I Have Had Stacks Of Openings To Go One With The Angling I Loved In My Boyhood
My nonattendance from the canal-side in the years since I halted angling seems so weird to me now. I used to adore it so much, especially as my other sports tended to be at the extremely strenuous end of the spectrum, playing as I did rugby, football and cricket for various school and village teams. Having the chance to get my fishing tackle, jump on a bike and cycle for the ten minutes to go to the local fishery and spend a few hours quietly seated with a rod in my hand and watching a float on the water was a joy.
When I left sixth form college, “by mutual consent” as the football slang has it, subsequent to the 1st year when it was evident that I had messed about too much in the first year to have any likelihood of passing any A levels at the end of the 2nd, would have been the best time to enjoy spring and summer evenings with my fishing tackle instead of poring over some economics homework.
And as I was working, in a department store coffee shop, I was earning and had more cash on the hip than I had ever had previously plus a day off during the week which would have been perfect to get out to the lake and have a few hours if not a complete day angling with the place virtually to myself. Even better, because I was working in Guildford, going to the fishing tackle shop should have been straightforward and I could have had loads of maggots to drown. This was unheard of before I left education since our village didn’t have a fishing tackle shop apart from a very small part of one shop had a limited selection, and certainly no live bait on offer, and to journey into Guildford and back having been to the fishing tackle shop to get some would have taken ages and was not worthwhile.
In following years, I worked for a huge utility company in Staines which had it’s own angling lake and for some reason I never felt the urge to finish for the day, get the casuals on and spend an hour down there after work. Even sillier, less than fifty paces across the road was the Thames which has some marvellous fishing that went completely ignored by me, especially as by then I was making really good money and had the opening to get some really fantastic angling in the fishing tackle bag.
Later on, again I was working for a firm that had it’s building right on the towpath, and quite often on breaks a gang of us would go and sit on the steps on a nice sunny day and watch people fishing, and as every alternate week saw my shifts finishing at 4 o’clock, it would have been very simple to get the fishing tackle out of the car and see off the day with a couple of hours fishing. I might have enjoyed the job more too, thinking about it.
Naturally other priorities present themselves as you go through the years. After I left 6th form I discovered pubs in quite a significant way. Women were never a challenge of course, I don’t ever recall any throwing themselves at me and begging me to ravish them, so that generally wouldn’t have been an obstacle to deciding on a days fishing, but it just seemed that at that moment I’d put the fishing tackle away and forgotten about it.
That’s altering now though. I do have the need to go back, I have had my fishing tackle out to check it over and see what has to be updated, which is most of it, and I’ve been finding places to go and what I need to do in order to be able to fish there, so hopefully I can renew some of the enjoyment from my younger days.
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