December fishing blog

 

I generally don’t do a lot of fishing in December as I am too busy doing a lot of working, Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat as they say!

December is a strange month in that the restaurant trade is very busy with people that only eat out once or twice a year and as such these people are not always the easiest to accommodate in their requests, I have had in the past for instance a young man that wanted a burger for his Christmas dinner…Not really the done thing but he got his wish, it still cost him £25 though…I cannot let people have seats and sell them a five quid burger when I have turned away £25 punters.

One thing that I will say to all those out there that don’t eat very well and choose to stick to what they know..Live a little!

Food is a blessing, we have to eat to live, food is an adventure, don’t stay on the well trodden path, live a little trust the chefs and go cross country, we will take you on a wild ride if you let us!

Unless you have a food allergy try something new and exiting when you go out this year, instead of having the turkey go for the venison or the lamb or the Sea Bass…go wild, let your hair down and go for it!

Trust the chefs…they are generally quite good at what they do…and if you do enjoy what you  have eaten ask to see the chef, congratulate him or her and give them the “tip” because quite often the waiter or waitress that has simply carried the plates from A to B will pocket the lot and the actual people that do 75% of the work will get nothing. Look after the chefs, they make the magic happen!

 

UK’s first 10lb chub…Bollocks!

As I have said many times, I can really talk some proper bollocks when it comes to fishing and I mean proper bollocks but the front page headline on this weeks Anglers Mail is taking the gold medal for bollocks. 

Don’t get me wrong, the fish in question is a banger but on the left is my own personal best fish of 7lb 4oz and mine is bigger than the one in the papers …It is bigger and it is two and three quarter pounds lighter…

So somewhere along the lines somebody is talking some bollocks!

I know that they say all news is good news but the AM is doing itself no favours by going with the headline of “Britain’s first 10lb chub”

It isn’t a 10lb chub, therefore the headline is misleading and everyone that has purchased the paper feels cheated, it is akin to buying the Sunday Sport only to find that there are no Lancaster bombers on the moon, the entire story is a manifestation of crap!

I have no doubt that there are a few very very big chub in that part of the Thames and some may well scrape the double but this fish isn’t one of them. I feel cheated.

I am now in no rush to purchase the AM again, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me…there will be no twice.

A day in the mud!

Martin Womble and me went down to Collingham at the weekend, the plan was to fish a few hours into dark trying for barbel and zander but it all went wrong when the car came off the top of the flood bank and got stuck in mud…

A word of warning. It has been raining, the banks are soft, be very aware of the dangers that these conditions present and take appropriate precautions!

We were very lucky as some friends of ours managed to raise a local farmer that dragged us out of a very sticky situation with his tractor…If it wasn’t for the tractor we would probably still be there.

Be careful!!!

The ups and downs of being a Fishing Face

Facebook is the devil, its so bloody powerful it has the ability to make or break people, last week I saw a side of Facebook that was dark and it involved a mate of mine, Bob Roberts, now I am not going to try to defend Bob as he is big enough and old old enough to be able to defend himself  but I will start by saying that I like Bob, we go back a fair few years now and generally we get along just fine even though as people we are as chalk and cheese, I don’t know if I am the chalk one or the cheese one but we are different on almost every level imaginable, which is a good thing as uniformity is against nature as it stagnates the gene-pool and prevents evolution.

Bob is Bob and he likes to say things as he sees them and sometimes he likes to hear himself say them, I don’t always agree with him because at times I think he is quite wrong but I will defend his right to say them as the freedom of speech  is a greatly undervalued privilege but also as debate fires development as it invites opposing opinions to interact on subjects, it is no good for everyone to be yes men because it retards evolution.

But this isn’t a section on evolution this is a section about Facebook and the downside of being a “Face”, Bob attracts a fair few detractors (just as I do), some say he is too arrogant and pompous, some say he is too negative, some say he is just a self-promoter.

All fair points I say. In fact I would say that most of those are good qualities to have…Seriously they are!

Arrogance,  let’s look at what being arrogant means, it means that the person being arrogant has achieved a certain level of skill that warrants  self confidence in ones abilities, they are better than 90% of people in their field of expertise. Now this can be faked, people can be naturally arrogant but if they lack the actual skill sets to warrant the arrogance these people will soon be found out to be “Billy-Bullshitters” and their credibility is blown. Then on the opposite side of the spectrum are those really irritating people that display false modesty, I hate false modesty as it is just so bloody fake. If you are good at something you are good at it, the end. This leaves the rightfully “arrogant” person a fine line to walk in life so that they seem neither fake nor overbearing. It is hard being good at something and keeping a long and unblemished “friends” list and if anyone can do it I would be grateful of a little advice on how it is done because I myself can at time seem a little bit arrogant and I know it does wind people up a bit.

Negativity, is all about perspective and perspective is massive, some people are natural optimists and always see the glass as half full and some people are pessimists and see the glass as half empty, I see neither, my perspective is different to 90% of other people as I see the glass being banned under Health and Safety issues and replaced with fully recycled and recyclable plastic alternative but I also see the half a beer within the glass replaced  with a non-alcoholic substitute that complies to Halal certification. I am however generally a rather positive person in my outlook….Sorry…I just had to have a little break there whilst I stopped laughing at myself. Sometimes I really do write some proper bollocks...let’s continue, I see things that others choose not to, I see a time when we will not be worried about the silverfish content of out local rivers or the potential for a record barbel.

I see things as they will be, in the short term, populations of fish will fluctuate and be cyclical in their nature but humanity will continue to increase exponentially. Everyone will want a washing machine, everyone will take a shit in the morning and pull the flush, everyone will want a drink, a shower, a bath, to wash their hair their arse and their armpits, people will want to have a green lawn if they have enough money to own a home or even a green roof ! …and the water will have to come from somewhere and to compound this our waste will need to be accommodated.

take for example the River Don at Doncaster, by the time it reaches that point it is 75% recycled sewerage effluent, which means for the most part you have either pissed it, flushed it, sat in it soaking or washed your pants in it. That is the future. The future is a time and place where water is too valuable a commodity to concern yourself about fish numbers. So it doesn’t really matter one iota if you think the chub on the Trent will get bigger or if the Roach at Lochnaw have topped out because in 50 years time there will be no angling, so stop planning the next phase of angling by looking at data from the past, it is called the past because it is past, it is history, look to the future and if you don’t like whats coming do something about it.

Self-Promotion.  I was an ugly boy at school with a face like an under-cooked pepperoni pizza that had been blasted with a shotgun and if truth be told I have made a less than stunning adult, I  have lost the best part of my hair, in fact I have more hair on my back than I have on my head and I have as many chins as Jabba the Hut and they are sat under a face that few people could love for its aesthetic appeal, in short, I am not a good looking bloke.

And I know it.

BUT what I have is all I have got so I had  better make the most of it. Like the old saying goes you cannot make a silk purse out of a sows ear” What I add on to that is ” But you can make some fantastic pork scratching’s out of them though”

This is realism and this point of view was forged within the white hot heat of my first interactions with a female that was a fair bit older than myself when I was sent away by college to finish my catering education. Working at the DeMontfort Hotel I met an older woman that used me like a dirty dish-cloth for a month or two, it was a bloody steep learning curve and an experience I will always cherish because it gave me many “life lessons” most of which I cannot repeat but two of the most important ones to me have been” You will never be the best looking bloke in the room but if you can get a girl to laugh you can get her to take her cloths off” ( luckily for me my wife Tina found me rather amusing shortly after we met) and “If you don’t sell your own tickets don’t expect anyone else to sell them for you”

So why should’t a person be a self promoter?

Nobody else is going to roll up out of the blue and make the break for you, you get out of life what you put in and if you are going to make the effort to put in you have to promote your product. You get your face seen and your voice heard.

But it is a two-way interaction because if you don’t like the product Bob sell’s, be it his articles or his DVD’s you only have to put your own product out and push that, that is the great thing about it, we can model what our sport looks like on so many levels by simply inputting our own material but this does take effort and a great deal of work.  This year I have had three articles published, Bob has probably had thirty or forty, has anyone any concept of how bloody difficult it is to put out that much material? Editors need content, the angling media economy is a black-hole and it needs content continually.

But if you think the content of the angling media is shite, input some content, be that to a magazine, a newspaper, a website or even a television channel or YouTube channel. It has never been so easy as it is today to get stuff “out” all it takes is hard work and commitment and a thicker than average skin to take the flack that will be incoming as soon as you pop your head over the wall.

Just don’t moan because all you see are the same faces week in week out quoting the same opinions week in week out, send some stuff off and change the world.

Norovirus

What a fucking whirlwind that was!

Sixteen or so hours, I lost count, of uncontrollable vomiting followed by the resulting aches of having strained oneself to the point I feared I was actually going to draw some turds up from the depths of my guts…or at least lose part of my liver.

Seriously I have never vomited like that in my life and can see why it does kill older people that are more prone to dehydration or even the shock of such a fast onset violent sickness, if that is Norovirus, I don’t ever want ebola is all I can say!

But Noro Virus and the all new fashionable killer on our streets ebola are rank amateurs when it comes to seeing people off and putting them in a box, the big daddy of them all is influenza, that bad boy kills millions every year!

It always make me laugh when people say ” Oh, I have had a touch of flu” You don’t have a touch of flu just as you don’t have a dap of leprosy or a tickle of bubonic plague, no, flu grabs hold of you by the throat and sticks the nut on you until you fall into your bed where you stay until it has had enough fun kicking the living daylights out of you, sometimes it has so much fun it kicks you to death and it does so laughing all the way. Flu is evil. Flu is not a cold.

And then there were two!

UKIP MP’s that is and with that goes the core of the anti-UKIP argument, UKIP now has parliamentary representation!

And why is it? Why has UKIP gained so much so fast?

It is because UKIP strikes a chord with the average everyday man and woman on the street that is sick and tired of being mocked for feeling that they have been sold down the river and that their natural and normal patriotic feelings are something to be ignored or even sneered at.

The wretched sneering labour MP that was forced to resign showed exactly how Labour views the working men and women of Britain, they view them with contempt, they feel that they are relics. dinosaurs, something to hide away from view, an embarrassment and as for what Ed Milliband had to say on the subject, pathetic, the man should know when to shut his mouth, pure unadulterated patronising drivel from a man that would not know a British working class lifestyle if it were to jump up and hit him in the face.

How can he understand something he has no connection to or concept of?

Ed Millibands father Ralph Milliband was a “Polish” Jew that fled Belgium to avoid annihilation at the hands of Nazi Germany but rather than be grateful of a safe haven the left-wing Marxist wretch wrote this “The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world … When you hear the English talk of this war you sometimes almost want them to lose it to show them how things are”

Ralph Milliband hated the very idea of Britain and Ed Milliband is an apple that has not fallen far from the tree.

Unfortunately politics is full of people that hate the very concept of Britain, they want Britain to be devolved and reassembled as part of a greater European project and this is something that they have been working on for many years taking away our power to govern ourselves in tiny almost imperceptible increments and it is this that people are finally starting wake up to and rail against.

And long may this awakening continue!!!

It is time we rid ourselves of these self serving parasites that would say anything for a vote and got real people in positions of power, people that will do as they are bid, in the interest of the nation.