A lady at leisure

Sometimes strangers will tell you the most peculiar things...

Imeet a veteran fisher with a great angling story. We are at a golf course when he approaches, and in case you think I have taken to hitting small white balls into bushes, I should make it clear that I have no hand-ball co-ordination skills…

No, I am doing a recce for a film and our paths meet in the convivial surroundings of the restaurant overlooking the fairway. Sport is on the menu, and it goes thus: whilst fishing on the River Spey and having no success, he decides to console himself, not with whisky, but with a chocolate éclair. It is one of those chewy things with a sweet cocoa confection inside. He unwraps said toffee and savours it. He then ties the silver wrapper around the fly and casts out into the stream. Half an hour later, there is a twenty three pound salmon on the bank.

Stories told in passing are always the best ones and sometimes complete strangers tell you the strangest things. Perhaps it is working in the media. People feel they know you from somewhere and are happy to bare all. A wife has disclosed to me about the large boil on her husband’s bottom. It apparently puts him in a permanently bad mood, poor chap. Meanwhile a husband confesses to me that he does not tell his wife about the football match he goes to every Saturday. Where does she think he is all that time – shopping?

Perhaps it is a good thing they do not know I write a magazine column… For such stories should really not appear in print. Yet not every piece of information is quite so indelicate or clandestine. The MacGregor and I get much correspondence from folk across the pond. They are usually clansmen and women who either wish to tell a story or ask for advice.

This time the email comes from a man who could be forgiven for being confused as to which tartan he should wear. He is an Armstrong, but his mother was a Pirie, and he also has MacGregor in him from a grandmother called Grier. Then there are his Henderson, MacFadden, Simpson and Davidson forebears, to name but a few…

I know not quite what to say – except congratulations: you really are a true Scot! Although married to a MacGregor and from solid Armstrong stock (indeed, one Armstrong forebear married another Armstrong which got tongues wagging) I also have serious English and Welsh ancestry.

The chief, too, has some English in him – whisper it, from Essex, no less… But whilst my lot were miners and shoemakers, he can claim descent from some very grand folk indeed. Among his forebears is Admiral Hardy of Admiral Nelson ‘kiss me’ fame. Then there was a daughter of the Duke of Atholl and a daughter of the Earl of Antrim.

I tell the chap in America he should be proud to have such a strong Scottish lineage. He has names from the Highlands to Borderland, but I recommend that he wears the Armstrong tartan, of course.

But back to our lucky golfing angler. Is it the silver paper or the chocolate – or the vanilla in the chocolate – that attracts the fish? Salmon fishers the length and breadth of Scotland may now be packing their fly boxes with chocolate eclairs. Just remember, as my wise and charming older sportsman tells me, it has to be Cadburys…

‘Salmon fishers the length and breadth of Scotland may now be packing their fly boxes with chocolate eclairs’