RH Fly Fishing

  When you can’t go fishing, there’s at least an opportunity to catch up on your thinking. Four and something years ago I blogged “over the pond, the turkeys have voted for Christmas” or some such. Who knew how bad the sh*tstorm clusterf*ck would turn out?! How did it come to this mess? The fault, as always, lies with us: humanity and its flawed vanity.   For longer than the four years I’ve referred to, we’ve had the phenomenon of social media fuelled by the internet. Stealthily at first, anyone could say anything, no matter how dishonest or plain stupid, without censure. This bred the fakery we see in the news and in politics, throughout nearly all our societies. Every postulation (pustulation? forgive the pun) brought infinite extrapolations and variations, and any denials sank into the morass.   Who can you trust today? Really trust? We all fear manipulation, but we give an ear to those who shout loudest (numbers of followers, posts, likes, etc.) and thus, some cre...

    Covid 19 lockdown again, tier 5 no less! My, how well we are doing! According to them what’s supposed to know, it seems there’s no fishing, unless you can fish ‘locally’, at least until mid-February. I don’t have any local trout fishing, at a stretch I could fish the tidal Itchen, but there will not be many fish until the Spring warms the water. This has set me down the road of fly-collection-perfection once again! I ordered five new fly boxes to help overhaul and sort the massed ranks of flies once more, aiming for some sort of ‘meaningful’ order. No doubt this exercise will once again produce a heap of ‘no confidence’ ones, which I’ll put to the sword (er, knife) so I can re-use the hooks. Also, at least one of my older boxes has strips of slotted foam that are much less ‘stuck’ than they ought to be.  I will re-post when I’ve   actually got somewhere, to let you know the outcome. I suppose the first thing to do is list the flies in some sort of order, on pa...