Writer, fly-fisher, river restorationist
Especially if you’re an angler, invasive non-native species can really spoil your day. From giant hogweed on the banks (with phyto-phototoxic sap which inflicts third-degree burns that’ll keep coming back for years) to signal crayfish and killer shrimp in the water (which destroy the food web from the bottom up by chewing through all the […]
Just before Christmas last year, I got a call from a German design and publishing house which was working on a big new fly-fishing book project and needed another writer to join Andrew Herd to pick up some interviews at short notice. Would I like to come on board? Took me about 3 seconds to […]
When I started planning the latest issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal, I was pretty sure there’d be a Balkan river theme running through it. Doug Flynn had sent us a gripping account of exploring some very secret Slovene streams, and David James’s study of the magnificent cased marble trout on the wall of the Flyfishers’ […]
Over on my Urbantrout website (the continuity site for my first book, Trout in Dirty Places) I’ve just launched a new edition of my eco-branded Urbantrout Kryptek Highlander fishing caps. These are the same amazing, cutting-edge-camo patterned trucker-style caps that I brought to the UK for the first time last year – and now they’re […]
OK, so maybe sitting down to write a massive grid of emails for a charity healthcare marketing campaign doesn’t sound like the most excitingly creative way to spend your day. Unless, of course, you’re an integrated marketing copywriter geek like me. In that case, you’ll know that this is authentic, painstaking, too-much-caffeine-and-chewed-down-fingernails wordsmithing. The actual heart of […]
Writing an article isn’t just writing an article. It’s also writing the right article, and then finding the right place to get it published. Sometimes this can feel a lot like the painstaking process of fishing itself… Three casts later, as I tracked the nymph round and felt it lifting through the currents, just as […]
Just in case you missed all the social media chatter a few weeks ago, I thought it’d be worth mentioning again that my review of Mark Everard’s important new book River Habitats for Coarse Fish has now been published on the Fallon’s Angler website. As I said in my introduction… In these days when all […]
A couple of weekends back – before, during and after the Wandle Trust‘s usual monthly community river cleanup – film maker Jeremiah Quinn came down to the Wandle with his camera to capture some new angles on this little urban chalkstream’s story, and the qualities that have kept lots of us fishing and pulling out […]
After taking a break for a few issues, I’m delighted to say that I’ve just had another article published in Fallon’s Angler… … this time revisiting (from a very different angle) a few days I spent exploring the chalkstreams of northern France last summer with Jeremy Lucas and a couple of pals from the South […]
As some of the dust starts to settle (or not…) on the results of last week’s referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, I’m clearly not the only environmental writer who’s been thinking day and night about the implications. Readers of my chapter in Chalk Stream Fly Fishing (2012) may recall that I’m very […]
