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Greetings!
The publicity ahead
of Dirty Business earlier this month, Channel 4’s part
documentary, part drama about the failings of the water industry,
hailed it the next empowering TV series that would do for water users
what Mr Bates vs The Post Office had done sub postmasters. But
as a writer friend of mine lamented last week, as the three-part
series reached its conclusion, why is nobody talking about this show?
I am not exactly
sure but let us start with the TV show itself. Frankly, I thought it
was confused, not exactly sure whether it was an exposé, drama,
satire or documentary. At times it felt more like W1A, the BBC
television comedy series that lampoons the management of the BBC.
Other times we went down emotional rabbit holes, such as the
disability assessment for the surfer, a Ménière's disease sufferer,
which though probably true and certainly saddening, felt contrived
especially as the credits at the end told us there was no evidence
that Ménière's could be caught from sewage waste in the sea.
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David Thewlis & Jason
Watkins who play Ash Smith & Peter Hammond of WASP
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The chronology was
confusing; we were constantly whipped from 1999 to 2024, with a side
diversion to the 2010’s, and then back again, within the space of a
few minutes. The same messages were repeated again and again; it was
as if the programme makers did not believe the viewer had the wit to
understand what was being depicted the first-time round. There was also something Orwellian about the
narrative, painting the world of sewage as if prior to privatisation
in 1989 not a single drop of untreated sewage entered our
seas. This is the great conceit of our sewage system for, since
Victorian times, both nationalised and privatised companies, have
industrialised, and made a habit of, using our rivers, waterways and
seas as a cheap and convenient dumping places for human waste.
So why has Dirty
Business not landed in the public consciousness? For sure it has
not been helped by the Iran war that is dominating the news cycles
but mostly I think it is because Dirty Business does not have
a clear message in the same way that Mr Bates vs The Post Office was
about a miscarriage of justice. There is a particularly poignant
moment towards the end of the second episode when David Thewlis,
playing Ash Smith of Windrush Against Sewage Pollution (WASP),
questions, ten years in, the whole point of what they are doing. However,
much evidence they produce, however many people they talk to and
however much publicity they garner, the carnage of pollution
continues to lament Smith. Lessons are learnt it is said, but nothing
changes.
Having written
about the state of our rivers for 15 years or more I understand; the
forces of inertia are powerful. But as Jason Watkins says, who plays
Ash Smith’s sidekick at WASP Peter Hammond, we cannot just give up.
To use a warfare analogy Dirty Business is no atomic bomb, one
strike and done. This is an attritional war fought in the
trenches.
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Spring is a
gathering of all that is wonderful in the English countryside. It’s
the moment when, after months of the desolated, monochrome landscape,
Mother Nature breaks out her colour palette to bring life, hope and
joy to every living creature and thing.
Suddenly trees, for
so long bleak sentinels along the valley ridge, show a hint of green.
Small creatures, lured out from semi-hibernation by the midday
warmth, scurry heard but unseen among the stiff, dead grasses
alongside the Brook. Birds start to sing long and hard, to mark
territory and call out for a mate. Ducks fight. Geese honk.
Kingfishers whistle in flight. At night the eeks of otters echo up
the valley. The foxes occasionally scream like damaged children but
mostly steal silently by at night, keeping the rabbit population
forever in equilibrium. The trout, largely dormant since the
exertions of spawning around Christmas, start to show themselves,
venturing from the dark recesses of the stream.
At The Mill it is
all a sort of magical awakening, giving purpose to the days as we
scramble to keep up with the growing grass and riverbank vegetation
that goes from nothing to abundant in the blink of an eye. Suddenly
we are full of urgency to complete all that essential maintenance to
the hatches and mill controls that seemed not quite so urgent just a
few weeks ago. Machinery that we abandoned at the end of the autumn,
glad to be done with work for another season, seems to take umbrage
at being pressed into service again. Mowers will not mow. Chainsaws
oscillate between not starting or not cutting. Hand tools are rusty,
wooden handles clammy to the touch after months hung in a damp shed.
All that said the
mood of the valley, and mine, is very much dominated by the winter
that precedes the spring. If you look at this over a decade, I can
give you a flavour of how that is. In broad terms, across a ten-year
stretch, nature will give us one really wet winter of the alarming
kind, a couple that are just plain wetter than the averagely wet, a
bunch of years that are neither particularly wet nor dry and a
drought winter. Of all those possibilities, the last is the most
depressing, not least because I will have spent the winter
fruitlessly willing it to rain. Such is the geology of a chalkstream
that it is the rain that falls before St Valentine’s Day that
recharges the aquifers which feed the chalkstreams for the seasons
ahead. In the same way that your garden needs rain at certain times
to bloom, so do chalkstreams to thrive. A drought winter is not an
ecological disaster; over millions of years there have been thousands
of drought winters, but after one I will go into the spring and
summer knowing the season ahead will not be the best.
The flood winter is
unalloyed joy tempered by fear of The Mill flooding. Of course, I
know it will not because it never has. We laugh in the face of a
once-in a-hundred-year flood event. The Mill has been here for over a
thousand years and every possibility of flooding has been accounted
for as the hatches divert the flows around, under and beside us,
carrying the water harmlessly away. However, being a tiny dot amidst
a landscape of flooding does test the nerves.
But regardless of
the winter rains spring is always spring, the season of new beauty,
life and endless possibilities.
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This is an extract
from my new book Tales from The Mill. It is available direct
from me, Amazon, Waterstones and most bookshops. If you have already
bought a copy, do please review it on one of the platforms as the
wretched algorithm, by which authors live and die, depends on reviews
to push the book up the rankings.
PS If you happen to
notice any typos in the book please let me know as we will be
reprinting in a month or two.
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A History of Fly Fishing in 50 Innovations. No. 6:
Literature
As you will see
from the list below, and to be truthful I have not included them all,
there have been a great many nominations for writers and also
particular books. In fact, given half the chance I could fill all 50
spots with great angling books with some to spare, which is maybe a
task for another year. However, for now, I am going to ruminate on
the profound influence literature has had on angling.
I cannot think of a
sport that has such a long and storied literary past. The first ever
book on fishing, A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, by
Juliana Berners was printed in 1496, just 20 years after William
Caxton introduced the printing press to England. At this point in
time the first book on cricket was still three centuries away.
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To my mind angling
literature falls into two groups. The first are those books that
broke new ground, changing the way we fished. Obvious examples are
Halford’s Dry-Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice and Skues’s
nymphing bible The Way of a Trout with the Fly. The bigger
body of work is the literature that defines the ethos of fishing: The
Compleat Angler is a prime candidate but books such as
Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea added a new dimension to
draw in a new generation. Closer to home Mr. Crabtree Goes
Fishing, serialised as a comic strip in The Daily Mirror
in the post WWII era when the paper sold 5 million copies a day,
falls somewhere between my two groups as both a story and a how-to
manual.
I was going to
compile a bit of a Top 10 at this point but I would be hard pressed
to disagree much with an old friend of Fishing Breaks, Keith Elliott
who compiled this list for The Field magazine in 2020.
1. The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton (first published
1653)
2. Dry-Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice, FM Halford
(1894)
3. The Way of a Trout with the Fly, GEM Skues (1921)
4. Tales of Freshwater Fishing, Zane Grey (1928)
5. Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing, Bernard Venables (1949)
6. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1952)
7. Sea-Trout Fishing, Hugh Falkus (1962)
8. The Trout and the Fly, John Goddard and Brian Clarke
(1972)
9. The Domesday Book of Mammoth Pike, Fred Buller (1975)
10. Somewhere Down the
Crazy River, Paul Boote and Jeremy Wade (1992)
I think most
discussion would revolve around entries 7-10, so if you have
thoughts, send them my way.
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People
F M
Halford
Ernest
Hemingway
Lefty
Kreh
George
Selwyn Marryat
Frank
Sawyer
GEM
Skues
Izaak
Walton
Lee
Wulff
Dame
Juliana Berners
Francis
Francis
Clarke
& Goddard
Charles
Ritz
Richard
Walker
Bob
Church
Francis
Maximilian Walbran
Colonel
Robert Venables
Literature
Stillwater
Fly Fishing by TC Ivens (1952)
Fly
Fisher's Entomology Ronalds(1836)
Harfield
Edmonds
Norman
Lee
Arthur
Ransome
A
Summer on The Test - JW Hills
Nymph
Fishing in Practice - Oliver Kite
Mr
Crabtree Goes Fishing - Bernard Venables
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Gear
Eyed
hooks
Floatant
Fly
lines
Fly
rods
Forceps
Greased
line
Nets
Polarized
sunglasses
Reels
Rods
& rod rings
Tippet
material & X rating for diameter
Tippet
ring
Weighing
scales
Waders
Flies
Floating
flies
Wet
flies & lures
Saltwater
flies
Emergers
General
Stocking
of fish
Internet
Cheap
air travel
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The usual
random collection of questions this week inspired by the date and
the Newsletter topics.
1) What item of shoe wear was patented on this day in
1790?
2) What is an aglet?
3) The theme music for the BBC comedy series W1A was
used previously for what BBC children’s TV show from 1962-83?
The answers are
below.
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Have a good
weekend.
Best wishes,
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1) The modern
shoelace with an aglet.
2) A metal or
plastic tube fixed tightly round each end of
a shoelace
3) Animal Magic with
presenter Johnny Morris
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