GLORY DAYS ON SCOTLAND’S RIVERS

Salmon are a hard fish to love. I didn’t catch a single one last year. My one and only take, on a sun-baked west coast that felt more like the Amalfi, did not stick. Inexplicably, so it seemed, until I found that the fly had flipped backwards over the line and wouldn’t have hooked a fence, let alone a fish. Yeats’ Aengus may have caught a silver trout that became a glimmering girl but when this lovelorn Irish god started chasing his fantasy vainly through “hollow lands and hilly lands”, I began to wonder if it wasn’t a salmon after all.

I remember chatting some years ago with the Editor at the end of another frustratingly fishless summer. The sound of smoke was exhaled resignedly across the mouthpiece (that might date the call) as he said: “If only the bloody salmon could be more like the bloody eel.” That might also date the call, because all that’s happened since is that the eel is now more like the salmon