I rolled over, heard the rain against the darkened bedroom window and hit the snooze button. What a horrible day. What a horrible month. What a horrible start to the New Year of 2008 – weather wise I’m talking, of course.

We started the season last June 16th with flooding and generally the highest summer river levels for a decade or more, probably much more and we finished the previous season last March with virtually all rivers in spate.

My local river is not a river. It is a stream, and I hope you understand the difference. It is a lovely stream, it is the Colne stream that meanders across the Hertfordshire countryside just to the east of Rickmansworth. I dream of it all the time, and last night was no exception.

I suspect I am right in saying that the majority of anglers fishing for carp will use boilies for bait. Some of them will regard particles as just another bait, when, in fact, they are much more than that. Fishing particles properly is an angling principle.

Particles are a relatively cheap, yet in terms of fish catching, not necessarily inferior alternative to the ubiquitous boilie. One cannot hope to cover the whole scope of particle fishing in one short article, but what I will try to do is to give anglers with little or no experience of fishing particles a rough idea of the principles and techniques involved.

Global warming certainly seems to be affecting our winter weather and although the conditions might be more agreeable for the angler, I am not sure that the fish will always see it that way.

I got seduced the other day. I know I did wrong, but I don’t care: it was bloody wonderful.

It happened in a moment, but now I know the sort of extended passion that dwells on the edge of a scream. I’m going to break the news to my wife when the moment’s right. Honesty is the best policy when you’ve succumbed to a bit of naughty, naughty. She won’t be pleased, but she’ll understand; after all, men will be men. She’ll just assume I had a momentary itch that had to be scratched. Women are generally OK about such things, provided they’re sure that such lapses are simply passing, and not under-pinned with sloppy stuff such as love, or emotion. At that stage, I’ll probably change the subject, because the extra-marital lady in question has raised my pulse on numerous occasions over the years. I’ve thought about her at nights, and I will admit now that I have stroked her often with affection bordering on adulation. Let the News Of The World make of it what they like: I’m naming names. The Lady in question is called Felton Crosswind.

Every once in a while, something happens to make you realise you're never too old to learn…………

It was a wild, desolate and beautiful place. Acres of rocks, kelp and bladder-wrack interspersed with spits of shingle and sand. Rushing green slides of clear tidal water ran like rivers in flood between boulders of granite, all of it stretching away towards the horizon. A place of currents, washed out shells, where a myriad of sea-creatures splashed and clicked under boulders and burrowed in sand. Around us a pulse-quickening smell of salt, decay, freshness and exposed weed. Above us, the wind howled, spray hissed off the surface of racing water and gulls watched our progress with wing-quickening interest. The sound of oyster-catchers shrilled across the shingle. This was an area of richness, uncovered twice monthly by spring tides, a place where an incoming tide could drown an unwary man quickly. A place to go with a friend and cast plugs into the teeth of the wind while chanting invocations to the bass-god………this was Alderney.

Last month I was looking through some pictures and I came across a picture of my wife gaffing a pike.
Although I do not believe that we did much harm to the pike, having occasionally caught the same fishes at a later date with the gaff mark healing up, it did occur to me how, as anglers, our general attitude to our quarry has changed. I doubt if there is a single pike angler in the UK who would gaff a pike nowadays, keepers on game fisheries and the like excepted. Of course there were reasons we used a gaff as even we pike anglers of the past were not without feelings for them. I remember extolling the virtues of pike and pike angling in the angling press decades ago when there was still a general feeling among many coarse anglers, especially match anglers, that all pike should be killed. I also remember that Richard Walker was very much in favour of removing pike from waters too, and having argument with him about his views.