So the good people of WordPress have given me a gong. It looks like this. It is nice to have eight years marked. But to be honest I thought it was longer. Oh well, that makes me feel younger.
Apologies for rambling, I have just watched an extraordinary game of football between England and Belgium. Is that an excuse? You may need to be a football person (note the fashionable gender neutrality, whose trend-ability I’ve just impinged by referencing, oh well) to understand how it might be, i.e. how such a football match can scramble the mind somewhat. But since we’re talking about football (you saw what I did there?) for me it was the moment, as an Englishman, when I thought we might have ‘won’ the World Cup. Why? Because we did something very un-English. We lost our innocence. We did. (There is a little way to go as we meet the dangerously unpredictable Colombia on Tuesday night, but through guile and a bit of luck we have opened up a clear path to something that hasn’t happened in my lifetime, and I’m quite old these days, or at least 1966 was the year before I was born anyway).
Apologies for the stream of consciousness. But at least, unlike a literary hero of mine, James Joyce, I punctuate it. And it’s not as long as those chapters in Ulysses (a book that took me exactly one year to read; worth it though).
Meanwhile, here is a fish of 29lb being lifted up above the waters of the River Gaula on beat E2 in Kval, in Norway’s Trondelag. It was caught about a week ago. The guide (on the right) is Simon Kitcher. He is a good egg, and, as it happens, an Englishman. A geography teacher, in fact, back in Albion, who spends his long holiday out in Norway each year. I wonder if he also will be supporting Gareth and the boys about two thousand miles to the east in Moscow on Tuesday night.
Light showers lightly dampen the southern uplands of Scotland and water dribbles into arid burns and dissipates before it even enters the river. High pressure holds sway over the land. This is the arena of a July fishing week on the Nith.
It couldn’t be world famous fashion designer John Rocha could it, out fishing on Russia’s Varzuga river? Yes it could. Rather a bruising salmon, beautifully marked.