During August an increasing, confused noise and chaos fills our group subconscious,
Some is the fruit of the often aggressive, urban visitors, aimless, starved of shops, and depressed by the lack of beach weather; some comes from bored and unengaged children; some from the keeling, fruit-heavy, overgrown squalor of the Earth in late Summer.
At night in Newport, it is the Season of pissed and bellowed brutishness. Queues in the Spar reach back beyond the biscuits.
The crescendo usually comes like that last rising note on Sargeant Pepper, on August Bank Holiday.
And order starts to prevail once childrens’ heads are bent over desks and people stop waiting hopelessly for a “Proper Summer”.
Now, let the Welsh Summer begin.
Still, blue days when you can hear a dry Sycamore leaf slowly clatter through the canopy to the ground. Fishing on a welkin bay without a jetski in site. A warmth to the sun that your body drinks in thirstily.
No sign of it today though.
The Earth is still having a great emotional wobble, with streaming tears of rain pulsing across the valley from the South and SouthWest. Great gusts of anger, and sobs that soak you in seconds.
Luckily I have just about made my new living space homely, so can lie cosy on my imperial bed, typing this. The Morso stove is popping away as it heats up, ready to make my toast.
There are advantages to aloneness as well as choking hurt.
Now, this really should not be the stuff of a fishing blog. But then, I argue, the sea has obviously not wanted company recently.
I probably could have got out and checked my pots, but what I really want is some fish; to set a net. This is the time of squirrelling away a harvest, and I want some mullet and occasional bass in the freezer.
And Life and its Dramas go on.
It has felt here lately that the soap opera I live in has a new script writer determined to raise ratings with painful, fast-moving story-lines.
Someone sack her please. Soon.
There’s a time to look away from the sea.
I cannot imagine huddling on some storm blasted beach, half-drowned by rain and spray, hopelessly watching a rod. The art is to know when to go back, and not get too stuck in lubbery routines.
Last time that I got out, it had been a month since I’d been to my pots, and they still held lobsters and a mob of spiders. Parlour pots are the best ones for us ‘casual’ fishermen.
I must work on and standardize the doors though, as mine are ridiculously fiddly when there are six spidercrabs to extract.
When I have a pot-making session, I will take a set of pictures as a visual aid to making your own, and blog them.
Someone tore out & gave me a copy of an article by George Monbiot about sea fishing with a kayak recently, entitled “How fishing saved my life”. It’s well worth reading. It should be available on the Guardian website. It’s good to know we are in such good company.
I can hear the car off to meet the school bus.
Hooray.
That tabloid fraud called the British Summer is over
Now lets’ get on with some proper weather...
