did i blink and miss it?

This could just be the fisherman’s arrow of time, the conviction that things must change from better to worse, but I reckon that I’ve asked this question every June for the last few years: “did I blink and miss it?” Mayfly I mean. Maybe the condensation of memory has stuffed all my yesterday mayfly days into one compressed folder and the uncompressed reality of now is always going to be a stretched out version of how I think things ought to be. Now is full of wet days and windy days, with the odd perfect one between. Yesterday is all perfect. But then again ... I just can’t think of too many of those yesterdays lately: lately seems to have been not quite there for one reason or another. And those steamy, still afternoons, plagued by river locusts and punctuated by the gorging snouts of fat trout – a long way off . I don’t know. It’s not as though I haven’t caught anything. It’s not even as though it hasn’t been as much fun as ever. And I’ve generally thought that I’d shut my todger in a fridge door sooner than start on the things aren’t as good as they used to be road to oblivion and flat caps. But ...”did I blink and miss it? Or what?”

First published 9th June 2008