So, it’s Boxing Day morning, and I fear the rain that started late afternoon yesterday has not relented overnight. Plans made a few days ago need to be rethought, or abandoned. But isn’t Boxing Day a traditional day to be out somewhere, anywhere?
I look at the Wye river gauges which don’t enthuse me. Levels up and rising, and I guess sheep from Wales will be arriving soon. I drive to Leominster, ostensibly to pick up a paper, but also to look at the Lugg behind the sleeping B&Q store. It’s a torrent of brown.
An email comes in from my potential saviour, Brian. But he expects the Arrow to be out for the count, and a look at the gauges on that river seem to confirm that. So, barbel, pike, and now grayling all seem to be a distant pre-Christmas dream, and plans washed away to nothing.
Hmm… I don’t know why, but Boxing Day 1959 springs to mind. A very scrappy diary entry seems to confirm warmer than average temperatures, some rain, and three roach and six gudgeon from the Peak Forest Canal just outside Romiley, on the outskirts of Stockport. The big news was the first outing for my Christmas present… a Hardy Altex reel that I had opened to whoops of joy. I’ve still got it, one of the items I have hung onto all these years.
I feel guilty. The years have done it no favours. The bail arm is wonky, but it winds still and the clutch remains smooth, if not silkily so! It came in a box, which also remains, but I’m unsure whether it was the original Hardy box or not. Indeed, I rather think the reel was secondhand all those years ago, and a quick search reveals the Altex made its first appearance back in the 1930s. When my old friend was made, only John Stephenson might know?
Way back then, still at primary school, up the road at Bredbury, I would have made my way to the canal along the lane that was still cobbled, and led down from the Spread Eagle public house. I would have climbed the steps up to the canal, steps that were always wet and lethal in freezing weather. My 1959 rod was a whole cane affair, about eight feet long, and had cost just less than ten shillings (50p) the previous spring. A whale could not have bent it, so I guess those gudgeon made little impact. To be honest, those were still the days when overeager strikes often landed fingerlings on the towpath or in the undergrowth behind. A rod that actually bent and the understanding of the slipping clutch were to come two years further down the line.
In those more innocent days, I was allowed out, providing I was back way before dark. I would have had my bath and the diary suggests we watched Laramie and then Dixon of Dock Green on the black and white set with its screen only a few inches wide. No doubt then I climbed weary and satisfied to bed…
It is midday. The past is the past. I have four or five hours of daylight left to me. The Boxing Day fishing bug calls…
