A stone setting of ginnels and snickets

We're heading north once more for the fishing. This time it's the River Dee and I feel a bit more optimistic than I did about the Tay. I love the Dee. I love spring salmon. There is no finer fish on no finer river.

But first we have a 25th wedding anniversary party in Leeds for Gill's sister, Alison, and her husband Richard - the Whitakers. They're having the party at what used to be Dyson's jewellers - now the Georgetown Restaurant. It's a place I remember well.

I once spent many hours in an upstairs room with a photographer for a newspaper investigation, watching out for people coming out of a ginnel opposite. Or should I call it a snicket (pronounced in the same way that Geoff Boycott says cricket, i.e crickitt)? Either term would suffice in Yorkshire but for the rest of the world I suppose I should reveal that it is an alley or a cut-through or a passage.

My other memory of Dyson's goes back nearly 30 years when Gill and I went there to choose an engagement ring. I only had £200 to my name, just enough to buy a ring with the tiniest sparkly diamond. We could afford something more showy now but would never replace it. The ring was good for us then and it's good for us still, like our marriage. I wouldn't claim that it was set in stone, but this is the stone setting.

Big salmon, tall story?

We spent a snowy weekend in Wales, walking by the River Wye. The landlord of the pub where we stayed had a lot of old rods and fishing memorabilia strung across the bar. He pointed to one of the rods that he said was the very one that was used by Georgina Ballantine to catch the UK record salmon, 64 lbs, on the Glendelvine beat of the River Tay in Scotland, October 7, 1922.

Even with a few drinks inside me I was more than a tad sceptical. This is the fishing equivalent to finding the cricket bat used by W G Grace when making his highest score (344, made for the MCC v Kent at Canterbury in August 1876). I asked the landlord if he had the provenance. He said the chap who sold the rod to him still had all that. Why would you buy a rare item and let the seller keep its provenance?

I don't know much about the rod that was used by Miss Ballantine but it was probably made of greenheart wood. This rod may have been greenheart. It was a fly rod. I tried to read the inscription on one of the brass mounts but it was a bit dark and the rod came away from the wall to the landlord's dismay.

I know that the Ballantine catch was made not with a fly but with a dace harled from the back of a boat rowed by her father. But the rod she used may have been a fly rod. The account I have read is not clear on that. Still I hope that the landlord did not pay too much for his antique.

I'm wondering now what did happen to the Ballantine rod? Do you happen to know?