Give a Boy a Fish, a Good Barbeque, Teach a Boy to Fish He'll Have Fun for a Lifetime.

My daughter Sophie arrived back from Kings College London shattered from her medical exams first year. "Phew" she said thumping her bags into the back of the car, "It's great to be home".  The following morning, Saturday, sat around the breakfast table telling us all about it, her mother, brother and me, this end of term medical poster business sounded rather daunting to us all.  Conversation then turned on things to do.  Sophie was to go shopping with her mum for some mum and daughter time, Sam was coming fishing with me.  Having made up his rod off we went.  The River Windrush was absolutely beautiful, Mayfly everywhere, late but very welcome, fish jumping the length and breadth of the river.  "We'll have some fish today" said Sam, "I'm not so sure," came the reply, "even the best looking artificial Mayfly can have a job to attract these gorged-on Mayfly trout".  Sam went one way down the river, I went the other.  After about forty minutes I hooked an absolute beauty close to two pound I guess, but in our haste to leave the house we had forgotten to pick up the landing net and I had hooked this trout on a particularly steep piece of bank.  After what seemed to be an hour which was in fact ten minutes of a furiously fit fighting brown trout doing his damnedest to break my line I had him down in the water from the bank beneath my feet.  I turned for the landing net on my belt it wasn't there.  I shouted down to Sam "Sam, have you got your landing net?" He shouted back from a distance, "Don't shout dad, I'm fishing and no I haven't got it" then I heard "Oh no its stuck," he'd got his fly stuck in the bush behind him as he turned to bark back up the river to me.  The trout by this time seemed to have had enough of this shouting about, looked up out of the water and one final leap and belly-flop finish had separated himself from the fly on the end of my line.  Sam had walked back to me with his fly stuck firmly in the tree, although we never caught anything, another superb day on the river.