13 September 2026 News/Editorial
For those concerned (thank you), and still bothering to look, no I am not dead. I just lost the will to live on all matters fishy. The river is low, as it has been for months, and the weather forecasters are completely useless in always predicting mountains of rain, which then never happens.
The fish are stuck within a gnat’s crotchet of the tide and show no signs of moving upstream, contrast this with springers who leg it to Kelso and all points west as soon as they say goodbye to Berwick.
Too many of those being caught are by spinning with something thrown upstream, maybe acceptable in moderation if you have both banks, but wholly unacceptable when you are fishing the fly and those opposite, in breach of the Tweed code on spinning, do nothing but throw metal at you from the other side for hours on end. We stopped using the upstream version here, at the boatmen’s request, when catch and release came in, because too often the hook was down the throat and the fish was unsaveable. We haven’t caught a salmon spinning here for 3 years. Thank God spinning ends, for this year at least, at close of business on Monday next week.
And then there was Tweed Commissioners’ meeting on Monday, an undeservedly really painful process for the Chief Commissioner, who some Commissioners had been very obviously undermining at every opportunity over recent months. At the meeting, amazingly, it was agreed that a paper sent out marked “Private and Confidential” could be leaked deliberately, directly to the subject of the paper, and those who declared a conflict of interest in the subsequent discussion, expressed strong opinions against the paper, despite their conflict. No doubt they will come up with all sorts of justifications and excuses for this, but in terms of orderly process and the proper way of having debates and voting, it was a shambles in which not only did I (with 4 votes via proxies) not have a chance to vote, but all those viewing online (many of whom I know to be sympathetic to the Chief Commissioner and his paper) could not vote either.
And before anyone complains that all this should be confidential, well so it should, and I have never divulged the contents of RTC meetings before, in all 13 years of writing this report. But who started this, blatantly breaking confidences?
And then to cap it all, just because we happen to pay quite a significant sum in terms of the annual Tweed levy, it was inferred that those like us were "proprietorial blackmailers” if we used that fact, of paying a lot, to exercise some influence on the decision, this complaint coming from those who mainly pay very little, or nothing at all. For context, my family has paid the Tweed levy, and much more than that in terms of buying out nets etc, uncomplainingly and on time every year for the last 45 years. But, of course, nobody was interested in that.
So there we have it. Do you wonder that disillusion has set in, and that the last thing I want to do is go on writing about the Tweed, the river loved more than anything, and its fish?
There is more to my life than this aggravation, and to the relief of many no doubt, this really is the last one. I am done, had enough. Thank you for reading/listening over the last 13 years +.