Spring at The Mill

 

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.     David Thewlis & Jason Watkins who play Ash Smith & Peter Hammond of WASP   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.      Spring at The Mill     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.       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.   Order from Fishing Breaks Order from Amazon Order from Waterstones     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.      Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing   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.   Your nominations so far, in no particular order. New additions in blue. Do keep them coming! simon@fishingbreaks.co.uk   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 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     Quiz   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.   Have a good weekend.  Best wishes,     Check & book dates here   Simon Cooper simon@fishingbreaks.co.uk Founder & Managing Directorwww.fishingbreaks.co.uk     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

TV’s Dirty Business gives the EA a deserved kicking

 

Greetings!   I have yet to watch Channel 4’s Dirty Business which is loosely based on the real-life Oxfordshire campaign group Windrush Against Sewage Pollution (WASP) who for over a decade, have done so much to expose the egregious failings of the regulatory bodies, primarily the Environment Agency (EA), who are meant to be monitoring and protecting the health of our rivers.   From what I have read of the three part series the EA get a real kicking and deservedly so; for those of you who have been following this column for some years you will know I only hold Ofwat and successive governments in greater contempt for all that is bad about the state of our rivers, waterways and coastline.      David Thewlis & Jason Watkins who play Ash Smith & Peter Hammond of WASP

 

The EA are just terminally hopeless; let me give you an example that popped into my inbox on Monday. As you will know the EA are responsible for administering the General fishing licence, the annual ‘tax’ levied at all anglers. At Fishing Breaks we generally rely on everyone to buy their own licence but as a back up we buy a block licence direct from the EA. This is something we have done for literally decades and something you would think the EA would welcome as responsible and revenue earning. Think again. This is the email response to our annual block licence application of last week which I quote verbatim,   “The amount of time and resource we’re able to allocate to this kind of work is now very limited. Due to resourcing issues, we currently have a reduced capacity to carry out work on our manually issued General fishing licences and may not be able to process an application for several weeks.”   So here am I trying to do the right thing, making sure the uninitiated are valid licence holders whilst pushing hundreds of pounds in a single transaction into the hot little hands of the EA and what do they say? We will get back to you and by the way, you are being a right pain in the a**e. And I know from past years that when the EA say ‘several weeks’ they really mean ‘several months’, if at all.   There is something deeply, deeply flawed about the EA the reasons for which I have never been able to fully divine. Take for instance us here on the Test and Itchen arguably two of the most famous rivers in the world. You would think that the EA would be all over us as custodian, police officer and cheerleader. But no. Two years ago our local EA officer Morag Stirling sadly died whilst in service and is yet to be replaced - the latter of which nobody seems to know or more concernedly, care about.

 

 

Is there such a thing as the rural economy?   I have been reading a great deal recently about the woes on the rural economy from the existential crisis of the village pub to the plight farmers who will have to pay inheritance tax at half the rate of normal folk and wondering, how does all this apply to me?   Afterall, you cannot get much more rural than chalkstreams but few of the things that might buffet my business are uniquely rural. Whenever I fall into conversation with other small business owners, regardless of sector or location, our list of woes are near identical. Of course, from time to time, I will have some localised issues but for the most part, wars in far distant countries, the machinations of the UK economy and the ever-increasing cost of doing business affects me just as it does a corner shop owner in a city hundreds of miles away.     Swill basket maker Owen Jones at his workshop in Cumbria. Richard Cannon/©Country Life Picture Library   Think about it. You live on an almost self-sufficient smallholding with chickens, selling the eggs from a stall at your roadside gate. How do you price your eggs? Do you meticulously work out your costs of labour, food and housing plus a profit to arrive at a cost per dozen? Well, you probably should do that but in all probability you will pop down to your local Waitrose to check out the market price, then price your eggs accordingly.    Of course, if you sell at your meticulously worked out price, by disregarding what the market is telling you, you may be in for a nasty shock. If, by chance, your price and that of Waitrose are aligned, happy days. If, however, you are way more expensive, sales will be slow to non-existent as it is unlikely your egg buyers are unaware of the market price. If, on the other hand, you are way below market price you will sell out quickly. Soon you will ask yourself, or more likely your customers, why?? Then, as your production is likely finite, you will adjust your prices upwards.   The fact is that whether you sell eggs, beer or fishing, the concept of the rural economy as separate and distinct to the economy as a whole, is something of a fiction. Rural business owners may be defined by location but in reality we all march to the same macro and micro economic tunes as every other business; be it a widget maker in Wolverhampton or a basket weaver in Cumbria.

 

 

Vote trout for the tenner!   The EU style UK red passport was not to everybody’s liking but I recall it fondly as the pages featured illustrations of brown trout and salmon. Sadly, when the new blue post-Brexit passport was issued our fish had vanished to be replaced with some rather weird, circular hieroglyphic. However, it seems the Bank of England are not dead to the concept of British wildlife as a part of officialdom with the proposal to replace Churchill, Austen et al with animal illustrations.   Apparently (who knew), the Bank conducted a survey last year with Nature selected by 60% of respondents as one of their preferred themes just ahead of Architecture and Landmarks at 56%. With Notable Historical Figures at just 38% you can see why the Bank of England have grabbed at this survey to ditch all the culture war implications of picking a human.     The £5 note 'reimagined'   Now it is apparently down to us this summer to pick the wildlife to feature on our banknotes though, of course, that is not how it will work as the British public will be given a carefully curated list of choices chosen by a panel selected by the Bank. Honestly, I have never heard of any of the six members on the panel which includes someone who is, ‘a television presenter, author and cultural strategist working at the intersection of nature and identity.’ OK, I have absolutely no idea what all that means but he is sure to vote beaver.   Regardless of all that I am pinning my hopes on Steve Ormerod (actually I think I have heard of him), a professor in the School of Biosciences at Cardiff University who specialises in freshwater ecology, to ensure a river fish makes it onto the list and, with my mammal hat on, that otters get a look in. Who knows... if the Bank put Salmo trutta on the current £10 note and stay with the same colour scheme the new banknote might pass into the realm of slang to be known as a brownie!     I think a trout might smile more!     Think Like a Fish   It is not often fishing gets a look in at a literary festival but I am pleased to say Jeremy Wade, he of TV River Monsters fame and our cover girl Marina Gibson (it is her on the header of the Fishing Breaks website) are hosting a talk about fishing, rivers, and the natural world at the Winchester Books Festival next month.   Marina talks about her memoir Cast, Catch, Release and Jeremy, best known as the TV fishing adventurer and author How to Think Like a Fish, brings thrilling angling tales from around the globe, alongside insights into the behaviour of the world’s most extraordinary fish.   The event takes place on Saturday 18 April, 1:30pm - 2:30pm, at The Guildhall in Winchester. For details and tickets click here ….. and look out for my new book Tales from The Mill too!

 

 

Quiz   The usual random collection of questions this week inspired by the date and the Newsletter topics.   1)      Who did guitarist Jeff Beck replace on this day in 1965?   2)      Who wrote the book Rural Rides published in1830?   3)      Place these people to the value of the banknote on which they are featured: Jane Austen, Winston Churchill, Alan Turing and JMW Turner.   The answers are below.

 

Have a good weekend even if you happen to be travelling to Paris to watch England!  Best wishes,

 

Check & book dates here

 

Simon Cooper simon@fishingbreaks.co.uk Founder & Managing Directorwww.fishingbreaks.co.uk

 

 

1)      Eric Clapton when he quit the Yardbirds due to the band moving away from traditional blues. 2)      William Cobbett 3)      Winston Churchill (£5), Jane Austen (£10), JMW Turner (£20) and Alan Turing (£50).