… means Trout in Dirty Places in Italian, and this week I’ve been surprised and thrilled to find out that I’ve featured in this article about urban street fishing as an antidote to lockdown and C-19, in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

For urban and rural dwellers alike, being able to #FishWhereYouLive, or anywhere close to home, is a blessing that’s not lost on those who are lucky enough to experience it – and in fact I’ve recently been writing something on this subject for publication in Fly Culture in a few weeks’ time.

Stay safe, y’all, and watch this space…

(Images: Corriere della Sera)

Thanks to Paul Sharman there’s an excellent feature about the Wandle river restoration story in the latest issue of The Angler, the Angling Trust’s new-look membership magazine, which has started dropping through letter boxes over the weekend.

To conclude the feature, Paul asked me for a testimonial about the Angling Trust’s role in the Wandle’s restoration, which naturally I was more than happy to provide:

Without great help from the Angling Trust and Fish Legal at a very critical point in the Wandle’s history (after the catastrophic pollution in 2007), the river would now be in a much more precarious state. 

And the Wandle Trust itself would not be in a sustainable position to look after the river in the long term – and even be able to think about sharing what we’ve learned and helping local people to look after other rivers across the south east of England.

There’s plenty more detail in the article itself, but I think that sums it up…

The past few weeks have been busy with new project development (of which, I hope, more soon!) but I’ve also had the thrill of meeting two great and influential writers on the banks of the Wandle.

First up was Tankred Rinder, Austrian author and editor of the rapidly-growing Forelle und Aesche e-zine. Tankred fished the Wandle semi-regularly with local fly-casting instructor Alex Titov whilst living in the UK a few years ago: now based in Cologne (but travelling widely on fishy business), he’d read Trout in Dirty Places and had been inspired to write a double feature on urban fishing and river restoration for his German audience.

On the afternoon of his latest visit the Wandle was flowing high, cold and wintry… so we spent the afternoon Kaffeeklatsching in the café at Morden Hall Park instead. Tankred’s article on the Wandle has now appeared here, and his feature on urban fly-fishing is here: please do click through to read them in the original German, or let Google Translate give you the gist if your Teutonic turns of phrase, like mine, aren’t quite as fluent as they might once have been.

Secondly – and with a lot less advance planning – came the celebrated environmental writer-campaigner George Monbiot, who dropped in on the Wandle to witness the excitement of this year’s Trout in the Classroom trout fry releases.

Being personally fascinated by the edgeland blurring of boundaries that’s happening on the Wandle and urban rivers across the world, as the philosophy of the Trout in the Town movement takes hold and brings iconic wild trout back to concrete canyons where natural processes have been suspended for hundreds of years, I’m intrigued that George’s next book explores very similar territory.

In the meantime, his deeply thoughtful and moving piece about rewilding urban kids and rivers appeared last week on the Guardian website, complete with name-check for Trout in Dirty Places.  There’s a short extract over on my Urbantrout blog, and the full piece can also be found on George’s own site.

One year on, the confluences continue…

(First photo: Tankred Rinder / Alex Titov)

I’m delighted to announce that my latest Trout in Dirty Places flavoured feature has just appeared in this week’s issue of Shooting Times.

The article focuses on urban fly-fishing opportunities for trout and grayling in Britain’s market towns including Fakenham, Leominster and Tiverton, and I’ve also (briefly!) addressed the vital role that’s played by good rural land management practices and catchment-sensitive farming in protecting water and habitat quality across whole river systems:

The Wye and Usk Foundation estimates that more than 700,000 tonnes of valuable soil are washed into the Lugg and other tributaries of the Wye every year, smothering spawning gravels at the same time as denuding the local strawberry, maize and potato fields, while fertiliser run-off contributes to algal blooms that deplete river oxygen levels and even cause fish kills.

… so this isn’t an insignificant environmental or economic issue (hang on, did someone just say ecosystem services or Upstream Thinking?)

I grabbed my Shooting Times at Victoria Station yesterday between Rivers Trust and Wandle Piscators meetings – and you can’t get much more urban than that.

But copies should be available at newsagents in towns of all sizes across the UK for the next few hours at least.  So if you’re interested in exploring a totally different angle on the traditionally rural sport of fly-fishing, pick up yours today!

One week on from the official launch of Trout in Dirty Places at Grangers in South Kensington, and the slightly scary sense that I haven’t so much dropped a pebble into the margins of a quiet pool as heaved a bloody great boulder into a cast-iron bathtub…

… is slowly starting to subside.

Still, it’s been a busy few days out there on the airwaves and blogosphere, so I reckon the best and fastest sort of summary is the ever-reliable in-no-particular-order link haze:

• “Why town dwellers can get hooked on urban fishing”… fly-fishing the Wandle with Evan Davis on BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme
• Fantastic book launch pics from Kavita Kapoor
• A chat with Keith Arthur on Easter Saturday’s Fisherman’s Blues (0700 – 0730, 19:24 onwards)
• “Ever tried trout fishing at Manchester Airport?”  5 top urban fishing spots reported by Yahoo news
• “Trout in Dirty Places – Smashing!” … Alistair Stewart’s review on The Urban Fly Fisher
• “Interesting and inspiring, with the capacity to lead readers down new paths of discovery” … Raif Killips’ review on Fly Fishers’ Republic
• “BUY THIS BOOK” … forthright advice from Manchester Fishing Fiend‘s Mike Duddy
• “If you have an interest in the decline of industry in the UK, and the efforts and selfless actions of small conservation groups and local fishing clubs… then you need to buy Trout in Dirty Places”… Ian Gould’s view from One More Cast
• “Lo and behold, the shopping trolley that features on my cover shot for Theo’s new book is still exactly where it was before!”… my urban fishing partner-in-grime Dominic Garnett returns to Tiverton’s River Lowman
• Fly Forums discussions here, here, here and here
• On Caught by the River, the full text of Charles Rangeley-Wilson’s foreword for Trout in Dirty Places
• And last (but certainly not least) typically deft summation tinged with national psychoanalysis from Tom Chandler’s Trout Underground …

If overwhelming isn’t quite the word I’m looking for, it’ll probably do for now. And I’m immensely grateful to everyone who’s read and enjoyed Trout in Dirty Places so far: big, big thanks to you all.

Update: My interview with Bryan Crump has now been broadcast on his Nights show on Radio New Zealand, covering a wide range of subjects from sewage in the Thames to parallels between urban and back-country fly-fishing: click on the player below to listen!

Accompanied by doom-laden headlines about hosepipe bans, double-dip recession, petrol shortages, and killer shrimp in the Norfolk Broads, next Tuesday’s official publication date for Trout in Dirty Places is creeping ever closer.

And like that old (but very apt) analogy of a dropped pebble’s ripples widening over a pool, the story still seems to be spreading slowly across the media…

First there was Paul Sharman’s review on Fish&Fly, followed by Michael McCarthy’s Thames-linked feature in last Friday’s Independent.

Yesterday BBC Radio Scotland called me in for an interview with Fred MacAulay, sharing a slot with Alistair Stewart live from the Kelvin. It’s possible I’ll be trying to repeat his performance with one of Radio 4’s presenters on the banks of the Wandle early next week: meanwhile, Radio New Zealand have also been in touch, and there should be plenty of other reviews in the pipeline.

Is this the sort of more-than-just-a-fishing-title reaction I’d hoped for when I wrote my first proposal to Merlin Unwin, suggesting a trailblazing book about urban fly-fishing, the strangely beautiful places it takes you, and above all the people who’ve made it possible?

Gentle reader, the answer has got to be a great big yes.

Two and a half years later, maybe it isn’t so surprising that when the economy’s tanking and the south of England is slowly catching fire, this rare good news story about recovering urban rivers feels like that metaphorical cool splash of water on a news-hound’s burning brow. Which is exactly how urban fly-fishing has always felt to me too… and to most other city fishers I’ve ever met.

More soon, we hope!