Blood Knots

When I was at prep school I became a voracious reader.

The headmaster fed my appetite, lending me the complete short stories of O Henry. I read them all without much pleasure and returned the book. The HM accused me of lying when I told him I had read them all. I think I’d like them better now and will try a few. I still don’t like him any better.

But I digress, I also read the Swallows and Amazons books and a lot of PG Wodehouse including the golf stories. I had never been on a sailing boat or a golf course but the narrative transcended a lot of baffling jargon. So, to get to the point, you don’t need to be a fisherman to enjoy Luke Jennings’s tip-top memoir Blood Knots. Indeed if you do fish you may not be a coarse fisher and it’s not until page 132 that Luke gets to fly fishing. As a child I fished with my grandfather and caught tench, perch and pike sometimes. This haul came from a lock on the disused canal by the Boyne at Rossnaree when I was thirteen.

It was only in 1990 I discovered fly fishing. A friend gave her husband a beginners’ course in Devon and suggested I went too. We stayed at The Arundell Arms, learnt the basics and fished with more pleasure than success on tributaries of the Tamar. If my fishing book is to be believed I caught two trout out of a stocked lake and three more tiddlers on the Lyd and the Ottery using Invicta, Coachman, and Black Pennell flies. A pleasure of fishing over shooting is the opportunity to record minute detail in a fishing book. Being a beginner I did not record if my line sank or floated and other details of absorbing interest to the true angler.

The following month, in June, I fished on a reservoir in Northamptonshire with a friend, let’s call him Andrew. I caught three (rainbow?) trout weighing four pounds in total, using an Invicta (again) but with a bushy-type dropper. The day started calm and bright, became very windy and overcast. We fished from 6.00 am until 2.15 pm. We stopped rather early, rendered sluggish after a riparian picnic with a very young god daughter and her parents.

Luke Jennings’s book is a different kettle of fish, more about his father, his childhood and with some super digressions. It is highly recommended. One lesson I took home is the skill needed to catch trout on a dry fly which explains my almost total lack of success in that department. I also found I wasn’t alone in spending an inordinate amount of time trying to retrieve flies from trees and the riverbed and getting my line hopelessly tangled.