Learning the secrets of happiness from Britain’s most foul-mouthed angler

To go fishing on the Itchen in mayfly season, you either have to be very, very rich or very, very lucky. That’s why I’m so grateful to have a friend in Mike Daunt, arguably Britain’s best-connected angler, certainly the most foul-mouthed, who invited me up for the day on to a particularly juicy beat of this idyllic Hampshire river to try to catch my first trout ever with a dry fly.

I’ll cut to the chase: I got one. About two and a half pounds, I’d say; a handsome brown. I still don’t know quite how I got it — it took in the middle of the stream, where I wasn’t expecting to get a bite. One second it was not there, the next it was. I lifted my rod, reeled it in, with not too much of a fight, and there it flapped, glistening spottily in the net. ‘Right, best put it back,’ I said to one of our very jolly party.