Mayflies in midwinter: the latest issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal has been landing in the midst of a week-long deep freeze for much of the UK… … but I hope it’ll bring something of the warming hope of a springtime hatch to this beautiful-but-Baltic season. Cyril Bennett is on the front cover, hunting bugs in […]
Read Full Post »
Editing, Flyfishers' Journal, Writing
Dec 18 2022
There’s a definite urban vibe to the latest issue of Fly Culture magazine (step forward, Matt Eastham, Dan Osmond, Nick Thomas and Peter Coleman-Smith!) and for once it hasn’t very much to do with me… … unless you count a little tale which I might have heard in my old south London local (or much […]
Read Full Post »
Fly Culture, Writing
Jun 21 2022
On the few occasions when I’ve tried saltwater flyfishing – also known to its real cognoscenti as SWFFing – around the coast of Britain, I’m happy to admit that I’ve not been very successful. Yet if the fish were fairly insignificant (mainly small pollack or coalfish lured up from forests of kelp with sinking lines […]
Read Full Post »
Editing, Flyfishers' Journal, Writing
Jun 05 2022
This month, it’s 10 years since Trout in Dirty Places launched on a (mostly) unsuspecting world. Merlin Unwin Books and Granger’s fly shop in South Kensington threw us one hell of a party, and for a few days, the weird idea of fishing for trout and grayling in urban rivers was making headlines across the […]
Read Full Post »
Trout in Dirty Places, Writing
Apr 30 2022
Mayflies must surely constitute some of the most perfect symbolism of a flyfisher’s sport. Beautiful, fragile and famously ephemeral. Patient and enduring, living stoically and nearly-invisibly among dark stones and silt for a year or more… before emerging together into light and air for a celebration of life that seems all the more urgent and […]
Read Full Post »
Editing, Flyfishers' Journal
Dec 23 2021
As I’ve recently written in the Wild Trout Trust’s autumn newsletter, this is the kind of story that many of us know… A spring, or a line of them, bubbling and gushing out of a rocky hillside. Tumbling downhill, meandering through an upland meadow where trout and bullheads dart above the gravel, and human huts […]
Read Full Post »
Pollution, Rewilding, Sheppey, Urban rivers, Wild Trout Trust, Writing
Nov 28 2021
In the past few months I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading about geology, as well as thinking about ways of helping urban rivers now and in the future. So I guess it was slightly inevitable that these themes might emerge in some of my own current writing too… For the latest issue of […]
Read Full Post »
Fallon's Angler, Wild Trout Trust, Writing
Oct 17 2021
Four years ago, give or take a few days, Sally and I took our final walk up the Wandle to hand over our keys to the estate agent who’d (mostly) been helping us to sell our house by the river in Carshalton. As much out of habit as conscious farewell, we stopped and peered over […]
Read Full Post »
River restoration, Trout, Urban rivers, Wandle, Wild Trout Trust
Jul 29 2021
Late May / early June means it’s time for the summer issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal. Truth to tell, this wasn’t the easiest issue to be responsible for editing, including as it does some very poignant Appreciations for friends and fellow Members of the Flyfishers’ Club: recent past president Paddy Laverty, author and historian Tony […]
Read Full Post »
Editing, Flyfishers' Journal
Jun 05 2021
As the start of trout season creeps round again, I’m feeling incredibly proud and privileged to feature in the latest issue of the beautiful Fly Culture print magazine – this time alongside work from Richard Baker, Adrian Grose-Hodge, Henry Giles, Ben Jailler, Matt Eastham, Dan Osmond and many others. Editor Pete Tyjas asked me to […]
Read Full Post »
Fly Culture, Fly-fishing, Trout, Writing
Apr 21 2021