Green Flag.
Before 8am I sit in a coffee shop (where have all the caffs gone?) with what passes for breakfast, an ersatz fry-up toastie plus coffee (Italian for coffee? Go to Italy, they have the mutt’s knuts, coffee-wise) and I look at the décor - a basket of baguette slices - and think, "they'd make good floating baits".
In some Cambridge industrial estate, from the customer's coffee room, I look into the lake, clear water and leave hooks in my conversation for the other anglers and get a small bite, telling me there's rudd and a few carp, but the other lake in the middle has even more rudd and they're worth a look from the ornamental bridge. Always good to hear about rudd...
...behind the Holiday Inn in Basildon there's a lake and 10 minutes into a completely dud meeting, I'm struggling not to watch the right sort of warming wind chopping the water against the far left hand corner, where I know there'll be something to catch...
...on the A34 at Beedon, just off the southbound exit, there is a small water hole: storage, irrigation, something like that; years old, 20 at least. I'd always wondered about it holding fish and even at 1am, as I pass it in the dark, I wonder still. The Kennet at Newbury then; Stockbridge, with its Test-threaded pavements and bread-fed, illegal immigrants. Then the Bourne, the Avon, the Ebble, the Stour, nearly home...
...my day's guide and myself leave Santiago and its statue of Cervantes and, due to a refuelling detour, we cross the Rio Minho at Valenç by the old international bridge and my guide is telling me about how his parents used this bridge for crossing when he was a child, and how there used to be a street market at the bridge end; I store this for later while I'm really looking at the river and wondering about the swirling possibilities below. The fortress with its thick-faced walls and banks, though, is both extraordinary and imposing, built to withstand and repel, an impassive 'by invitation only' statement for the Spaniards of old...
...then at the regular restaurant, well past lunch hour, someone else's phone call meanders, so I lean over the car park dry stone wall and on the other side at the bottom of a cut is a familiar pond, but today earth is being bulldozed towards the water, which ripples as dry soil slides down the new scree-slope. When the dump-truck departs for more infill and the sliding mass skitters to a halt, the reeds still flicker and wave, panicking fish in a shrinking world, buried before the end of the day.
Dropped at Oporto, time to squander in this most sterile of airports, I walk outside, away from the terminal and lean against a concrete bastion, one end of the half arch/half beam that supports the roadway above and let the sun warm my face. It's not quite spring, in the UK at least, but in Portugal it's warm and the roads are green lined and I don't need much of a leap to imagine a favourite swim with long grass, a fresh green smell, a slightly metallic scent of budding blackthorn either side and new pads swaying with heavy shapes below them. I'll overtake Jack-o'-the-Green on the flight back though. After a while I go back into the glasshouse, start up the big technology and fill out a holiday form. Warm enough before the close season for a couple of days among the spring shoots and the early risers, after Jack's been around the lake to wake it. Yeah...
...on the metal tube home, the first track out of the small technology is J.J.Cale's "The Old Man and Me". What are the odds? (1 in 1852).
