The People's Front for the Liberation of Fishing

Fishing or angling? Debate over the name of the new all-embracing organisation that is going to represent angling interests in England and Wales has swung away from Angling (or Angling Unity) to something around that word “fishing” I can exclusively reveal.

This is my first bit of exclusive revealing, I do believe, since I exclusively revealed that the body would be called Angling Unity (or Angling). I had every confidence in this assertion because here, for the first time, anglers were speaking as one.

That was before some splitter suggested “Fishing” of all things. So the betting has swung now to something like the Fishing Association or simply Fishing although you can get good odds on “Judean Liberation Front.”

Apparently there was a feeling that “Angling” sounded too antiquated, the sort of thing that Isaak Walton would do with a pole and a length of cat gut.

Fishing, on the other hand is bold, simple and to the point. Unless, of course, you use a net. Then there’s the problem with gender neutrality. The beauty of “angler” is that it can refer to either sex while the rarely used “fisher” does not trip off the tongue so easily as “fisherman” which can get us in to so much trouble with the gender police.

Fisherman is the word you associate with so-called fishing humour – the male-oriented birthday cards, mugs and tee-shirts depicting silly men standing in the rain in waders, exaggerating the size of their catch or doing unspeakable things with maggots.

Fishermen refer to their wives (they don’t have partners) as “‘er indoors.” They lie about walking the dog or going shopping when really they’re off to the river. They’re always buying tackle they don’t need to feed their obsession and they eat Marmite sandwiches washed down with flasks of lukewarm instant coffee.

It is for this reason that I have persisted with the concept of the “fisher” in my writing. I think it works particularly well in fly fishing and have absolutely no problem now writing of “fly fishers.” Somehow “fly anglers” just doesn’t work so well for me.

Angling, on the other hand, has survived well over the centuries, which is surprising given its description, not of fishing, but merely the angle of rod and line. But it doesn’t look as if it will survive as the name for the new body.

Instead it seems we are marching in to the bright new dawn as fishers who go fishing. Unless someone decides otherwise and at some future date I can exclusively reveal that the People’s Front for the Liberation of Fishing has prevailed.

Mill dams, Marmite, tea and cigarettes

In the alphabet of life, fishing comes somewhere between the boy scouts and girls, or at least that was how it happened for me. Come to think of it, I would have barely enrolled in the cub scouts the first time I cast a hook over the pier at Whitby and hauled out some small silvery "kamikaze" with fins.

Earlier still I was pulling greedy sticklebacks from the park lake that would attach themselves obligingly to the brandling worms I had tied to a piece of string. This method seemed to catch bigger specimens than I could get with my net. The net was made from one of my grandma's stockings tied in a knot, threaded on a piece of wire and attached to a bamboo pole.

I would take the sticklebacks home in a jam jar where they would die within two or three days. I had more success when I put them in a plastic tank outside until a heavy frost entombed them within a block of ice. Perhaps this was when I first began to appreciate the merits of catch-and-release.

Pink underskirt

Once I slipped on a wet leaf by the side of the lake, finding myself fully immersed in the "mucky end" where all the leaves, litter and uneaten breadcrumbs left by the satiated ducks would gather.I must have been about three or four years old. My mother dragged me out, took off my sodden clothes and dressed me for the bus ride home in a pink underskirt she had bought on the market. It was the bus ride from Hell and the associated humiliation most probably scarred me for the rest of my days.

Apart from holiday fishing I did not begin to take the sport seriously until I bought my first fishing licence and joined a coarse-fishing club in my early teens. It was on one of those fishing trips I bought my first and only packet of cigarettes - 20 Embassy - just like the ones smoked by mum and dad.

I had gone with a friend to fish a mill dam just outside Ossett in West Yorkshire. For some reason we thought that our chances were better the earlier we arrived so we were on the bus at first light and on our way before the first of the shift workers.

No sooner were our floats in the water than we were both puffing away on our "lights." Within two or three smokes my face must have gone the colour of the pea-green dam water. I can't recall whether or not I finished the packet but it certainly cured me of the urge to experiment any further with cigarettes, although I did try smoking my dad's pipe with the same unfortunate results.

Marmite sandwiches

These coarse-fishing forays, sustained by Marmite sandwiches and a flask of tea, would usually produce a decent haul of perch and roach, never very big. I might have progressed to bigger things had it not been for adolescence and the intervention of progressive rock, underage drinking and girls.

But the fishing was merely neglected, not abandoned, and during a canal holiday with friends I had what I can only describe as my angling epiphany. I was admiring a fine chub I had taken from the Avon near Tewksbury when a friend challenged my ethics (not that I knew what ethics were at the time).

"What are you going to do with it?" he asked.

"Throw it back," I said.

"Don't you think that's unkind to the fish? Wouldn't it show more respect for the fish if you killed and ate it?" he said.

I thought he had a point, so it was not long after that I acquired my first trout rod. This one was a birthday present from my in-laws-to-be who regarded game fishing as a healthy shared pastime for a soon-to-be-married young couple.

Broon and gold

Soon after our marriage they invited us salmon fishing to Scotland, to the Kinnaird beat of the River Tay. It was early April and there were few springers around but Gill had a lovely 17 lb fish on the Wednesday.

We were spin fishing with "broon and gold" devons bought from Malloch's in Perth. On the Saturday I knew I was in the last chance saloon when I hooked in to something big. When I look back now at the tackle I was using it makes me weep. My rod was a bendy piece of hollow glass fibre, bought from a barber's shop in Batley, and my tatty coarse-fishing reel was falling apart.

The fish kept taking line and I was struggling to get it in. I was tiring after 15 or 20 minutes and thought the fish must be tiring too so I tightened up the tension on the reel, but far too much. The fish ran and parted company with the line. It was just before lunch and it was an understatement to say I was distraught.

Silver springer

Straight after lunch I went back to the very same spot, cast again and had a fish on. It felt like another good one. This time I left the tension well alone. When it came to the gaff (this was the late 70s) it was a superb 23lb silver springer.

A year later, on the same beat in the summer I was casting a salmon fly for the first time and hooked in to a fish of about 12 pounds that was at my feet when it shed the hook.

They still shed the hook now and then today but there has been a lot of water under a lot of bridges since those days. I'll never forget that first springer or indeed those early roach and perch. Fishing is something that gets in to your blood.