urban(e) fatty

... and that’s just the fish.

It’s been a long time since I last blogged on – but that’s OK cos no-one’s reading this anyway - since when, and largely the reason for my silence, I have died of a surfeit of fishing. Either of that or the inguinal hernia (don’t ask) op that pinned me to me bed for a week and made me feel like I had died. The worst part of being cut up and stabbed by doctors is that you can’t laugh afterwards. Everything is painful: for a few days my willy was numb, I couldn’t tell when I needed a piss and I feared greatly needing a dump. But that was all by the by compared with a giggle. Giggling, to say nothing of actual laughter, was like the Spanish Inquisition - a thousand jabbing saw-like blades. So much so that when I wrote to Jim Babb to tell him of my plight and got his typically witty email back, I had to stop reading it lest I tore my insides back open and died in howls of agonised hysterics.

All of which has nothing to do with the fatty pictured above, but this beauty (not the ugly bastard holding it) was one highlight of my trouty season so far, the memory of which took me through the pain. Zim is posing it for a grip and grin, but I caught the fish in a reach of an urban stream more or less exactly between a bus-stop and a haulage contractor’s works depot (though visible from neither). I could of course be more specific and tell you where, but then I’d (as they say) have to kill you. The point isn’t exactly where, so much as generally where – in a very urban stream, and this fish was not the biggest we saw, nor the biggest we caught. How can so many fab fish thrive in an urban setting? Many reasons, I guess, and some of them genuinely encouraging - I like to buck the default fisherman’s lament for time gone by and find, in the words of Ian Drury “reasons to be cheerful”: the biggest must be that urban water is getting cleaner. This stream is heaving with insects as much as it is heaving with tin cans and tyres. (And of course few people wash sheep in pyrethroids near town centres, or plough fields the wrong way in December). The second may be that no-one knows they are there. The most universal response to the sight of us fishing this river (and others like it) is disbelief that there is anything worth catching. Left to their own devices, largely ignored by people and cormorants (too busy for them) and with clean enough water, these fish have found something of a sanctuary in the culverts and race-ways of the town centre.

But our ignorance of their existence is a two-edge sword of course, and on balance it is better to protect through knowledge. it is harder for someone to pollute a stream that is cherished and if they do, the pressure is on: witness the Wandle.

All of which means the Wild Trout Trust’s next big project: “trout in the town” is a great initiative. If we can have wild trout in out town centres we can have them anywhere. The tide is turning methinks (mehopes).

First published July 29th 2008