news/editorial

14 March 2021 News/Editorial

I have just watched a wonderfully poignant video of my old friend David Houldsworth’s funeral service at Dallas, up north. He died a month ago, far too young at 67.

Tweed fishers will be unaware that they owe him a huge debt of gratitude. He acted as our Scottish lawyer in 1987, and afterwards, when we were reducing Tweed netting; it was complicated, half the 25+ nets bought were in England and the other half in Scotland. Legally, there is just the right to fish, so as all we wanted to buy was the right to fish by net, leases over 999 years had to be created of the right to fish by net, leaving the rod fishing with the original owners. David made it all go smoothly, with impeccable advice and, as ever, with the greatest humour. He had a lovely gentle, essentially quiet, but mildly mischievous, manner.

He caught his biggest salmon here many years ago, a 23lber in the Bags. I fished with him many times, here and elsewhere, especially on the Spey at Knockando. He would start, however unpromising the conditions, with “It's just a question of numbers” to encourage the team, invariably followed by a blank day.

He was the UK director/secretary of Orri Vigfussons’s UK fundraising arm, the North Atlantic Salmon Fund (UK), to compensate both Faroese and Greenland netsmen. He took the greatest delight, at every possible opportunity, and at every meeting I went to, in calling it “NASFU-K” at the top of his voice.

Here is the link to his obituary in the Scotsman. In case you haven't seen it already: https://www.scotsman.com/news/people/obituary-david-houldsworth-lawyer-member-of-the-royal-company-of-archers-and-natural-countryman-3162403

It is so hard to believe we will never see him again. He claimed we met first at school when he was sent round to my house with a fag note (aka a message) from the Maharajah of Jodhpur or Jaipur, or wherever else. He says I treated him like dirt, and barely acknowledged his existence, as senior boys were wont to do. The fact that I can recall none of it simply added to his conviction that I was, and still am, a first class sh-t.

He will be desperately sadly missed, a devastating loss to his wife Poppy and daughter Romilly, to his wider family, to all his many friends, and to everyone at his beloved Dallas.

A lovely man.

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I was woken this morning by the gentle cooing of a wood pigeon. An old friend, he (of course) was there on the right hand chimney of our outhouse most mornings last summer, same chimney, same pigeon, same coo. He knows it is spring. “Good morning to you” I whisper as I draw the bathroom curtain and spot the slightly hunched figure atop said chimney stack. Spring maybe, but a cool one so far. My avian friend won’t know it, but it is still mid March, the cruellest month, you think you are through the worst, but the wind is a cool nor'wester, and those April/May easterlies are still to come. Summer takes its time to appear up here in the Borders.

Welcome as my cooing pigeon is, come June when he starts his morning chant at 3.30am, I might not like him quite so much. An old, sadly no longer with us, farming client came into my office one day, many years past, with a mixture of triumph and guilt on his face. “I have finally done it” he said, to which I enquired what it was that he had done? His favourite cockerel, a beautiful boy, had been waking him up at crack of dawn for months, but in mid June, at 3.30am, it was too much. “I cracked, had had enough, I got my shotgun, opened my bedroom window and shot it!”.

I will not be doing the same to my friend, for his song is one of peace and balm. It is the collared doves that drive me mad, even if their song is similar, maybe because I think they are interlopers and should not be here. For completeness, the left hand chimney of the outhouse is occupied during the day, and often in the evenings, by a most tuneful cock blackbird. He must know that singing at the same time as the pigeon would clash, making two beautiful songs into a muddle.

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All of which gentle meander will tell you that news of the angle has been remarkable by its absence since Tuesday. The last, we hope, of our seemingly incessant winter storms has done its worst, and is even now a faded memory. The signs are good for high pressure in the coming week, perfect conditions for an angle, cool, calm and fining down nicely after a 6 footer and its aftermath. The water might even be warm enough, no longer in the 30sF, to persuade those bullet shaped springers to risk coming out of the warmer comfort of the sea.

If you are lucky enough both to live locally and have a chance next week, good luck, it could be good.

For non locals, and your hopes of getting here to fish, our First Minister is due to give more details of lockdown easing (I keep trying to say “lockup” as the opposite, but of course it is anything but) in Scotland. I read in my Sunday Times today that she may be intent on virus elimination, north of the Border, as opposed to England’s intention to “live with it” as we do with flu, albeit at a very low level. The implications of an “elimination” policy would seem to condemn Scots to a much longer and more severe continued lockdown now, as compared to south of the Border. If so, the implications for the Scottish economy are pretty severe. Perhaps we are all torn between wanting her to accelerate, but fearful of resurgence, a la Italy. It would be too much to bear being locked up again, but the vaccine does seem to be miraculously successful, and old people like me will soon have been jabbed twice. I get my second next Saturday.

Can’t wait!

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We had a badger event last week.

Now I like badgers as much as the next man, that is not the issue, but it is the sheer weight of numbers that is so disheartening. Pre badger proliferation, the most common sight in my garden was hedgehogs, and their telltale poos. There is nothing now, no hedgehogs, no poos. My old friend C. Packham will tell you it is changes in farming practices to blame; here it is nothing of the sort. There is no farming, and nothing has changed over the last 40 years except a burgeoning population of badgers, which have killed all our hedgehogs, dig up all our bee/bumble bee nests, and almost every night make the edges of my drive like a ploughed field.

Well, blow me if there wasn’t a dead badger on top of the sett by the Ledges steps, one morning last week. For fear of those who would say we had killed it, it was rapidly disposed of. Despite extreme provocation, as essentially law abiding folk, “Not me,Gov” was the truthful answer, even if I find it hard to regret a very small diminution in the badger community.

The conclusion; it died of natural causes. But it was surprising how much we assumed that everyone else would see a darker truth lurking, skulking even, behind it all, as they probably did.

I can only repeat. “Not me, Gov. Honest”. RIP Mr/Mrs Badger.