The fields rolling and falling though marsh to the rush-lined margins, bleached and wrung-out by winter.
A consuming stillness save for the calling raven, finches and thrushes. Artificial yet real, but isn't it all?
Three moorhen career through the pasture's edge headlong as if to fall in a chestward heap, legs in cartoon motion to the rear. How many are they, these ever-present canal rails? Thankfully more than sufficient to gladden the heart on all-but every gongoozling excursion, without doubt.
Here a major chunk of F, F & F history would be recalled. Negotiation, advertisement, commitment, engagement and satisfaction in the pursuit.
This was a stretch of the most picturesque Midlands canal snaking, as it still does, from dark tunnel to complex locks; through ancient parkland with its mature oaks and chestnuts; cutting through sheep pasture like a chisel to linocut. The result the same. A work of human art.
A change had come. Rush beds extended, reedmace beds established. A wide, now narrowed, bend and whereas, in decades past, the plate glass surface would be punctuated by the innumerable concentric rings of myriad small roach. Now- nothing.
Here, one imagined barn owl and drifting hen harrier slipping over rough grassland untouched by beast or harrow from decent to recent times.
There, a badger sett high and deep in the clay bank.
Then otter-marked brick paving. "Private, trespassers will be persecuted", it said to anything capable of interpreting it.
Today so different.
In years gone, sixty brethren would gather in the dawn-time mist. A fleece and nylon clump of pink-eyed expectation and laughter. "That's a posh shirt you're wearing there George. Are you trying to raise the standard of match angling attire?"
Of those a handful would remain to be showered as they coveted; the clump dissolved to all corners; glitter cast on the worthy.
Perhaps a shoal of bream, a 'juicy' tench or carp, a hard-won net of sparkling roach would attain the jewels, and otherwise perhaps just a handful of tiddlers as winter set in.
The crinkle-cut towpath edge, a straightened pastry cutter, still beats out those reminders with a numerical rhythm.
Twenty-three, the first; through thirties, a favourite 52 and up to 74, a narrower tiddler-filled straight.
Today though it was the teens and in pursuit of that toothiest of adversaries, pike. They had always been here. A slowly raking, shallow near shelf overhung by branches but the turbidity would prove to work against us and only the nuthatch, dunnock and siskin would keep us from sliding into tedium.
The historic stone wall, consumed by ivy yet still partly intact beside the massive oak and, more distant, fresh lamb; twins and triplets in red and blue. How closely the ewes knit their lanolin-infiltrated wool to the reins of their excitable young.
March violets quietly bloom, a modesty instilled by evolution, on woodbanks and in the lee of hawthorn hedges. Hints of green among the marginal rushes and young rabbits, all dewy-eyed twinkles and bobbing white tails, conscious of the soaring threat of these cloudy skies.
Spring, and the sweet shop is again open.
