Young in the field

One of the perils of lockdown, finds Editor Jonathan Young, is that idle hands relabel beloved kit as litter. How best to hang on to threadbare coats and domestic harmony…

AS soon as the starter pistol banged, I threw the fishing kit into the car and went to see ‘someone who isn’t a direct member of your household’. Partly it was to chuck a fly, partly to savour the sheer joy of escaping the family. Much as one loves one’s kith, familial familiarity does pall.

My friend hadn’t seen anyone from ‘outside’ for seven weeks and there was a moment when I thought he’d break social distancing and hug me in a rather un-english manner, forgivable, almost, in someone of Norman descent carrying Continental blood. Happily, he recovered himself and made a cup of tea instead. He’d dug a fishing lake some years ago and stocked it with rainbows and browns but somehow, in Nature’s mysterious way, other fishy tribes had arrived, including carp, roach and some potentially record-breaking gudgeon.

“You’re almost the first one to fish this season,” he said. “Almost. We had a very adept angler here last week, far more skilled than us. We had a visit from an osprey and we were able to get a clear photo of his leg ring. Apparently he was hatched in Wales but spent the past two years in Africa. Presumably he’s heading home now to breed. He was bullied by the resident kites but still managed to scoop out some splendid roach from the lake, in fine style, I might add.”

A feathery gauntlet had been thrown, I thought, as I studied the water, brown as builders’ tea and unruffled by any movement save a scudding ripple driven by a sharp nor’easterly. Ideally, the first trout of the season should be taken in Halfordian style, primped little Olive sitting sweetly as it bubbles merrily towards a rising fish, but it was bitter cold and all the lake’s denizens were down deep so I tied on a gold-head Daddy and threw it in a likely spot.

For 10 minutes I watched the line carefully as I cast and retrieved, waiting for any momentary straightening to lift the rod and connect with a fish. Nothing. And, as ever with me, I became distracted. A trio of kites began circling low above, perhaps on patrol for any other errant osprey, as I continued casting and my lack of concentration almost lost me my rod. Something big smashand-grabbed, taking the fly and, almost, my favourite Sharpe’s five-weight. The line whistled off the now singing reel, as the fish bored off for the farther bank. Finally, after 10 minutes, he came to the net, a slabby 5lb rainbow swearing silent curses.

I sent him on his way, cleaned the fly and had another fish five minutes later, this time a docile brown, then a strange take, distinctly untrouty, and a small carp came to the net, thus completing some sort of finny Macnab. “Keep fishing,” urged my friend, “Now you’re here you might as well take a brace for supper,” and soon I had a couple more rainbows, this time bonked on the head. And none too soon; the nor’easterly was freezing, my hands were mottled blue and orange and I was grateful for the old shooting sweater that I’d bunged in the car and saved from the ravaging of my wardrobe earlier that week.

Like many of my friends, I own clothes older than my grown-up kinder and I love them. An old friend of the family gave me that sweater decades ago and I’ve several more that were new when Wham! were in their pomp. Terriers long departed have chewed the cuffs and the wool has sustained generations of clothes moths but I would not be parted from them. Nor from my best shooting coat, worn thin on the shoulder from countless gun mounts, or the plusfours where the crutch is dangerously thin.

Perversely, I’ve stacks of kit that’s in tiptop condition, which would undoubtedly make me more presentable in company but somehow I always don the ancient, not modern. I’m not alone in this. Most of my chums appear in gear that would be refused by a charity shop. It seems we prefer always to set forth for battle as knights in very unshiny armour, a reality not always grasped at home.

One of the lesser but rather horrid consequences of enforced home working has been a domestic outbreak of ‘tidying’ and ‘clearing out’. Our physical presence in the household has somehow been taken as a mandate for stealthy removal of ‘clutter’. “Surely you don’t need all these coats/shoes/boots/shooting glasses/shooting socks/ breeks/gloves?” pings the question, with the rider: “And most of them are knackered, anyway.” Which would be fair if we were, say, tennis players defending our collection of battered wooden racquets. But we are fieldsportmen and we need all this stuff for when our vintage clobber, finally, is too disgraceful to wear.

Thus thwarted, the searchlight swings towards the study: the claret-and-green, cloth-covered sporting tomes that can no longer be confined to the bowing bookshelves; the piles of shoot cards jamming the desk drawers; that wobbling tower of guncases threatening imminent avalanche. “Now you can’t possibly want all of this?” comes the challenge, to be batted off with patient explanation that every book is vital, that every case is needed for every gun, the latter leading to that awful supplementary, “So, how many guns exactly do you have?”

With luck, the hunt for chuckables then shifts to the outbuildings, where, frankly, I don’t care what decrepit garden furniture or garden tools are hauled off to the dump so long as that majestic nine-pointer head stays together with the sack of wigeon decoys.

And thus, having made some sacrifice and restored domestic harmony, one can return to matters of real import, namely, have I sufficient Mayflies for my next fishing trip?

Sight of a tower of gun cases leads to that awful question: ‘How many guns exactly do you have?’