John Olliff-Cooper remembers his schooldays:

EDUCATING ARCHIE

'…Faith, hope, and charity, and the greatest of these is charity. Boys, there is good in everyone, if only you have the charity in your hearts to look for it.’

I have never kept a proper diary, the bother of it wasn't the main reason, but that after a day's angling I was usually too tired, and when I was contributing on a weekly and monthly basis for the angling periodicals, coupled to all my other commitments. I Just did not have the time. As I recently told your editor, if I had kept a diary I couldn't lie!

But I do have several photo' albums, and occasionally I glance through them and remember much of my lifetime of angling. Just one picture can bring back so many memories, as the brain's ability to wander from thought to thought multiplies that one picture into many others. Flashbacks!

What is it about fish and rain? Or, more specifically, what is it about non-fishers who think you always catch more fish when it’s raining? Is there some truth in the saying…all I know about rain, for a simple fisher like me who does not sit rigidly under a brolly, but spend much of my fishing time roving the riverbank..is that I get wet. Though my Goretex is pretty protective, as is my wide brimmed hat.

Barnes Pond is a small, roughly circular pool on the outskirts of London, surrounded by common land and Georgian town houses. Laid end-to-end, I would guess that a couple of football pitches would over-lap the banks, around which generations of teenagers had, after closing time at the Sun Inn on the Northern shore, also been laid end-to-end.

"If the ill-informed opinions of 1000 randomly-sampled Joe-public welders, butchers and van-drivers really mattered then we wouldn't need any educated and informed experts, would we?"

This piece was first published 7 years ago but, unfortunately, it's as relevant today as it was then.

As with most things concerning fishing, the prerequisite for success is more often than not dependant on the weather.

This is particulary so with collecting lob worms after dark. Most fishing books concern themselves with a few paragraphs about picking up worms from grass at night, but few go into any real detail as to what to expect under different conditions. If I start with the absolutely best conditions you could possibly hope for, then everything slowly tapers off for varied reasons thereafter.