Tales from the riverbank

Now is the time of the year when I usually write a versified survey of global affairs, a survey so shallow you’d be happy to let a toddler stomp in it.

But I’m not going to do so this year because everyone knows what’s happened and is sick of it. And besides I’ve just been on a fishing trip and the sun beat down as it should and, well, let me introduce you to Mr Andrews.

He was a schoolmaster, with hair like a pot scourer and a worrying penchant for long scarves, who once told me, in the manner of someone vouchsafing the whereabouts of the Grail, that there were three things worth doing in life.

Now, at 16 one has strong views about what might be worth doing in life, and they are unlikely to coincide with those of a middleaged school teacher, but it is still the sort of sentence to make a 16-year-old sit up, his hatchling whiskers twitching.

Well now, the first of Mr Andrews’ things worth doing turned out to be playing in an orchestra.

I have never played in an orchestra. Nevertheless, I can see how it might stir the juices to be one of many people, flawed and ordinary people with mortgages and haemorrhoids, coming together to make a sound far greater and sweeter than any of them could hope to make alone.

His second thing was commanding a platoon. I haven’t done that, either, being averse to uniforms and having won prizes for cowardice. But again I can sense how it might be stirring to lead a band of brothers over the top and into the machine-gun nest of legal slaughter.

His third thing was rowing in an eight, and I have rowed in an eight. It wasn’t much of an eight and I wasn’t much of a rower, but there were still moments when the boat came together as one, when the catch of the oars was as crisp as an apple, and we picked the boat up and flung it forward over the water’s skin and you almost held your breath at the magic of it, at the sense of unity and power.

And that, I suppose, is the common theme of his three things, a sense of oneness with others and the creation of something greater than the sum of its parts.

For some reason Mr Andrews came to mind this week as I was standing in the Ohau River, rod in hand, scanning the sparkling water. I am now far older than Mr Andrews was then, and I asked myself what I had to put beside his trio of thrills.

But even as I wondered, a fish rose beneath a low-hanging willow, a good fat trout, all unaware that I was there. With heart in mouth I paid out line and cast to it and, with the precision that is the hallmark of my fishing, I landed my fly in the willow.

I pulled on the rod. The fly was stuck fast. The trout sensed something amiss and melted back into the depths. I stepped forward to retrieve the fly, slipped on a boulder, overbalanced and sat down in the river.

And if, right then, as I sat in the water, attached to a tree by rod and line, a youngster had appeared and said, ‘‘Hey, old-timer, what are three things worth doing before I reach your state of decrepitude?’’, I like to think I’d have replied that it doesn’t much matter what you do, so long as it makes you laugh at yourself. But I’m not sure I’d have managed it.

Merry Christmas.