I can remember my first fish like it was yesterday. I was seven, although now some 43 years later, that first fish has stuck in my memory like a dream. It was the first time my pipe smoking father, Jack, took me with him and we fished a private piece of the River Cam, just outside Cambridge, at a farm in Grantchester. The Cam idled through this land, with a quiet reassurance, of time on its hands.
As for the fish it happened to be a small brown trout! That trout was less than I had expected to catch (minnows or tiny roach) was my order of the day as my father had set me up with a tiny piece of chopped worm and a single maggot.
It was a great surprise to me as my father gave me a Shakespeare fishing kit, packaged in a plastic and cardboard, the rod was made of fiberglass almost white in colour with little plastic floats, I must have beamed from ear to ear, it took ages for me to settle down again and become quiet and still sitting back on my upturned bucket, after catching the beautiful little trout, as I waiting for my next fish, looking back now I must have looked at my father, Jack, with new eyes, not just my dad but now my friend.
And as for the pipe smoke that used to waft over from where he sat, its still here, in my lasting memories.