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Not so easy to detach! While I’ve spent more time on my bike than by the river, I’ve still been on the river a lot, when you look at it. Though I have not cast so much as I used to do. It’s not that the magic has left me, rather than it has been taken away, even if most deny it. I did too, for years. You can still find it, but you have to look harder, and so many of those places where it lived, have gone now. You hear about how destruction of the Amazon rain forest is accelerating. Probably already too late to do anything worthwhile to protect it. But you don’t really hear about the destruction of English landscape and ecosystem. By agriculture. But it is. It’s just a matter of scale. And this tiny, insignificant, blessing in the natural world is stolen from us, from future generations who will be denied knowledge of this jewel we once held. Gone now, and, you know, it’s never coming back. You have to search for these special places. So, while we can, we do. And we find them. They still exist, even in Britain. Here and there. Where you can escape the farms. Easier to go to Europe. Cross the Channel, and you’re immediately in a better place.

Here, in la Vallée de la Ternoise. Like it or not; it’s how it is. It’s just better. And some of the British want to leave! Half? Well, probably less than half now. But it’s only a matter of politics, a momentary lapse of reason, an instant of xenophobic cowardice. That’s all. Is this what two preceding generations of my countrymen fought for? Oh, right. Thanks for making that clear.

And yet, I’ve found all I ever wanted fly fishing to be. The Ure, Aa, Ternoise. The San.  All I ever wanted life to be. One and the same. Not Eden anymore. Not Loch Maree. But beautiful nature nonetheless.

Apparently (so says one of my son’s university friends), I’m married to the ‘classiest bird ever to come out of Coventry’, and here: in surely the prettiest British sports car ever.Spitfire 1500. One of the very last to role off the line at Canley, 1980.

Been fishing with the Volition two weight, and since May, the Zero. Another level in fly fishing; given us by Tom Bell. This is tenkara without all the nonsense that pervades the fixed line technique. Because, finally, you can yield line on the Zero, and this make ALL the difference.
We’ve achieved such a high altitude now. I don’t want to come back down. Why would I?

It has been a fabulous year; Aberdeenshire, Wales, Anglesey, France, Poland, with fly rod and bike (here an MTB kindly leant me by Kuba), and a lot of trodden miles with my wife and usually with Ellie four legs.

We biked twice around the Grand Prix circuit at Monaco before the ride back to temporary home on the Bay of Angels.

In England too, with my boys in the river team. With our captain, Freddy Bainbridge. They did us proud on the Ure (and deserved better), this gorgeous stretch on the Lord Bolton Estate. Big grayling here.

A fragment of old England, not devastated like the Eden Valley.

I resigned as manager, but was persuaded to carry on another year, particularly after the national final on the Eden, and the formation of the new team, with Derek Spry, who was with us on the Ure. That’ll do me. For me, a return to northern Ireland, with Derek, our new captain, and the rest of the team. Unfinished business, boys.

It gets more difficult for me to write, as I used to do. There has needed to be a point to it, that I have always thought others should read. But, who am I? Eleven and a quarter stone of middle English privilege. Retired. Grumpy old git. What do I know? I observe and analyse, that’s all. I form my own opinion, but this might well be at odds with yours. And that’s fine, probably as it should be. It doesn’t even piss me off if you don’t agree anymore. What’s right for me doesn’t have to be right for you. It’s how it is, and we can both get by. All part of the high decibel noise that leaves me, and you, with a high pitched ring over things. So, forgive me for being quiet now, not adding to the noise. It hardly matters at all if there are differences, and my country has lost so much, because it has happened and there’s nothing I can do about it. Can you? You just have to do the right thing, however small that is. It matters, if only to you. I think it echoes in the afterlife. Think of that, in case I’m right. So, I’m hoping the good Monsieur Macron will still allow me to live in his beautiful country, and I’ll hang on the memory of the old England I have known. Here; the Derwent in Derby, with Ben, Mama and Ellie.

I don’t know how much longer. Who does? Eden is collapsing, an entire ecosystem. Think of it, without all the spin, the propaganda, the politics, the motives of those who are just not good people – because they simply do not, really, care one iota beyond their short-term, shallow existence in this shared space and time where you and I are nothing to them. It is the same which has driven the corals to the abyssal edge of existence. Like the rain forests. Like the ice; all that ice. Like the ancient deciduous forest of old England, for the sake of some artificial obsession with growth, and HS2… You know, my new year resolution was to be more positive, but in the case of my once cherished, loved Eden; well, I can hardly dare hope any more. And, more scary, I am getting to the stage when I wonder if I still care enough. It is the hypocrisy that really gets into your soul. I mean, if we all just said, ok, the farms are everything. The natural environment, even one so massive and devastatingly precious on the English scale of things, as Eden, is just a sewer, serving the farms, then fine. The welfare of a few hundred, or even a thousand, farming families is all that matters, even though they give us nothing, really, from impoverished, marginal, degraded landscape, and just cost the European taxpayer. Soon to be just the UK taxpayer – now think of that. I’ll live with it, in this mad world of altered states, altered values. Now. Finally, I’m lucky. After all these years. I can escape after all, go to European environments which are still beautiful, still live, still worth something. Here, Ternoise Valley, northern France. I’ll be back soon.

Today on my bike, a farmer decided to overtake me with tractor and slurry tank, on a road where, well, it was just dangerous. I had just climbed up from Appleby to the high point on Orton Scar, then the insane descent into and out of the village. He could not wait, though, those few moments, and he just hated that I was there, and, frankly, if there had not been witnesses around, I know I would have been driven off the road… Watch out, bike riding friends, around Orton. You are an inconvenience. Understand the way it is.

The wild trout are almost gone. Maybe they’ll last a few more decades, even a hundred years. But I doubt it. A line of slurry across my river.The end of times. The bitter end. I am detaching from it. I can let it go. And how utterly bloody awful is that?

There is somewhere yet to go. Escape. To breathe clean air. To live with hope. In the rivers here, there are still trout with a future, and the farms are not given everything. And the ghastly rush of humanity towards the destruction of all things beautiful on this planet…

It was a better age you helped bring us through, shared with us. Thank you, Tom Petty, for the sounds, and your lovely voice.

Season closed now in France, and we move into grayling time on Eden. Strange year; contrasts, as always, but this year, so marked. The further degradation of Eden at the hand of ruthless, unfettered, agricultural activity. Pretty soon now, two or three years maybe, we are going to move into the next phase. Call it what it is – destruction, all for the sake of unsustainable agriculture profiting the few. Really, just the few. It sure doesn’t profit most of us, or the wildlife and multiple habitats that are being wiped out. Last Dance. This madness that has enveloped my country, this war we have with nature, such that entire ecosystems are allowed to degrade because of the utterly dismal, brutal escalation of intensive cattle and pig units and sheep grazing on a scale that beggars belief. You don’t notice it, perhaps because the stench of Cumbria has not pervaded as far as where you are. But it will, finally, and also the misery of the modern cattle or pig unit and the degradation of landscape, as awful as the degrading of the human soul that parallels our complicity with such fathomless cruelty.

And yet the utter joy of seeing the saving of rivers, of habitats, of sustainability, and kinder by far, just the other side of the Channel. It is like living two lives, but it feels the wrong way around. I want to be so proud of my country, my time, but I am not. I look to Europe, while I am still a European, and, oh God, the contrasts. The wrong way. What a terrible mistake we are making. And you know, the only difference between us, most of us: it’s just a matter of when we admit it to ourselves. Just a matter of when.

Eden in its death throes: the spring brought us phenomenal, really, phenomenal, big trout, hunting alone out there. The last. They are the only ones that can survive the continuous silt and slurry pollution. Diminished hatches, but hatches all the same, in shrunken waters, and the desperate trout up at them. There were idiots out there, of course, catching these hapless bastions of Eden, and displaying them for our pathetic egos. It was too easy. It is also the way all rivers die. There were so few juveniles, either trout or grayling. Last Dance. The summer brought on the black gnats, and the hatchling trout and grayling came up at them, while the cormorants reaped, clearing out yet more of the adults, before the rain returned to wash in the farm poisons, and the top soil, and diminish the fish and invertebrate populations. I can scarcely comprehend our arrogant stupidity. And to think that anything, anything at all, could be better when we petulantly slap the face of the Europe that gave us so much to protect us from ourselves. Just a matter of time before we all admit to it.

And now, Free Falling, Tom, into the fall, the autumn. Some of my pals are on the San, at a sane edge of Europe, among properly protected forest and an enormous river basin. There are wolves there, and beavers, bison and bears, and trout and grayling, plundering blue winged olive hatches you cannot possibly imagine. Eden; it might not have been so big, but it was equally as valuable, precious, in the context of my country.

Funny, if it wasn’t so disastrously, catastrophically wrong. The end of an ecosystem. The way a river dies. A northern, beautiful, precious river. In England, where there is not much left. And all of us in denial. If not in denial, then struggling, yes struggling, to shout about it and reverse the trend; reverse the inevitable as it closes in on us, on the wonderful River Eden. Artery of Cumbria, poisoned by silt and slurry run-off, banks degraded beyond repair. Almost. Catchment drained to the point way, way beyond hope of stability. Seas of monocultures. Industrialised dairy in the modern intensified farming arena which seems to have been accepted as the norm, the way to go.  And maybe it is, until the bitter end. The brutality of my world. But it is your world too. And it is their world even more: the young and those yet to be born to it. We hardly dare take my fly rod down to the river now. Of course, there are fish to be caught, but it breaks your heart all the same, because you remember, don’t you? How it was not so long ago, before we really gave up on it and just went through the motions, as we do now. But who am I to say that my view, my memory, is any better? Who are you? Who are we, to have this war with nature? You could swallow it if it were not for the hypocrisy. If only we just agreed, accepted, that it’s all fubar and that the profitability of the few is so much more important than anything else. Well, then, that would be fine. Better, anyway. Cards on the table. Better than trying read the tell. Bothering to be angry, to fight. Going along with it, taking what you can, is easier, right? Along with seven billion of our disgusting species, all trying to get their bit.

‘Lighten up, Jez!’

‘Come back to me,’ she asks. And because it is her, I can.

Because of the memories, which are sacrosanct.

And we can still make new ones.

And the French chalk is still such a treasured place, in our times, now.

And then, it can all get messy again.

Of course, there are those out there who want to do it all down. So be it. Their world is so much the smaller. Best, finally, to ignore them and… just get on with it. Busy, but how I want it to be. An English interlude. Cumbria, Yorkshire, Lancashire. Now, there’s a mixture; while at times you feel you’re in foreign lands, though it is, finally, all England. For me, it is, still, all about England. My England. Perhaps the England of the 40s when England was gloriously great, or the 80s, where, when, I admit to still live.

The Five Nations Fly Fishing Championships, 2017, though, on the Ribble, and Stocks reservoir, and I saw some great competitiveness here on the river, which was gaspingly low after the spring and early summer we have had. But they sorted it out. Marvellous England performances on the river, from the likes of Tony Baldwin, winning his session after desperate lake sessions; young Tom Gott, blasting to a session win on the Ribble; Harry Fox, the ‘one man’, catching a fish in each of his four sessions, which was something of a feat. Magnificent. As was Tom Speak’s fishing on the river; really, almost faultless with nymph and dry fly. Almost, and so elegant – yet blanking here. It is so unjust. It will though, finally, come to him. It will. It does. Just keep doing what you are doing my young friend, and it will come to you. And the French. It has come to them. It came many years ago, and they keep showing us. Keep giving. Some of my countrymen notice, watch and learn. Some. Like my old team mate, Simon Kidd; England team captain: Sure, the French stole it, with magnificent fishing on the river with size 24 plume tips, flat over the back, with solid enough performances on the lake to see them through. But Team England – we’re getting there. We really are. I have more faith in, and understanding of, what we are doing now than at any time since – well – since I was fighting for survival in great England teams of the 1990s and 2000s. Anyway, you come through it, after waiting for her.

Like my daughter, Ellie, who has come through shocking, desperate times, to deliver us all back to when we can all enjoy life again. Really, just six months post liver transplant, Ellie has just won five medals in the British Transplant Games,including a gold medal in the 1500 metres – my stunning, brave girl, showing us all how to live (and son-in-law, Paul, trashing the 5K donor race). Yep, that’s living. That’s getting a life.

And so with Fred Bainbridge; stranded, misunderstood, on the edge of English competitive fly fishing. So what does he do? Well, he only becomes England National Rivers Champion. That’s what! And gives me the chance of managing him in next year’s river international on the Ure, North Yorkshire. That’s what. A statement, n’est ce pas! And I have Jonathan Barnes back in as team reserve, with an exciting mix of great England talent making up the rest of the team, including Gilliaum, whom I remember coaching on the Eden, not so very long ago, introducing him to some of the vagaries, the tortures, of the river craft. On Eden. This is the England Rivers Team, 2018. Yes, we are getting there. We are coming back. Sure, what comes next is probably going to be the toughest challenge yet. So, let’s bring it home now, boys. International competitive fly fishing. Let them trash it as much as they like. Some of them have let it go, because they couldn’t hold on to it. You know. I know. Let’s bring it back home.

So, calmer, on Eden today in the rain. Beautiful Eden. The last of England, of English rivers, almost… After spate, falling, clearing, and the trout re-materialising, up to the Oppo, snatching at the PTN, Eden stunners, and best of all, finally, rising to mixed upwing species and coming to the plume tip.

I love it still.

It was a long time coming, but finally, I managed my England team in the 2017 IFFA Rivers International on the delightful River Ebbw in South Wales. I am so grateful to have had this experience. It has shown me just what it is I have missed since I retired from team selection, back in 2009. It allows me to live it all again, with great anglers, to be at the frontier of our sport. Seeing all the old faces again, a little older, but also meeting some of the new. The stalwart; my ‘professional gentleman’ friend, Ian Campbell, IFFA International secretary. All my friends, all the history, my magnificent team, this moment in Wales… Yes, it has been like coming home.

30 degree plus heat met the teams (this after months of prep through the spring), and a shrunken river. Nothing new here, though. I recall that internationals were seldom as you imagined they would be, or fished in great fishing conditions. This is not the point. I had forgotten how tired I have become seeing all those trout caught, and sickeningly displayed, like medallions, by those who can choose their time on the river. In internationals, at this level, it is never like this. Even so, 251 trout were caught by the 20 competitors (five from each nation) on the day of the international, the 23rd June. Each and every one of these was returned alive, no worse for its experience, to the river, having been measured by the controller and having experienced about 10 seconds airtime. This one came in practice, to a plume tip, and had five seconds airtime! Absolutely no pause for a photo in the international.

Think of that: an average of over 12 fish per angler, through the difficult time of day, in water of wildly varying type and productivity. Make no mistake; these fly fishers, at this level, are simply outstanding in the exercising of their great skills. I think they have now gone to the next level with nymph fishing, beyond what we could do in the early years of French leader. I don’t think we have moved on with dry fly, on the river, at anything like the same rate; but then the Spartan simplicity of ultra sparse CDC flies and the ultimate refinement of ultra thin fly lines are right now changing everything there, as the leader did with nymph fishing.

And in any case, the pragmatism and experience of the modern international competitor, utilises all the methods, seamlessly. In the morning I watched Rob Bending, Team Wales, working his way up a section which one of my team, Jonathan Barnes, would fish in the afternoon. This is Jon, with Steve (about to go into a demo for us) and Harry, our great team reserve. Oh, the temp was 33 degrees at this moment. I watched as Rob switched rod and method according to the water type and conditions, working upstream. It was a breathtaking example of pragmatic, international level fly fishing. He came to a spot we as a team had earlier identified as prime dry fly water (meaning you were only going to extract the best out of it with dry fly). Rob switched rods at precisely the moment that I would have done so, going dry – three casts before the perfect one was made, and he tapped into a 45cm wild brown which he coaxed into the net fifty metres downstream of where he had hooked it. Here he is, fish netted, charging upstream towards his controller, and the team win.

Awesome performance, Team Wales. Strong leadership by manager Paul Jenkins, and, son, Kieron, as captain. But then, you were never going to be beaten on your river. It was always going to be about who came second. Team England did not have a good draw, but they went in resolutely and simply made the best of it. At the lunch time break we were firmly in the wooden spoon position. I was devastated. All this work, all this effort, from those who deserved so much better. I had watched one of my team, Fred Bainbridge, fish a section better than, well, I could possibly have fished it myself. Without leaving anything, anything, behind,catching five trout that I would not have caught, not all of them, and you? Steve Cullen had drawn miserable water. He had done everything, and more, and taken two total immersions. Andy Ford, on what we regarded as the worst section of the entire 10 miles of river had saved the blank in both morning sessions. World Class, Andrew Scott admitted to what he saw as a tactical error in his first session, but had peerlessly demolished his second. Jon had a nightmare on, yes, the second-worst water we had identified. Wild West Street, Caravan.

But then, the turning point. There is always a turning point. Fred: ‘right, I’m off to win it now; I’m gonna destroy it’, he growled. Andrew: ‘I can’t believe I was outdone in that first session…’ Suddenly, after the shock of knowing our position, everyone felt the same way. The desire to turn it around was palpable. I watched it infect the whole team. And they went out and produced a typical, great England ‘last ditch’, effort which did indeed turn it all around. Steve bringing a good trout to his controller in the third session.

For all the teams a mixture of nymph fishing techniques was the ‘percentage’ approach, although dry fly was certainly significant. John Barnes drew water in the afternoon where Ireland’s Eamon Conway (below)had taken twenty trout in the morning, on nymph, including the biggest fish of the international, at 56.3cm, so Jon had to resort to searching the lower part of this beat for any fish which might not be spooked or had not been caught. He saw five rising trout through his two sessions in the afternoon. He rose every one of them, and netted four. Meanwhile Fred and Andrew were winning their sessions and Andy Ford (below in a practice session), again on mediocre water, at best, managed a high placing in his final session.

Even so, I did not know if we had done enough, right up to the moment when Ian Campbell came out of a lengthy evening session working on the score cards, to tell me that we had taken second place by a mere placing point from the Scots, who in turn had pushed Ireland into fourth place by a single placing point. This was a stunning result really; a great Team England performance and I am enormously proud to have been a part of it.

The team, from L to R: Jonathan Barnes, Andy Ford, Fred Bainbridge, Steve Cullen, Andrew Scott, with brilliant (and apparently very good looking) reserve, Harry Fox.

Lovely time with my team (England River Team, 2017) on the Ebbw in South Wales. I cascade back through the years while I am with them, back to happy, exciting times, when we seemed to be at the frontier of our sport. Our passion. In beautiful places. It is so fulfilling, and something of an eye-opener. You might think that nothing really changes, that there are just tiny, incremental changes and developments. In the main, I suppose, this is how it is, but believe me, out here, on the frontier of possibilities, the paradigm is shifting. ‘The shit shifts’, as one of my boys put it. There was a time when experience was enough, when time with dry fly technique on the river could see you through; well, it did for me. Plume tip and medium olive (and Sunray Volition two weight prototype and presentation line), Ebbw, May 2017.And if you could learn how to nymph properly, sans indicator, or (perhaps with the suggestion of an indicator section) French leader, then you were up at the next level. Enough of us in England learned how to do it, such that we were among the best in the world at it – the little, rarefied world of competitive fly fishing for trout and grayling. But then, of course, they all caught up, and most of them passed us by; passed on. The French and the Czechs, in particular.

The Ebbw is a gorgeous river, tributary of the Usk/Severn system, essentially recovered from the massive coal mining pollution of a bygone age, and probably not suffering the same nitrate and phosphate agricultural damage as most (all?) English rivers.I caught beautiful trout here, on the plume tip.

Oh yes, there is pollution, in the form of greenhouses disposed of in the river, and rubbish bags hurled over river-side walls, and… But the river is alive. Heavy hatches of up-wings of at least four species; midges and dance flies galore.

And wonderful, wild trout in abundance. Oh, how I wish that Eden was not so horrifically damaged, and was repaired to the state of this little Welsh river. Just one more example of what has gone so terribly wrong in England, in comparison with rivers elsewhere, anyway. Ah, but there are those, the majority(?), and the influential in their high, secure positions, who are in denial. Their egos, their own agenda. Finally, their ignorance. Dare I say it – yes, sounds like the political class of 2017, taking us over the edge into the abyss. But they are wrong and one day, will seen to be wrong.

Even among housing estates, industrial estates and road networks (it all beats farms when it comes to healthy rivers), the Ebbw is a delight. Down at water level, anyway. And the population of trout is certainly healthy, fed by that phenomenal invertebrate abundance.

And – Team England – they are all more photogenic than me, dammit. This is Andy Ford, caught in a moment that belies his phenomenal work rate. Although none of them are so photogenic as these lovely trout.

Hiatus – because I never like writing when I have little to say. What is the point? Though, actually there is a lot I could say, about the Eden; but it is breaking my heart. More of the same, very negative, and I am getting so tired of it. I really, really cannot understand how it is that it has been allowed to be so abused, but there are so few who kick up any fuss, and many more who are in abject denial, or complete ignorance, or have ulterior motive. Yes, you can find fish if you want them, but it is mostly just large trout now, because the smaller fish have been devastated by agricultural pollution and starving flocks of predatory birds. So, I am not going to post pictures of these wonderful fish, because it simply casts the wrong message. It’s just not clever anymore. It’s not cool. Actually, I don’t even want to catch these beautiful animals at the moment. I think we should leave them alone. There, I have said it, now to move on.

Quite a different mood from trout and grayling rivers elsewhere, particularly, for me, the Artois chalk streams where all is so much more upbeat. This is a big grayling on the spawning gravels, on the Aa, which is rather like the upper Itchen was like forty years ago. Like everywhere in Europe, it seems, a comparatively dry winter has been followed by a dry, cold spring, and yet these undamaged chalk streams maintain their clear, cold flow. I am inspired afresh by the conservation efforts in this intensively farmed landscape, because in the main they are working so well. Where damage has been done, it is repaired and not by futile restocking, but by removing the constraints that are doing the damage and then allowing nature to repair and recolonise. Like this: wild brown trout on la Ternoise.
Wildlife corridors, woodland, forests, chalk downland, and beautiful, idyllic chalk streams – not the catastrophe, the nonsense of the English myth of having all the world’s chalk streams – all that matter, anyway. Not even in the 1950s, people. Not even then, when ours were still worth something on the environmental scale of things. In France the chalk streams are as nature created, or restored, recovered, to pretty much the same. All simply overseen by the EU legislation which feeds through to the AAPPMA (which is a national body rather like the EA) for purposes of administering the fishing and protection of the aquatic environment. And I have nothing but praise for this Association and its work. I wish I could show it all to more fishermen, more conservationists, more of the politically powerful. So, I wish you were here, too. You would see it. You need to see it.

Contrasts. In life. In a fly fishing life. Positives and negatives. Too many negatives lately. But positives in France, at least. Here is where I see the hope. Wish I could see it in England, my country. I can see it in Scotland, for goodness sake, because the Scots will surely leave us and rejoin with the beating heart of Europe. That lovely idea of a United Europe, and a United Kingdom. But, again, we will be alone. Alone in the world; 1939 to 1942, where, when, I think I live sometimes. Oh yes, I wish I were there, and I wish you were too. It was a better place. It still exists, in France.

It feels like a reconstruction, a metamorphosis. Certainly a relief; another chance. To have come through this winter, which has been horrid for a number of reasons, to the dawn of another trout season. Yes, a relief. I was out several times on Eden, and caught a few beautiful grayling on the nymph, but my heart is not really in this anymore. Not on Eden anyway, so abused by those who care only for what the landscape can yield them, at any cost. There is nothing, meaningful or effective, to stop them. I fear it is the end of any worthwhile times on Eden and I just cannot find the strength to be in denial, or fight against the inevitable, any longer. This is what we have had all winter; the aftermath of an entire slurry silo release into a tiny feeder beck. The black stain of slurry ran all the way down the Hoff beck to its confluence with the Eden. The spring might change that to an extent, as it usually does, because as the sun, and a new greenness, bathes the valley and surrounding fells, all seems so much better. The pollutions are swept away by spring time rain and the greening of the banks. So, it is difficult to let go of something one has loved for so long.

As always, we are all so excited for the new season, anticipating those first hatches of dark olives and, if the gross slurry pollution (like here in another poisoned feeder stream – notice the grey stream bed) in the system has not finally wiped them out, the famous March Browns. I have a few pals who like to spider the riffles at this time of year, and some of the deeper glides. I prefer to duo with an Oppo and a PTN, searching all depths up to about three feet. Best of all, to me, the Oppo always gives indication as to the readiness of the trout to rise to the surface (more so than the droppers on a spider rig). And if I have a few splashy rises to the dry fly (actually, usually one will do) I usually switch immediately to the plume tip. True to say though, that the trout are focused on the surface at this time of year only when there is a hatch. Otherwise, they seem steadfastly to remain deeper, feeding on sub-aquatic food forms, waiting.

Waiting, like us now. Not so long to go, especially on the French streams, already looking more vital, and at least lacking the farm ravages of the Eden. Clear waters and vestige growth of starwort and crowfoot, banks entangled by alder, willow and hazel, so that there are windows where we can glimpse into the waters, spying its secrets. A lot more bankside this year: the AAPPMA has given access to a stunning parcours on la Ternoise which is strictly fly only and no-kill. This river is a great success story for French fly fishing and habitat restoration. It was overgrazed (not, you understand to anything like the extent that occurs in England) and becoming badly silted. Gravel insertion, substantial cattle fencing and bank protection (mostly by leaving the trees in situ) has had a profound effect, over just a few years. You don’t see many trout. There aren’t many trout, but the wild fish are returning with, now, their biggest threat being cormorants (which remain in ridiculously high numbers, mostly because of the easy pickings from carp lakes and pools in the region), and to a lesser extent the catch and kill angler, of which there are many, though in declining numbers. A sign of the times. I hardly mind that the trout population is, therefore, low. The stream supports what it naturally can. So long as there enough that spawning can be successful. With fish ladders replacing the defunct mills of all these chalk streams, and notably on la Ternoise, salmon and sea-trout are returning in greater numbers, climbing upstream to the restored spawning gravels.

It is alright, isn’t it, to hope again? To find a new hope in landscape. An ecosystem that is still worth something. I find it here on Ternoise, and on Aa and Lys, and all these magical streams of les Sept Vallées in the massive chalk plateau of the southern part of Pas de Calais. Eden, in Cumbria has become a lost hope, a great river system once cherished by many, but now a shadow, and it is certainly not going to recover once the tumour of Brexit results in a loss of the European legislation that has offered at least a little protection from the gathered selfishness that cannot see the value or the beauty that was the Eden valley.

All we had become, all that we had aspired to, and achieved. Then won and lost; all gone, drifted into memory. Just like the Great in Britain, lost in that moment in the referendum where we put ourselves before the beautiful greatness of helping the Europe that needed us, again, the others who needed us – which, finally, is the only thing that ever made my country great. Now it is something different, something in a brave new world that I barely recognise. But this: upper Tees.

And it has to change. Or, at least, if I am to be a part of it, then it has to change. English fly fishing, out there in the competitive arena. Well, a nonsense. Yes, a nonsense, a travesty of what it should be. Could be. Was once, for some brief, treasured moments. I remember. All of it, all the euphoria, the sharing of such moments. You would love it. You would, you know, and you could be a part of it, because we could have it back, again, even though now it seems so far away, so high up – here, on the Vah.

Honestly, really, honestly, what is it now? Is it the time of Skues and Sawyer? Oh, definitive, paradigm shifting, but today; come on. Is it the showmanship of Oliver Kite or Arthur Cove and those thrilling times? Lovely, shining memories, but not even close. Is it what the truly competitive, English greats like Leadbetter and Ogborne offered us? Well, a bit closer, but still so far away from what it can be. I know, because I touched it. Really touched it, and grasped it as one of the foundation stones of my life. 

Here is the bottom line. The question: is it about those Facebook photos, those grip and grin pics that show the world of ‘friends’ just what a fishing genius I am with my conquest – all those beautiful inches – because I’m better than you? Well, is it? Not necessarily a rhetorical question, because for many of you it might just be so. Or, perhaps it is more to do with this special place I once found, where a group of fly-fishers achieve something that is utterly beyond what you thought possible. My team-mate, John Pawson, once said to me, on the cusp of my first World championships – ‘You are part of something that those back home cannot possibly understand. We have a special bond, here, that will never, ever be broken.’ He was right, you know. We went on from there to win the Worlds, in Canada, far from home. I was the highest placed England rod too, the individual bronze – because my team-mates had put me there. I could not possibly have done it without their input, without them, the men, my friends. I was the one with the luck, with the lucky draw, and whatever skills I had in the moment, were honed only by their enrichment. We won the World Championships, because we were a team. Just that. And then, upper Ternoise, northern France.

And what have we now? I scarcely waste the effort to go there. I am embarrassed by recent England fly-fishing team performances, at every level, every discipline, across the gamut. The individual has come before the team and it is there, right there, that the plot was lost. You see, I don’t care about how wonderful you are as a fly-fisher, not, anyway, unless you can give me something, give my wonderful sport something that takes it to the next level. Can you make me smile? Honestly? Because – there are thousands who can do what you and I can do, given the circumstance. What I want is what you can give beyond all that. You see, we have fly-fishers up there with the best in the world, up with the French, Czech, Polish, Spanish… We do. I mean, look at Iain Barr’s smile at the Worlds in Scotland, not so long ago. L’Ecosse, far enough from home, on wild waters, to really count for something. Believe me, this was a great, great performance, by the team that supported Barney to achieve this result, for us. Something to celebrate. I was here, then, in that moment: les Sept Vallées, northern France. I wish I had been with my friend, as we were together the year before, in Norway, and won the silver medal together.

I watch the French, and others, in admiration, mostly… I watch them form a team, make a team, and sometimes it takes my breath away. Sometimes, I can only admire, and then, I wish – so wish – that we all remembered how it was in England. I want that again. Eden, and our few remaining wild rivers, of consequence, are not enough.

I was recently honoured to become the new England rivers team manager. In fact, I see this as being to date simultaneously the single-most overwhelming honour and challenge that I have experienced in my sport. I have been given this chance, this moment, to make the change, to recapture what we lost, years ago. I don’t know how long the moment will last, and if I will really be given enough chance, by you, to take this journey back to the top. Back to where we have something to say. A special place, in this sport that has defined my life. I was here once, with my friends, including someone who could be a world champion, another English world champion. Perhaps. Vah tributary, Slovakia. As Lawrence (of Arabia) said: ‘It is only a matter of going.’ Allons-y.