In 2022 we relocated to Yorkshire and I've returned gratefully to the angling I did so often in my youth and younger adulthood - to fishing for brown trout and grayling in the Dales rivers and local stillwaters. While I very much enjoyed (and learnt a great deal from) the angling I did in Essex and Suffolk for chub, dace, roach, winter pike, autumn perch and summer tench, I find that as I get older I feel more settled when I'm fishing for species I can in principle eat (though I return almost all of what I catch these days) and doing so in land- and waterscapes whose features and ecology I can name and understand. I suppose that's a form of nostalgia. It also includes deep and abiding friendships. The image here, for instance, shows a dear old friend netting a trout from a Dales river in April 2022. I find it reassuring to spend time with old friends on the river banks; sometimes, after exchanging symptoms, family news and our aghast understandings of academic/other working life and geopolitics, we barely fish at all. There's a depth and contentment in that process I hadn't expected.
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