Tackling a long lost love

I began fishing with my grandfather who, being a doctor, was also a fisherman. That’s the way it goes - in Scotland, anyway. All doctors are fishermen but all fishermen are not doctors. Praise the lord. Sometimes they play golf, but fishing always seems to be a favourite of the medical profession and pools are named after them.

You don’t find pools on rivers named "the Stockbroker" or "the Golfer" or "the Chartered Accountant". Well, I don’t. There may be rivers that celebrate other professions and pastimes but no one has asked me to fish them yet.

This grandfather, my mother’s father, came from Ballater, took one look round, got an education and pushed off south, smartish. He eventually set himself up in rather fine consulting rooms left to him by a dead patient in Kensington and refused, when the NHS was set up, to have anything to do with it for, I have no doubt, very sound reasons. It was all a bit AJ Cronin. Patients who could not pay did not. Those who could, paid handsomely. It sort of evened itself out.

It was under his eye, snuggled beneath his casting arm, that I caught my first trout, in fact my first fish, taken as it rose under a bush in the dark, widening, half-light of a pool on the River Wey. Rather surprisingly the Wey gave its name to Waverley Abbey, as in the Walter Scott novel, and Waverley Station despite being in Surrey. Life as they say, is full of little inconsistencies.

After about the age of 16, when I was no longer being taken on paid-for holidays to gamey summer lodges by my parents, I stopped fishing and took up rather more urban pursuits, until I was accidentally reeled back into it. I was spending a weekend in Aberdeenshire and the woman with whom I was desperately attempting to fall in love pushed off within 20 minutes of my arrival. An acquaintance came to the rescue and said, "Do stay, and come fishing". Which I did: on the Deveron near Turriff. It was a brilliant, warm evening in late June - bats were on the wing - and I caught two 3lb sea trout in quick succession. My hostess stood on the bank and applauded.

So where do you go from there? The first thing, seeing as how my father was not going to part with his rods, was to get my own. And being of a meanish disposition, I was not about to visit Mr Hardy’s establishment waving a large cheque. So I looked in the papers and found under what was then called "Fishings and Shootings" an advert for "ANGLING TACKLE, INCL RODS". I went round to a particularly unattractive pebble-dashed bungalow in the south-west end of Aberdeen. There was a fishing gnome in the garden and a tearful widow aged around 60 handed over her late husband’s gear for a tenner. This included a 10ft fibreglass rod, ideal for sea trout, made up by a local tackle shop, and a Milbro spinning rod.

The tackle was all in a huge, grey canvas sack with a brass-eyeletted and buckle strap, very clearly stamped "GPO". Our man had been a postman. In the sack was a throat pastille tin with a bit of sponge and a few manky flies stuck in it. Along with the rod had come a Milbro spinning reel, and a very old Milbro brass worming reel: or at least that was all it was any good for. A yellow tin with a picture of the Queen on it contained about 15 minnows of varying persuasions, but predominantly Devons - gold and yellow-bellied and brown on top, from one and a half to three inches long, and each with those little painted eyes. Some were weighted, others not.

Now the only point of all this is to say that last week I used the spinner - his reel has had it - and his Devons on the Don in Aberdeenshire and caught absolutely nothing. I never knew the owner’s name because I never asked. But I can only say I enjoyed using his rod and his minnows. And I hope he enjoyed it too.