Early-morning chat about fishing is like something out of a Ted Hughes poem

On TalkSport’s dawn show Fisherman’s Blues (Saturdays and Sundays, 6am), word has it that it’s an unusually good month for pike.

Last week John in Slough called in to say he’d just landed a 21-pounder on the River Lundy, though he knew that was nothing compared to the 45lb plesiosaur hauled out of a Norfolk broad in February. Although rightly pleased with himself, generally John sounded a bit low. But then, the overriding air of Fisherman’s Blues is firmly that of Fungus the Bogeyman.

“One month’s rain in 24 hours, and lots of it,” said the presenter Keith Arthur at the top of the hour, très Fungus. “From my toilet in London town . . . untreated and floating with other unmentionables. Can the sewers cope?”

John said he’d lost five and a half stone over the past year. That’s good, said Keith, was it deliberate? Well I was 22 stone, so I suppose so, says John. You’re still a big lad then, says Keith, and John agreed. God, Ted Hughes would have loved this show. To tune in is to open the pages of Remains of Elmet, with its lines about men wrapped in bits of Bradford and trout under discarded tyres in Heptonstall.

Certainly where I live, on the Regent’s Canal, it’s total bliss. Through the window of my boat, as I type, I can see the exact spot where I threw the frying pans in 2005 when the process of washing up got too much. And to the right the power station, which, I hope, is giving me leukaemia. In a few years’ time, like Erin Brockovich, I intend to lead the charge for compensation. I sort of see it as my pension. Yes, there’s a lot to be said for life on the water.

And I’m relieved to have the irreplaceable Keith back. He was in Florida for ten terrible days the week before last, getting away from all the tension surrounding the Anglers Association’s proposed initiative to keep the rivers open for an extra month this year – as if that’s going to change the world, when it’s obviously just pie in the proverbial!

Just then Joe rang in – a regular. He’d been on the Lee all last week. First day he was zero, and he meant zero, but he went back the next day and brought some sweetcorn on a maggot along with some honey and yucca, and bang, it went off. “My very first ever pound chub, Keith. I was ecstatic.”

“Where exactly were you, Joe?”

“Stanmore Lake. By the car park.”

As a rule, Joe gets lots of nicks and breaks in his line, which Keith just doesn’t understand. A person should be able to tie a 10lb line round their waist, attach it to a lorry, and have themselves dragged up the M62, no problem. Is the guy using some crappy reel from a packet, or what? But Joe had moved on to the various other things on his mind:

“I’m a bloody pessimist, always have been, always will be. You know I had that hospital appointment, Keith? So I said I’ll have the bad news first and they said actually it’s good news all your arteries are clear, and I thought I caught my first chub yesterday and all my arteries are clear – but then I remembered you were in Florida and I couldn’t call you and I was like, Bloody typical . . .”

Pick of the week

The Return to . . . Brisingamen
24 March, 11.30am, Radio 4
John Waite talks to Alan Garner about Garner’s childhood-shaping tale The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

The Single Story
24 March, 11.30pm, Radio 2
David Quantick on the 60-year love affair with the 45rpm single. Third in a four-part series.

Galton and Simpson’s Half-Hour
Ends 28 March, 1.30pm, Radio 2
Paul Merton stars in this reprise of the Tony Hancock comedy classic, originally broadcast on television in 1961.

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