Thoroughly hooked

On the southern edge of Kensal Green cemetery, beneath the wall that separates the graves from the Grand Union Canal, is a memorial inscription that would stop a Duns Scotus in his tracks. At the top of the heart-shaped marble there is a fading photograph of a man in his middle years, and then beneath some touching messages of love and regret, a single, enigmatic line of inscrutable theological subtlety ‘FROM ODDS ON TO ODDS AGAINST.’

It is hard to know what to make of that — ‘From certainty to doubt?’ ‘From scant rewards to a last, triumphant pay-out?’ — but for any self-respecting angler still on the other side of that wall this is the very definition of Heaven. There are clearly millions happy to spend their Sundays beside one of Britain’s ‘commercially stocked stew-ponds’, but for Luke Jennings it is the sheer impossibility of the odds stacked against the angler that is the whole point of fishing.

‘Nor would you want it any different’, he writes, of the unseen, un-navigable challenges that lie beneath the stygian blackness of London’s canals, because in an over-illuminated world, a world whose dark corners are in constant retreat from the remorseless, banal march of progress, this not knowing is a thing to be valued and enjoyed. It may be that your hooks are caught in the rusting spokes of a bicycle wheel, that your bait has already been stripped from the hook by Chinese mitten-crabs, but this is the nature of fishing. The odds are almost overwhelmingly against you and this is how you like it.

And if it is not a submerged fridge or low-flying branches, it’s the deep nettles that menaced the Sussex ponds of his childhood, if it’s not the overgrown banks of the Rother or the vodka-clear waters of a Hampshire chalk stream, it’s the historic guardians of fly-fishing’s soul.