Jon Day.
Over the hill, through a gap in the trees, Coniston Water spins itself out into the distance: a blue ribbon of water glinting in the spring sunshine. It isn’t the largest or the deepest of England’s lakes, but it might be the most tragic, and from here it feels like the most mysterious…
Jon Day.
The London Library has always beguiled readers who love books both as vessels of meaning and as physical objects; readers who love to touch and smell as well as to read. The library has nestled quietly in the north-west corner of St. James’s Square for over 160 years, and its modest façade now hides over a million books. You can measure its holdings in distance rather than number: miles of books, serried ranks of print, line its labyrinthine interior of cast iron floors and solid wooden shelving…
Jon Day.
We approach in darkness, in the chilled air of a winter morning. Billingsgate fish market keeps antisocial hours, opening at 5am and closing before 8.30. The squat, utilitarian building basks in the orange glow of sodium lamps and the 25,000 tonnes of fish that pass through here every year, now transported by road rather than river, have left their trace as an oily, mineral tang in the air…
Jon Day.
Opposite Minack theatre, the old stone circle that watches over the bay, there’s a rocky outcrop which falls away, sheer, into the sea. From its broken outcrop I see what I first take to be flotsam, lines of dark shapes drifting about 20 feet off shore. I watch them for a while and a subtle movement marks them out as living things.
I scramble down the rocks, hoping they’ll still be there when I reach the bottom. Of course they are, hundreds of them, a long line of movement hugging the shore. Grey mullet, old and fat lipped, difficult fish to catch. Idiosyncratic in their tastes, they swim near the surface in massive shoals, gently sucking in weeds and water. Unlike the foolish mackerel, who’ll bite a bare hook if stripped past their face at the right speed, mullet are subtle, elegant fish. You have to trick them, coerce them into taking your offerings.
My hands shake slightly as I put my rod together, threading the thick fly-line through the rings and tie on a fly. I love the names of flies: Wickham’s Fancy, Cat’s Whisker, Hare’s Ear. Local, ancient-sounding names which are discussed in hushed tones in tackle shops and on river banks, garnering some fame for their creators. Mullet don’t have predictable preferences, so I tie on an old favourite, a nameless green blob, and step down to the rocks nearest the water…
Jon Day.
I leave the house early to catch the rising sun and the rising trout. It’s cool but the sky is dazzling, promising coming heat. A faint haze drifts off the Cotswolds. The door clicks shut behind me and I swing my leg over my bicycle and roll gently forward. Crunching gravel first and then the friction-hum of tarmac. The first tentative peddle-strokes have given way to an incremental rhythm and I smile an idiot smile, hoping no one sees…
