Intro ...
Sorry about that naff Blog title but I was struggling as to what to name this here overly long and laborious recollection of a forgotten age? A more apt name for this Blog would probably be a more self deprecating 'middle aged buffoon goes on and on and on about the distant past' ... or perhaps 'memoirs of a massive, mental, misfit, morose, moron' - it is what it is and as I can't be asked to think up a new title it appears that we're stuck with it for now ...
Anyway, welcome to Monty Milligoon's Wotsit, a Bloggy sort of thing dedicated to ... well, um er ... as the title itself makes crystal clear, my old days of fishing. Well, it was pretty obvious wasn't it, the rather naff title in fact a complete giveaway surely? Now 'most' of what I write here will be deliriously boring, agonisingly self centred ... almost all of it in fact but it may also provide the occasional touch of excitement and mayhem if you're lucky or equally very very bored?
... also a side-note you'll also be able to see me go from ...
.... this 16 year old eight feet tall baby version ... to ...
... this twenty year old imbecilic version ... then from ...
... a man in his middle twenties with far too much hair ... to ...
... a 58 year old man with far too little hair, upside down glasses and a Cadbury's Flake wrapper moustache. You just can't get much more interesting than that now can you eh? C'mon ... credit where it's due ...
And next, for the criminally negligent, here is how to navigate around Milligoon's Wotsit should you so feel the need? I ended up writing out a full fourteen pages of this rather puerile madness/come utter drivel, so should you feel the need to traverse your way through certain bits, the page by page subject for the following will be:
Pages: scroll through older/newer posts at bottom:
1: Intro ... you're looking at it, a there's a clue there somewhere?
2: The baby years 1976 - 79 - self eye gougingly terrible.
3: Fordwich 1980 plus the tale of the C.C.G.
4: Old Gear ... not Top Gear!
5: The years 1981 - '82. Believe me, it's even duller than it sounds.
6: 1983, even duller than 1881/2 apart from the bit about one Mr D. Locke esq.
7: 1984 season part one - yawningly awful.
8: 1984 season, part two the conclusion, a riveting tale of pain, anguish and eventual triumph!
9: 1985 ... also Scargill and Fordwich Lake.
10: 1986 - Yateley and Fordwich.
11: 1987 - Fordwich, Yateley and Trenley.
12: 1988 - 2000: Yateley, Chilham, Stonar and Brooklands.
13: Stonar and College Reservoir.
14: People
Also, the photos will enlarge if you click on them allowing even betterer, closer range views of my wonderfulness.
So then, where to actually start this tale then eh? At the beginning perhaps? Ah, but the beginning of what exactly? My old departed days of fishing that's what. As I sit here nailed into my chair on this mid Covid crisis summers day, pondering how to get my thoughts down in understandable proper human type writing, I would like you to be aware at the outset that my fishing career is well and truly a thing of the past and been over for an awfully long time as I write, about thirty years in fact. It did really happen, of that I have much undeniable proof, and hereby I would like to present at least some of the evidence. Another thing for any unfortunate reader to bear in mind perhaps is that unlike now my fishing was once upon a time the very epicentre of my own personal little universe, my muse, my escape, my passion or one of them at least. For a good chunk of my life most of my close mates were anglers, I even did it as a job for a while and I did so come to love it. But then, like lots of things with a person like me, well the love affair waned, the thrill didn't last, my zeal for it ran away and once things got out of control in other areas of my life, well eventually I felt impelled to run away from it and I ditched the Carping altogether, sold all of my gear then studied moths and went birding instead. Okay, that's the short version, there was a lot more to it than what I just wrote but believe me that's the most easily digestible way of describing what occurred in my life over the course of a few years about three decades ago and will be the central subject of this here Blog. When I first started fishing I loved everything about it, every trip was a little mini adventure all of it's own ... there were up's and down's and in's and out's and everything in-between and for the most part at the time it was all great. After fourteen years of it, I was forced to leave it behind as by that time I was totally burned out and had other things in my life to attend to at the time. I still do in fact and I can't see me ever returning to it again.
Songtime
section of a concept LP I wrote about Bream Slime and how best to remove it once finding it all dried up and caked on from a landing net.
time signature 14/8 ... background chords, Gm going into an augmented A 7th ending on a P minor, a new chord which I made up in my mind. The piece starts with excessively loud guitar feedback for 8 mins followed by the aforementioned chords (x 2) with an 18 minute guitar solo crammed
1st verse:
I used to like to harp ..
harp on about some carp ...
He's big and fat, intrepid,
at water temp he's tepid
(Chorus)
carp, carp carp carp lovely Carps ...
my legs are very long, that why I wrote a song,
a song that like to harp, harp on about a Carp
What's that to do with legs
My reasons for writing this Blog are twofold ... one, partly due to me being a bit very stuck in the house, and thing number two; impending boredom on my own part due to the 'extra added' side effect of being stuck in the house and I needed something to do. There is also a 'sort of' thing number three too - this being my usual love of writing this sort of nonsense down. As it happened thing number three turned out not to be a thing at all as I found myself in the mood of not being close to loving this sort of nonsense down. Confused? Well I haven't got started yet! ??????? masochistic enjoyment I put myself through because in some small way I can from time to time actually enjoy the process of writing bits of utter nonsense, though for the most part it's become a bit of a trudge. They say writing is cathartic and I'd agree, even if my way of going about my 'writing' is a bit scatterbrain/Monty Python from time to time, hence the aforementioned rather madcap title. As I say, I do quite enjoy the process of writing when the mood so takes me and in recent years I have found myself writing many Blogs, some like this one about specific subjects and others which I keep solely as a daily log, as in an online site for storing my moth and bird records. Since I packed in the Carp fishing I have since been keeping records of the bird migration down at my local Nature Reserve and more recently moth records too. Moths and birds you might ask?? Recording ... moths?? But how? And why?? Well to me moths are utterly fascinating, they come in all shapes and sizes, some are resident and some migrate from as far away as Africa and I love it so much that this is how I pass much of my time these days. Anyhow, enough about that and back to the subject of this Blog.
So why a fishing Blog after all of these years then you complete and utter moron?
I'm so glad you asked. Well, in 2018 and 2019 whilst feeding my latter day YouTube addiction, I accidentally stumbled across some video uploads about fishing. These initial videos weren't Carp angling videos per se, just a mass array of all sorts of fishing from heavy tackle sea boat fishing and beach casting right through to delicate river fishing. In time and totally by accident once again, I also ended up watching the odd Carping video too and this proved the real catalyst to me writing this Blog I suppose? Just seeing these Carping videos triggered off all sorts of buried memories within me and after viewing a few smelly old Carp vids, well one thing just led to another and here is the result of the aforementioned video watching wotsit. Watching these videos took me back to my time spent fishing and in turn prompted me to search round the house for my (very old) fishing photos, unseen for over two decades at the time, and whilst hunting around for some lost photo albums I then stumbled across a couple of boxes full of what I'd describe as old fishing tat. I refer to it as 'tat' but to me it was all a bit of a Howard Carter moment. In one old shoe-box, taped over to stop the lid falling off, secured with a bit of string long ago, I found old membership cards, rod licences and the like, all just old rubbish chucked in the box thirty odd years ago and not seen since. It also contained some old notepads, one from as long ago as my schooldays and another equally old box containing my more recent (though still old) fishing journals. These I then read through ... it was all a very odd experience as even some of the more recent of these long lost diaries I'd not laid eyes on them for the thick end of thirty years or thereabouts. I use the word 'odd' but I mean it was enjoyably odd if that makes any sense? I also had hundreds of loose fishing photos taken back in the day and having nothing better to do at the time I then ended up finding them, gathering them all together, scanning many of them into my computer and then seeing them in a totally different light. It was quiet an eye opener gawping at these old images blown up on a 22 inch monitor rather than the well handled often looked at (small) 6 x 4 inch prints as I had been viewing them in the distant past. Unfortunately some of my old photos had got lost after all these years and though I retrieved most of my old journals, one complete diary has yet to be found whilst another has fallen to bits and some of the pages are missing. It may well be that I have a whole photo album and the missing journal hidden up in the loft, but as yet I've been unable to lay my hands on them. This means that while I have lots of old written and photographic records, there are still a few gaps in the sequence meaning that bits of both 1983 and the entire year of 1985, bar one page of script and a few odd images, are all that I have to hand to jog the old memory bank relating to both of these years spent by the lakeside. I put many hours into my still ongoing detective work trying to piece my old fishing days back together to write about here and it's been a bit frustrating to be honest as having all of these gaps in my old records has made it rather difficult to recall certain things. In a nutshell this means that what I have to hand as memory jogging devices are the photos and written accounts about the entire period between 1977 and 1982 then bits of 1983, all of 1984, pretty much none of 1985, all of 1986 except some of the time I spent at Yateley (when I kept very few notes) then 1987 and all of my three trips down to Cornwall to fish at College Reservoir twice in 1987 and once in 1989. I also have records/photos of about 60 small Carp I caught from Stonar Lake in 1989/90 but I don't think that will be very newsworthy so these probably wont be included here. I saw during this procedure of gathering all of this material together that the largest Carp I caught from Stonar back then was only 10 lb 11 oz., so in other words not too newsworthy. I bet these non newsworthy Carp are an awful lot larger nowadays thirty years on? Over thirty pounds now I am told.
Some of the 'old tat' I found in my buried box from another lifetime ago ... possibly the most boring photo ever uploaded onto the interweb but there ya go ... and there's many more of a similarly dull and boring quality to come.
Old C&DAA licences, rod licences (Thames, Anglian and Southern) even old day tickets from Brooklands and Stonar. I found some interesting info for this Blog amongst the annual C&DAA reports.
This was weird find. At the bottom of the old shoe-box, tied up with string, I found this thirty year old hook packet with some dried mud inside of it. It arrived via Geoff (Bowers) who went and fished on Redmire in the late 1980's and when he got home he handed me this little bit of mud scraped from the most well known and magisterial Carp lake of them all. A nice touch was that ... the mud was still wet when Geoff handed it to me. You can certainly see why they named it Redmire, the farm fields down there on that part of the Welsh border are this colour when you go to the lake. The lake itself is tiny, nothing prepares you for its minuscule size until you get to walk those famous old banks, I went down there myself a couple of years later with Geoff and Lockey.
Now, as already touched upon in my glorious preamble, during the past thirty odd years I had hardly given any thought to fishing at all, so as far as any material for this over long self indulgent Blog is concerned, I was pretty much totally reliant on my old notepads and photos to reignite any buried memories about those enthusiastic fourteen years spent fishing. The more and more I delved then the more and more clear certain buried memories became and I now believe that a full year on that I have pretty much joined up all/most of the dots so to speak, and much of what I will write here should be accurate. I make mention of this as I did write a similar Blog back in November of last year (2019) but once finished, I then noticed so many inaccuracies in what I rattled off on the old computer keypad during that first attempt that I felt impelled to do it all over again and try and put things right. No doubt a few errors will still creep into this one as it's inevitable after so many years, but I am happy to think I've got 99% correct for this re-write? The content will start back in 1976, when I first picked up a fishing rod as a gangly fourteen year old boy and go all the way through till 1990 when I gave up. It will be in the main a Carp fishing Blog, a written record of my Carping memories from day one onward, and will include tales about many of the people I befriended, the lakes I fished on and some of the Carp I caught. I fished with some great people and caught some lovely fish along the way, so therefore have a fair few old tales to tell. I was surprised to read just how many Carp I caught out of Fordwich and other surprises even for me (and I was there at the time remember!) included even some of the forgotten lakes that I fished on such as Chartham and the Reed Ponds at Sandwich, places visited that had completely slipped from my mind. I found it all so very odd taking into account just how some places and happenings that were such big things in my life at the time I'd almost completely forgotten about? This just goes to show just how much I had switched off mentally from the fishing scene this past two decades or more. I really felt I needed to get away from the fishing game by the late 1980's and it looks as if I really did rather successfully. That aside, I do have so so many happy memories about those days spent out at the lakeside, the people, the smell of the fresh air (well when not downwind of Geoff's bivvy) the fish, the wildlife ... I loved everything about fishing for a good chunk of my life.
Back to the present day ...
These days I have to admit I know very little about the current Carp scene being so massively out of the loop. I have had a few natters with a few of the old crowd that I've run into in recent years, though very few in truth, the rest of what I've been catching up with had been provided by all of those initial YouTube Carping videos I've watched this past year or so. The little that I do know or hear about the modern day Carping, well it sounds like a far worse sort of place than it once was and 'perhaps' because there is just no more mystery about Carping anymore as there was when I was fishing? It is now very easy to catch large Carp, the newcomer Carp angler has it all laid out for him, sophisticated baits and rigs, masses of books and videos, material and methods it took us lot many years to get our heads around and learn. For certain it's no longer the pioneering/experimental thing it was back when I was a kid thirty/forty years ago and that in itself stifles any real mystery or the element of the unknown we had oozing out of every orifice back in the day. I see that certain attitude changes are enormous too - I winced when I saw some bloke net a Carp on some lake somewhere in France on some recent YouTube video or other and announce after looking at it "Oh, it's only a small one" and it turned out to be a 25 lb Common!! A small one?? I'd have fallen into the lake in the late 70's had I netted a 25 lb Common! Anyway, what I'm trying to convey here is that back then, that while we knew virtually nothing and had to work a lot harder at our chosen hobby, it is that because of this struggle we certainly appreciated things a whole lot more I'd guess? In the late 1970's the mystery about Carping was tangible and addictive, it was just magical and this 'mystery' was very much part of the fabric of even wanting to try and catch Carp in the first place. It was an achievement to get any Carp at all out of Fordwich back in the 1970's, and when you did, well you were filled both with excitement and an overriding sense of satisfaction. There were many nonsensical old wives tales about Carp being impossible to catch floating around in those days that it makes me laugh just thinking about it. Okay, for the most part this was correct, Carp were hard to catch, but only because we were doing pretty much everything wrong at the time. So, this here Blog will start by me reminiscing about how it was in the old days. Hopefully it wont come across as all Uncle Albert (y'know - During the War, Only Fools and Horses?) but will just paint a picture of what it once was like learning to fish for Carp in the south east of England in the late 1970's and 1980's and its effect on Fordwich and the local Angling fraternity.
As an 'extra added' add on ... I have to point out that this Blog will be a bit warts and all, well sort of. After attempting a first proof read, I must admit that I was a little shocked about some of the content that I wrote in it and whilst my initial intention was to edit this newer Blog, well in the end I thought stuff it, let's just leave it as it is when it came out on my head. I was forced to leave out many of the old tales as some of them were more than a little out of order and being a very changed character as I am now I cannot in all conscious relate such things. I immediately realised certain things were out of order as I was thinking about what to write, so mentally omitted them at source. My reasoning about leaving this as it is it that when I thought about it the only people who are going to see it will be people that know or (used to) know me as a relatively inoffensive, down to earth sort of person and they will get the gist of it ... well hopefully? I just sit here hammering away at the keys and what comes out pretty much just comes out, I had no predetermined mental pathway planned for the Blog and often I jumped from one subject to the other in places. It could be far better set out but now it is what it is, a well meaning muddle of old tales I suppose? It is dealing with a part of my life now long since gone though it was a little bit weird just how I ended up writing certain bits of it and though the Blog as a whole was meant to be about my fishing days, I did find myself going off at all sorts of tangents ... things such as fishing gear I used, odd bits of football and far too much about guitars crop up all over the place. These were all big things to me in my fishing days (as they still are now) so somehow they made their way into this so-called fishing Blog. Anyway ... apologies in advance for that, as I say I think it's an age thing is all this tangential reminiscing?
I also write using my normal 'face to face' style intermingled with a few strange lingual lumps incorporating a few fancy words typed in to make it appear as if I' am some sort of sophistomacated,* deluded literally genius, so don't be fooled, I'm not anyhow, I well realise of course that I'm not a writist and am not event trying to appear to be. I do have a strange writing style I suppose, partly very down to earth/grounded as is my personality but also with various 'bits' where I use rather grandiose words, words that I'd never actually use in a face to face conversation, speaking as I do being an uneducated kid brought up on a housing estate in southeast Kent. So my writing style is now a bit of the above mixed with cockney git/integrated moron that those who do know me know me to be. Gottit?* Then we'll continue ...
*One or two of my made up words, known in the upper echelons world of high class literature as Philisms.
And now ... it's D ... d ... d ... disclaimer time:
I'm so sorry, I developed a stammer during the writing of that header. Anyhow, enough about that - my first header read as: Achtung, a warning to all humans out there on planet earth!! But I thought better of it? I think I mentioned the war but I think I got away with it? Anyway, the gist of this 'bit' is that I would hereby like to point out to my zillions of adoring readers that there will be, from time to time you understand, some very bad use of grammeration and many awful Spilling mistokes in thsi otehrwsie word perfect uber interesting reflection of a bygone age. This is inevitable I am afraid, as I'm a bit of a massive, enormous moron at writing this sort of nonsense. So then, should you notice such things as my various twistings of the English language, the wrong letter used or the occasional upside down image, then please bear in mind that I am not well and did my level best to get it right, scouts honour I did guv. Also, please take into account and see that from my angle, having sat in this here spot that I am still sitting in behind this computer laden desk and having such a laborious written such a large Bloggy thing such as this, that once you think of it as a finished work that is then a real a pig having to go back and ever so slowly re-read the whole thing back again to search out any errors as a final proof read. I will proof read it (well, 'a bit' perhaps?) but no doubt a few errors will still slip through the mental net, they always do with me. I am not totally without the ability to write you understand, it's just that anything that I ever attempt to write rarely comes out the way that I wanted it to. My mind wanders half way through a thrilling sentence or my brain hurts, or someone distracts me, you know how it is. Where was I now? See, I told you ...
Another disclaimer that I feel needs pointing out, deals with my worry about everyone in this post social media generation looking for yet another angle to get personally offended about pretty much anything and everything. The modern world makes me want to vomit most of the time, meaning that I just feel compelled 'here and now' to set this bit out in stone (as it were) so nope, nope, nope ... just NO!! Just stop it willya? DO NOT TAKE OFFENCE!! Is that clear enough? Is it indeed humanly possible to clarify the point any better than that? So, please, please, please do not take this Blog very seriously! It's a laugh? D'ya gettit? Y'know a micky take, a bit of fun or banter between consenting adults who enjoy getting their leg pulled by their mates. Phew ... I'm so glad that I cleared that little nest of vipers up on page one as I never did take myself too seriously and still don't. Mickey taking in our world always was, and still is, just a series of back handed complements, banter amongst mates, so TAKE NOTE that no person mentioned by name in this Blog will be anyone that we ever had a harsh word with. It was all friendly stuff in our little sphere of camaraderie and it still is to this day on the rare occasion when any of us run into each other. Okay, I may well have the odd whinge about the egotists and the troublemakers we inevitably came into contact with along the way but will I keep the names of the few we encountered very much in the incognito column. The old crowd will know the in's and out's as to this unsaid/unwritten material and who were the main protagonists anyway. The proof of the pudding is behind the bird in the bush??? No, that's not right now is it?? What I am trying to convey here is that even though there were an awful lot of Carp anglers from all walks of life, young and old, coming and going in and out of personal contact during my fourteen year fishing career, and we all got along, we were all mates and we had no real problems till about 1986 when a few undesirables started showing up on Fordwich. These people will not get any mention in this fluffy bunnykins Blog of human kindness and loveliness as I will apply the maxim that if you've nothing good to say about another human being, well then just say nothing. You'll also have to bear with me that I do still have a bit of a sledgehammer wit, so if you pick up anything that might be misconstrued as any sort of put down or slight on another persons character, then please see it's not meant in that way at all, it's just how we were back then and I still am now, a bit up front and in your face. This way of communication not only kept everyone in our social circle grounded but also meant that we were able to convey things, albeit in our own way and it was a jolly good laugh doing so too. No offence was given nor taken. It was a twentieth century attitude thing, allowed prior to the entire world going mad, taking itself too seriously, 'I'm so offended' becoming the vogue and generally meaning everyone having some odd sense of humour bypasses thereafter. I blame this attitude on awfully thick egotistical people using Social media. Oh, and I'm 100% right of course - it's all been scientifically proven ... well, in my world it has. I scientifically proved it to myself in my head where my brain lives! Even if I say so myself, we were all a very nice bunch. Okay, Lockey might threaten to throw you in the lake if you looked at his beer in the pub, but that aside we never ever had any agro, there was no envy, none of us were particularly competitive and we were always helpful and genuinely pleased when others amongst the group caught fish. For instance I well remember how Geoff and I reacted when dear old Colin Whimbush finally caught his first Fordwich Carp, after just eighty four years of trying too, we were elated for him. [see below] No, there was always a nice atmosphere amongst us as a twenty/thirty plus strong group of Carp anglers who mixed as part of the extended gang over a decade an a half, we were very lucky in this regard. There were no super heroes and no idiots either. Oh there were bad people on the lakes we fished, they just never entered our realm of consciousness too often and were always kept at arms length.
As mentioned in the above - here we have dear old Colin Whimbush, I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw that I even had a photo of Colin. I'm not saying it took him very long to catch the Carp in this photo but when he turned up to start this particular fishing session, he was wheeled down to the lake by his mum in a pram wearing a nappy, as in Colin who was in the said pram wearing the said nappy, not his mum, keep up willya? I have no idea of when he took this fish nor what it weighed but it looks to me like the photo was taken in the small float fishing swim just to the left of the middle Tree swim. A nicer bloke it's hard to imagine ... ah, bless him. An ickle lickle baby Colin Whimbush. This wasn't his first ever Carp by the way, I thought I'd better point that out.
One last disclaimer thing (yawn etc) for any of you that do read this Blog, then I apologise for any old ground already covered (as in repeated stuff) also any repeated stuff. I would also like to apologise for any repeated stuff even though I've done my best to eradicate any repeated stuff, any inaccuracies or any repeated stuff I may have failed to point out to the reader on the odd occasion. When I read back the first Blog I noticed a massive number of errors as I touched upon earlier, one of which was repeated stuff. Hopefully this one will be better in this regard? No doubt some of it will be either just plain wrong seeing how long ago all of it happened or looked back on and written through rose tinted spectacles, as we all tend to do as we all look back at our earlier lives. Lastly, I would also hereby like to apologise forthwith for any repeated stuff. I thank you.
Readership
I will try my best to get this here Blog to everyone who was concerned at the time ... however, I can anticipate a major problem or two here. Now I don't do this Social Media thing very properly. I am 58 years of age and for me twitface and Faceache or whatever it's called, well it's just an utter waste of time. I've been out of the loop with the Carping crowd for so long that I now have no clue how to contact many of the old bunch of renegades we rubbed shoulders with back then? I did once upon a time sign up to Facebook (as I needed to contact Roger Stanger and Lockey) and whilst looking up certain one's of my old mates I did see that a few of them were on Facebook, no doubt twitter too? I did track down (but not contact) Mark Sturge, Plonker, John Baldry and sadly dear old Clive Whitlock who died a couple of years ago. I do still have ongoing on-line contact with Dave Locke and I also see both Craig Reynolds and Geoff Bowers face to face from time to time whilst out birding ... as for all of the rest, well I have no clue how to get to them. Once I have all of this Bloggy thing finished I will perhaps have to re-join Facebook, if only to see who I can contact? So if any of you do get to see this Blog and you are still in contact with anyone mentioned in it, then please feel free to send it to them with my regards. It'll bore the pants off most of my old mates anyway, I realise that, but I would like to at least give them the opportunity to read it just in case they might be bored enough to take this trip down memory lane. Blogs about your own life are often very self centred, it's inevitable and because of this they aren't in reality all that interesting. Carp fishing has changed a fair bit since our day and whilst what I write out here might appeal to a few from a purely nostalgic point of view, to most people it'll just come across as the ramblings of a middle aged moron. They'd be right too ... I am a middle aged moron.
Also for the purpose of this particular Blog I am going to keep my name to myself as those that know me won't need to know and for those that don't, well you're not missing out on anything. I do revel in a bit of anonymity. If you never knew me and require a mental picture, then think of me now as still being extremely suave and debonair, well ripped with boyish good looks and a personality to die for. Quite why Cheryl Cole didn't hunt me down and snap me up a few years back is still beyond me. The loss is all hers of course.
One last thing for those that know me, I will probably post this Blog in the public domain as opposed to invitation only, which will mean that I'll have to explain certain older things to any newcomer reader, things that will be blatantly obvious to us who were there at the time. As I'll be concentrating much of this Blog on Fordwich lake, it therefore might be worth a read by any of these newcomers who are interested as to the history of the lakes Carp fishing but I never ever had actual person to person contact with at the time? Let's face it, most of the anglers fishing the lake now might have heard of me but wont know actually know me, in fact some of them weren't even born when I fished there. Anyway some of what I write will be aimed at these sorts too. One thing that I would like to know is whatever happened to those Carp that I used to fish for back then? I'd really like to know, presumably some of them will still be getting caught till this day and if so, which ones and how big did they grow? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated though quite how this can be achieved seeing as I don't do social media is up for debate? You can leave messages in the comments section of this Blog should you feel the need? Back to the point of this 'bit' I used to look back at some of those old Carp like old friends, I got to recognise most of them, so it would be fascinating for me to see their timeline if anyone out there knows? Some of the anglers fishing there now might even be interested in the fish that I caught too? If you have any new news about the older Carp in Fordwich then as I say, leave me a message in the comments box. You'll probably need a Yahoo/Google account to message me even though the Blog is available for public use, so no doubt you'll have to sign in? I think it's quite an easy process? Anyway, I'm waffling on here aren't I? I tend to do that quite a lot ...
So then, that's part of the sequence of events that got me to this spot, sat in my room stuck in front of a PC with far too much time on my hands ... so it's on with the truly gut wrenchingly wonderful and fascinating story about me, surely the most interesting human being on the entire planet ...