It’s the fisherman who’s truly hooked

Trying to catch fish with rod and line is a pursuit that, for many, goes far beyond the pleasant passing of a few leisure hours, the diverting indulgence of a hobby. It becomes little short of a reason for existence, an end for which the other bits of life are merely the means. I have never been so afflicted, being a casual sea-angler, but I look upon those who are with profound curiosity. Like deep religious faith, such zeal might sometimes look cranky, but there is much to envy too. ‘Fishing simply sent me out of my mind,’ confessed the Russian writer Sergei Aksakov. In The Lightning Thread, David Profumo traces the course of his own colourful, fish-obsessed years.

They begin in Scotland when he’s seven, with a brown trout and a worm. After the initial hook-tug and the sight of his six-ounce triumph on the river bank he feels ‘something glorious’ enter his heart. There follows a patrician bagatelle of a childhood — boarding schools, and Scottish sporting holidays peopled with the residual eccentrics of mid-20th-century Britain: the wife of a highland hotelier with ‘three bosoms’; the one-legged gillie who spoke Chinese; and the man who would surprise his guests by tobogganing downstairs on a tea tray.

Profumo moves up the fish ladder, progressing from worms to precisely cast flies, from loch trout to burly salmon. He sets off on a career of letters, first as a teacher, then as a novelist. In the parallel role of fishing correspondent of Country Life and the Telegraph, he is sent on many of the adventures recalled in this book. In the Seychelles he fishes in ‘God’s aquarium’ for vermilion grouper, pompano and emperor sweetlips. He goes tournament fishing in the Florida Keys and chases sporty bonefish and tarpon (which can grow to 100 lbs).