply, although the letter has been given the title 'Lucky Blighters'. It is, once again, a story about fortune.

There are other kinds of letters in the magazine. One discusses the reintroduction of otters into British rivers. Another talks about the system for administering fishing licenses. And a third raises the question of whether artificial baits are harmful to fish. Collectively they examine questions about the ethics and regulation of fishing. But it's interesting to me that they are mixed in with that other type of letter - those 'tales from the water's edge' that remake what are quite traditional stories to reaffirm some more fundamental sense of what fishing is really like.

Head of the goddess Fortuna by Skopas Minor (F l a n k e r) [CC-BY-3.0 (http: //creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.]