The Old Man and the Sand Eel

by Will Millard

  I had an interview in London coming up that was within a stone’s throw of the Grand Union Canal. It wasn’t a patch of water I knew very well at all; in fact, I could comfortably count on one hand the amount of times I’d even seen it, but I did know that canals are always a sound bet when the weather is rough.

  Canals had to be constructed to allow for the year-round passage of cargo during Britain’s industrial heyday. The canal engineers certainly couldn’t afford to let a few drops of rain stop traffic, so, with a deliberately even depth and flow provided by numerous manmade gates, locks and drains, you can get far more fishable water in rough conditions; plus, these days, with all the canal boats, low-slung bridges and concrete pilings, there are plenty of features for big perch to hide around and under as well. But the Grand Union Canal? In central London? Really?

  The catch reports I read were very mixed, and in some cases downright dangerous. News articles detailed fishermen who were robbed of all of their gear at knifepoint, and others who had actually been pushed in by thugs looking for a laugh. The perch stories ranged from the ludicrous – one man claiming to have landed a seven-pounder from the Paddington area – to the plausible: a head of three-pounders dwelling somewhere within the deeper locks of Camden. But to get anything more specific than that required a more effective knowledge of code-breaking than the employees of Bletchley Park had.

  I guess I could understand the need for some secrecy. Having put in so much work to locate a fish you wouldn’t then want every jolly perch fisher or poacher from W7 to E6 to descend on your mark and clean up; but some of the anglers had gone to truly ludicrous lengths to hide their knowledge: pictures of giant perch clutched by men who had blurred or blackened the entire background of their image, and others who had even gone so far as to obscure their own faces, as if they were part of a perch-based witness protection programme.

  I didn’t really get it. If you didn’t want people to know where you were fishing then why bother putting up pictures of you with fish on the internet in the first place? Unless, of course, you are just showing off and hyper-inflating your own sense of self-importance by blurring your face and background, in which case, why not go the whole hog and come up with an entirely new social-media profile to complete your disguise, instead of posting with your actual name, actual address and actual school leaver’s details just one mouse click away?

  What really irritated me on all of these blogs, pages and sites was the sheer amount of vitriol reserved for people who did not conform to the rules of the perch-fishing clique. Anglers who posted pictures with specific details of where their fish were caught were slammed for not caring about the welfare of the fish, and those who held their perch with arms outstretched in pride were ridiculed for making their catch appear bigger than it actually was, as if that matters at all at the end of the day. The worst of the wrath, however, was aimed at those who dared post a picture of their catch with a weight that was not deemed plausible by this, extraordinarily sad, minority of armchair anglers.

  I remember one young lad in particular who caught the absolute perch of a lifetime from a town centre pond. It was a fish that looked every inch a record breaker: a glorious, solid-looking perch, which I would happily give away every rod in my household to catch. Doubtless, he was extremely proud of his catch, and, quite reasonably, thought it might be a good idea to post it on the ‘Perch Fishing’ Facebook group. However, for daring to post the location, weight and method of his catch, he was thrown to the virtual lions and torn to absolute shreds.

  Within the hour the picture was gone, as was this boy’s Facebook profile, and no doubt any intentions he may have had to learn more about perch fishing from the adults.

  If it had happened at that boy’s school they would have all been suspended for bullying, but on this platform I’m in no doubt it was pats on the back all round for another job well done. That’s what the internet is all about these days though, isn’t it?

  And so it was as I watched legions of newcomers to the sport turned off for good, derided simply for wanting to publicly celebrate their perch, and feel part of this bizarre little club.

  It had been a while since I had been in London but I felt I knew the city fairly well, having lived here for a year in my mid-twenties, a piece of my own history I shared with Grandad.

  He had actually been part of the engineering team that had helped design the Thames Barrier in the 1970s, a pioneering construction built near Greenwich to stop the city from being flooded in the event of a storm surge or exceptionally high tide; but it’s fair to say Grandad revelled in telling anyone and everyone he met about what a truly miserable place he thought our capital city to be.

  I remember the first time I visited as a teenager, and, on returning to the village, made the huge mistake of relating to him the following comment by a bus driver: ‘In London you are either looking at a shithole or living in one.’ Grandad, I recall, nodded along sagely, as if Buddha himself had crafted this singular piece of crude wisdom. ‘Well,’ he eventually said, ‘he’s right. Lonely too.’

  I swore there and then that I would never go to London through choice, but somewhat inevitably, given the lack of entry-level employment opportunities for a budding Factual Documentarian in the Fens, I ended up in London anyway, and, to my great surprise, absolutely fell in love with the place.

  London, despite its faults, is one of the greatest cities on Earth, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. For me, by day, it may have been: ‘I simply can’t understand why you’re still stood in shot and not bringing our sandwiches’, but by night I was free to enjoy deliberately long strolls home in the darkness, through the buzzing Caribbean markets of Shepherds Bush, along the Royal Parklands, and down past the glitzy West London casinos where I watched Manny Pacquiao knock out Ricky Hatton live from the MGM Grand, and once lost a month’s wages in just twenty minutes.

  For a young man from a small village simply living in London was like getting my own star on the Hollywood Boulevard. I could not believe I was living in the capital and seeing instantly familiar sights like Tower Bridge, Big Ben and Piccadilly Circus with my own eyes and not just on TV. It was the sheer scope and cultural diversity of the place that truly blew my socks off though.

  ‘London isn’t a place at all. It’s a million little places,’ commented Bill Bryson, and I have to say I wholeheartedly agree. I feasted on all the pleasures to be had by throwing myself fully into this city’s life and began to wonder if Grandad had simply been overwhelmed by it all.

  Of course, it isn’t fair to write anywhere off with a sweeping statement, but having now lived in several big cities I have to say they can dish up a very special brand of isolation if you let them.

  When faced with such diversity, opportunity and choice, to be incapable of seizing any of it for yourself, through no fault of your own, is to feel like the loneliest leper in the colony. The city then becomes the problem, and will provide evidence for your chosen prejudice wherever you wish to seek it out.

  As much as I loved and appreciated all the parklands in London it never once occurred to me that I might be able to fish the canals. In my mind they were irredeemably dirty, the haunts of pimps and muggers and certainly not places to be spending any of my free time in. Whenever I peered into them I saw not near limitless opportunity to fish, but waste and weed, beer bottles and piss; an environment devoid of any life worth looking for.

  It’s extraordinary looking back to think how easily I turned my back on fishing that year, and so it was that the delights of the Grand Union Canal remained hidden from me, until today.

  My alarm sounded at a little past 6 a.m. I was staying with friends right out in East London. Ordinarily this would pose a real barrier to a day’s fishing in the city centre, as just the thought of piling on the Underground during rush hour with all my fishing tackle is enough to give me heart palpitations, but that is the beauty of LRF: no one would even have to know.

  Just what do you wear for an intervie
w when you know you’re going to spend the rest of the day fishing? I suppose the obvious answer would be to favour whichever of the two activities is more important to you and dress accordingly; but that’s a dangerous path for me to be walking down and one I suspected wouldn’t ever lead to an economically sustainable future, so I had opted for a halfway house: fishing trousers paired with a smart shirt and my fishing jacket to go on top, but within moments of boarding the Tube it becomes apparent that I have got it very wrong indeed.

  In the bright light I realize I had been happily spraying Lynx Africa deodorant over what is quite obviously a large circular patch of fish slime on the breast of my jacket: I smell like a teenage boy who has just rolled along the floor in a fishmonger’s and then stuck a shirt on.

  We pause at Stratford and my aroma wafts in and out of the doors as commuters stream on. A few people scrunch up their noses in disgust, so I do the same, with a shifty sideways glance in an attempt to palm the smell off onto some other unfortunate on the Tube.

  Thankfully I’m ignored. Smells on the Tube are simply another inconvenience to add to the thousands of others these Londoners will have to face down today.

  I wonder who else here might want to go fishing for a half-hour and what a difference it could make to their day. We pull into Liverpool Street station and dozens of smartphones flicker into life. Emails are coming in. Even down in this hole you can’t escape work. These people don’t actually have half an hour: they are 24/7 slaves to their emails and work.

  I’ve been in those offices. You procrastinate through half the day but wouldn’t dare admit you could get your work done in half the time; you eat your lunch at your desk and then wait to be the last person to leave at the end of the day; you send emails in the middle of the night to give the impression of diligence, when in fact all you’re doing is confirming your total servitude to a group of overlords who’ll never even notice the extra hours you put in.

  We’re losing out on our leisure time right across British cities and largely it’s a problem of our own making. I moved from this city, worked fewer hours, got out more, and surprisingly got a lot more work done as a result.

  Capping the mind-bending and inefficient seventy- to eighty-hour weeks made me much more focused when I was in work, and much happier when I wasn’t. I was largely getting to do what I wanted to do outside of work (which was fish) and I slept much better due to the increase in physical activity and fresh air.

  I’m determined to prove that it is still possible to go into work, even in our capital city, and find some time to fish somewhere nearby; but it doesn’t even need to be fishing – you can do whatever you want to do with your time as long as it’s not illegal and you’re back in work on time. The only thing I ask is that if you are a boss employer that you don’t read this to mean that I’m promoting the idea of fishing in the lunch break purely to increase productivity for your company: this is about my readers escaping your clutches during the break they richly deserve; it’s for them, about them, and your work doesn’t come into it – in fact I recommend you try it out for yourself as long as it doesn’t become an official ‘work outing’, ‘a team-bonding exercise’ or something else as excruciatingly lame.

  A man spots my rod so I give him a little smile. He looks at me with large, doleful, baggy eyes: ‘Get me out of here,’ they plead.

  My interview finishes at a very agreeable time. I think it went well: they didn’t once mention the smell from my jacket and I reckon they thought the fishing gear was actually pretty charming.

  Stepping out of the shiny glass building and onto the Euston Road it’s clear I’m not going to get everything my way today. The heavens open and it starts pitching it down hard. Clearly, Storm Barney hasn’t let us go yet. I pull my cap over my eyes and head towards King’s Cross station.

  In keeping with most areas around major train stations the world over, the immediate vicinity of King’s Cross is truly one of London’s grimmest areas. It really shouldn’t be – the station itself is full of Victorian splendour with its neat bricks, grand arches and glass façade, and just down the road is the equally stunning St Pancras Renaissance Hotel and British Library, but the fast-food restaurants, ugly coffee shops, horns, sirens and shouting give it a feel of a place where people would only ever wish to arrive or leave.

  Moments later I felt like I was in an entirely new city. The black atmosphere diminished with every squelching step I took down York Way; there was water around here for sure, and it had already cast its comforting net wide down this street.

  I pop my head over a low wall, hoping to spot it, but only find rows of parked trains. A little further on I spy the unmistakable shape of a bridge, but it’s got traffic piling over it and doesn’t look like a particularly inviting spot for my first look at the canal. You can’t mess up your first approach to water. It has to feel right; you’ve got to give your patch space to display itself in its best finery – otherwise you might find yourself writing the water off prematurely and miss out on something truly special.

  I take the next right down a narrow alley. I’ll catch her out further downstream. Soon I’m passing behind a posh business building, and there, at the alley’s end, the world opens out splendidly into wonderful calm water. This is Battlebridge Basin. Victory.

  It is hemmed in on all sides by up-market housing developments and the noise from King’s Cross is totally suppressed here, leaving this blissful oasis jutting fully 150 metres inwards from the main flow of the canal.

  It’s wide too, fifty metres across I later learn, and, better yet, it has relatively little weed and no obvious ‘no fishing’ signs: the perfect place to have my first speculative cast.

  I extend my telescopic travel rod and check the sharpness of the hook point by gently pressing it against the cuticle of my thumbnail. There are not many places to actually cast a clean line. The rows of brightly coloured canal boats on the far side look well worth a chuck, but on this bank I’ve got about fifteen metres of the alley end and a covered walkway leading across a marbled floor at the back of an architectural firm. Still, fifteen metres is better than nothing, and there is at least enough room to put a couple of long casts into the centre of Battlebridge Basin, and probably a couple more along the weeping brickwork running along the water’s edge.

  I’d better get on with it, at any rate; I’m being eyeballed suspiciously by a security guard with biceps like coiled ropes.

  The grass minnow plops into the drink and the time it takes to settle on the bottom tells me that this place is a hell of a lot deeper than it looks. From this point on, I’m fishing on faith and feel.

  The braided line and soft rod are incredible; I twitch the minnow through the water and can feel every single bump, nook and cranny, as I make my first retrieve. The rain pours on the surface, flattening it and obscuring any potential signs of schooling baitfish, but I don’t mind that at all as the water is painfully clear so a bit of natural cover plays into my hand and obscures my outline.

  I’m going to have to box clever today. There’s no point taking all my time to cover every single inch of water: the fish are either there or they’re not. I need to target specific features: something that casts a shadow and makes its residents feel safe. A couple of tries in each spot and then move on; accuracy, a methodical retrieve and determination are the keys to success here.

  I can’t be a river snob either; the perch in this canal are just as likely to be living inside a car tyre as in a bank of reeds; it’s only us humans who get really fussy about the look of our real estate.

  I fish between the canal boats, right along a thick ribbon of duck weed, under my first bridge, round a submerged traffic cone and along the length of a flat-bed trolley. No luck, but I’ve got to stay confident. Crossing a road out of the Basin I pass a sign giving fishing the thumbs-up and immediately feel buoyed. This place just feels right for a fish.

  The next likely feature is another bridge right opposite the King’s Cross Theatre. I’m goi
ng to be leaping from bridge to bridge like a troll today. The rain clearly isn’t going to stop so they’ll be my only possible shelter, but the artificial darkness will also appeal greatly to the perch.

  A couple of speculative casts into the murk bring my first proper take, but it’s short-lived: a single spirited headshake sees the hook easily disgorged. A pity, but a positive sign for sure. I must be doing something right.

  I try again, taking care to slow my retrieve right down, and this time the hook finds something far more solid: but this is no fish.

  I heave hard and get nothing back bar unyielding resistance. Obviously I’ve hooked into a heavy piece of solid waste: a trolley, a washing machine or perhaps something more sinister? I try and change my angle but there is still no give. This will have to be my first donation to the canal then. I snap the braided line under the strain.

  The very best of fish live in the hardest places to catch them. Of course they do; they’ve grown in age and weight by being canny feeders, avoiding bigger predators, and picking the best spots to ambush food, but here that doesn’t mean supple tree roots or the soft tendrils from an overhanging bush – this is solid city centre litter dumped off the bridges by the lazy and feckless, in short: a tackle graveyard.

  Another cast yields another aborted take, but this extra scrap of evidence allows me to narrow down the size and location of the fish.

  It’s a small perch for sure, hidden somewhere tight against the heavily graffitied far wall. There’s no walkway over there so it is clear of human debris, but right in the middle of the canal is a ceiling fan and a billowing white sack. It’s a tough cast. I steady myself. I reckon I’ve got one more crack at this before the little fish spooks for good.

  ‘Any luck, mate?’ comes a thick West African accent from over my shoulder. I turn to meet a large man in full train guard uniform, his head topped with an immaculate black cap.