I’ve recently been watching a TV show featuring Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer called ‘Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing’ . As is often the case with me, I’m late to the game and have found I have about 6 series to watch…
In each episode our heroes literally go fishing and we share the experience, including the conversations – both funny and profound – and it is a wonderfully relaxing way to spend half an hour. There is a gentleness about the show, and a love between the two men that is wonderful to see in a world where too often we hear of toxic masculinity.
When I was a teenager, I would occasionally spend mornings or afternoons fishing in the local river. I was never sure whether there were actually fish to catch there, but that wasn’t, to me, the point. I would be spending time on my own in the open air, with an apparent purpose. I remember those days very clearly fifty years down the line. I also did a little see fishing, and also once attempted trout fishing when on a family holiday.
Watching the program last night (Our heroes pursue, catch, and release two Crucian Carp) I was reminded of my own experiences, and that in turn led me to remember the time I spent looking through a big fishing tackle catalogue as a teenager. There’s a scene in Blackadder Goes Forth where Captain Blackadder talks about his love life:
I’ve always been a soldier, married to the army. Book of King’s Regulations is my mistress…possibly with a Harrods’ lingerie catalogue tucked discreetly between the pages.
Well, we didn’t have Harrods lingerie catalogues where I was bought up – the closest would be a Freeman’s Mail Order catalogue, about an inch and a half thick and so impossible to tuck discretely anywhere. But that, as they say, is another story…
Where I encountered this fishing tackle catalogue I have no idea. I don’t even know who published it – I don’t remember the cover – or whether it even had one – and I certainly don’t have it today. Somewhere in the tidy ups of my teenage years and the moves between home and university, 3 moves whilst at university, and then a few years of moving from place to place just after university – it was lost.
But I remember spending hours looking through it. The pages I most remember – and I can almost see them laid out in my mind – were the fly fishing ones, where there were several rows of images of fishing flies and short descriptions of them, with details of where they might best be used. I seem to recollect several of them seemed to target Scandinavian waters – so perhaps the catalogue was from a company in that part of the world. But the whole catalogue fascinated me – there was all sorts of technical information about reels, rods, nets, whatever. Stuff that I never bought, would never use, but that just fascinated me.
I’ve actually just done a Google search and found the image below. This isn’t from the catalogue I had, but is similar.
They genuinely were little works of art, and whilst I wouldn’t know one fly from another, they’ve always fascinated me. And they show up in my TV watching; Colonel Potter in M*A*S*H showing a wounded soldier how to tie a fly, Christopher Foyle in ‘Foyle’s War’ fly-fishing on the Sussex Downs.
The catalogue I had was quite thick, I seem to remember. The brief Google search I did just now does seem to suggest that fishing tackle catalogues are quite thick tomes, and still exist in the format that I remember.
Maybe I should go and seek some ‘vintage porn’…