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Spinning a line

James Delingpole

Wednesday, 5th March 2008

James Delingpole gets a lesson in coarse language while fishing

‘Don’t do ANY-THING you ****! Let the ****** run like **** till you’re sure he’s got the ******* live bait right down his ******* gullet. Only when I say — and NOT UNTIL, you **** — do you put down your bail arm and start reeling the ****** in. Keep the rod up. And when the line’s taut, strike like ****! Ready? NOT YET you ****. Not YET!’

You are now reading an expurgated version of a pike-catching lesson with Mike Daunt, ‘Bounder’ to his friends, complete ******* **** to his enemies and some of his ex-wives, widely reckoned to be among the finest and (certainly the most foul-mouthed) fishing teacher in the whole of the British Isles.

I’ve probably made it sound scary — daunting, even — and it is a bit. Daunt works on the old-fashioned principle that if you terrify the bejaysus out of your pupil the first time he makes a mistake, he’s that much less likely to repeat it. But he’s such a delightful, jolly fellow and he swears so frequently about pretty much everything — when the line snags on a blade of grass; when the hook needs rebaiting; when there’s a ‘Y’ in the day of the week — that you know he doesn’t really meant it.

Besides, his crossness when you get it wrong is as nothing to his ecstasy and unbridled praise when you do things even slightly right. ‘My boy, WELL DONE!’ he booms, when you execute a halfway decent cast. And you should have seen the fuss he made of my nine-year-old Boy Delingpole during our day out on the Kennet when he landed his first fish. ‘You will blood him, won’t you?’ remembers Daunt anxiously. So I smear Boy’s face with trout blood and he vows never to wash again.

Mike Daunt is on a mission. Together with his best friend and co-author Sir Richard Heygate, aka ‘the Bart’, he wants to reintroduce us to all those marvellous rural pursuits and fascinating local eccentrics that make our country the greatest in the world — and which New Labour’s grisly modernisers have, of course, sought to erase from the landscape.

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