Archive for the 'Writing' Category

The Flyfishers’ Journal: Winter 2023

Apart from his reputation as an outspoken environmentalist and dedicated salmon fisher, King Charles III has also been Patron of the Flyfishers’ Club for many years… … and the latest edition of the Flyfishers’ Journal records the gifts presented by the Club to commemorate his coronation in May 2023. These included boxes of specially-tied salmon […]

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Editing, Flyfishers' Journal, Writing Jan 02 2024

Recent Wild Trout Trust work: TWIST, trout and trees

I knew all those years of working in charity marketing agencies would come in handy some day… This autumn – apart from editing the latest issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal and hitting a really important new publisher’s deadline of my own (announcement coming soon!) – I’ve also been pulling together the Wild Trout Trust’s autumn […]

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Trout, Urban rivers, Wild Trout Trust, Writing Dec 20 2023

The Flyfishers’ Journal: Summer 2023

Earlier this year, the Flyfishers’ Club achieved an amazing coup by acquiring a cased set of six copies of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler – representing all the versions of the book which were published in IW’s own lifetime. To celebrate this momentous addition to the Club’s Library, we somehow persuaded the talented fly-fishing photographer […]

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Editing, Flyfishers' Journal, Writing Sep 01 2023

INNS Mapper: A new app for citizen scientists

One of the nearly-unavoidable hazards of traditional print production seems to be the way that important details can go out of date almost as soon as the book is published (and this situation has only deteriorated as we’ve started including more and more references to fundamentally ephemeral digital media!) In the case of my own […]

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Invasive non-native species, Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing, Writing Aug 12 2023

WTT x Sportfish: Making our rivers healthy again

As part of my busy and newly-expanded role with the Wild Trout Trust, where I’m now leading comms activity as well as continuing to develop urban river projects across the south of England, I’ve recently written a couple of articles for the Sportfish website… … describing how WTT’s river restoration projects are focused on improving […]

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Chalkstreams, River restoration, Wild Trout Trust, Writing Jul 28 2023

The Flyfishers’ Journal: Winter 2022

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 […]

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Editing, Flyfishers' Journal, Writing Dec 18 2022

Fly Culture: The Bowerbird’s Warning

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 […]

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Fly Culture, Writing Jun 21 2022

The Flyfishers’ Journal: Summer 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 […]

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Editing, Flyfishers' Journal, Writing Jun 05 2022

10 years of Trout in Dirty Places

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 […]

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Trout in Dirty Places, Writing Apr 30 2022

A new TWIST for the Sheppey?

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 […]

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Pollution, Rewilding, Sheppey, Urban rivers, Wild Trout Trust, Writing Nov 28 2021