Writer, fly-fisher, river restorationist
A few weeks ago I got back from a flying visit to the Pas de Calais with my fishing pals Jeremy Lucas, Keith Wallington and Jacques van Niekerk, and published a short account of part of our visit on my Urbantrout blog… Steep chalkstream headwaters with constant year-round flow can only mean one thing… historic […]
Thanks to all my fellow Members of the Flyfishers’ Club who contributed articles to the Summer 2015 issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal, our latest issue is now apparently cruising at 35,000 feet to many corners of the earth as essential in-flight holiday reading… a global affair in all senses of the word. There’s a brace […]
Hard to believe a year has passed since my Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing was published, yet this is already the second summer when it’s been helping ordinary members of the public to start fighting back against invasive non-native species (INNS) in their local areas. Now balsam (and floating pennywort, rhododendron, mink, grey squirrel etc…) […]
In gaps between briefs for several fascinating freelance copywriting gigs in busy London agencies, I’ve recently been devoting a little extra time to new product development for my Urbantrout eco-brand… … launched in 2013 and gaining a satisfyingly culty underground following among them as knows (look at that lucky orange hoodie on West Country fishing guide Pete […]
Arc-welder sun in sheet-steel sky. Daffodil banks, LDOs tumbling downwind. And somewhere, under slag-heaps and shopping trolleys… the hope that a fish will rise… (Model and fellow urban fly-fisher: my good pal Nick Steedman. Full disclosure: previously also published on urbantrout.net)
In my circle of closest fishing pals, it’s almost an article of faith that the bigger a river gets, the moodier and more unpredictable it can be. Small streams are where you go to hone your short game – fishing light and stealthy, casting to fish you can see or at least locate with an […]
The latest episodes of my Urbantrout Diaries were published on Flyfishing.co.uk just before Christmas – this time an end-of-year mini-series in which I’ve reviewed all the great urban river restoration projects that took place across the UK in 2014: In the UK’s river-mending community, this summer feels like the one when it’s all finally kicked into […]
Though I say it myself… I think this winter’s Flyfishers’ Journal has turned out to be a proper Christmas cracker. Highlights of the latest issue include contrasting Icelandic articles from Neil Patterson and Nigel ‘Fennel’ Hudson (also starring Tim Pike, John Hotchkiss and David Profumo), Andrew Herd’s examination of Jimmy Wright’s fly-tying legacy to the […]
It’s not every day you get interviewed on your home water for an international fishing ezine. So when Germany’s SCALE Magazine offered to send writer-translator Tankred Rinder (also editor of Forelle und Aesche) and photographer Veit Dresmann to south London as part of their round-the-UK road trip in September… … I jumped at the chance […]
Despite the obvious presence of a brace of hardback books in my portfolio, more than 90% of my freelance copywriting work these days is digital. Take two of my most recent jobs, for example… The first involved working with a PR company to launch a revolutionary new multi-joint fitness system which may in time replace […]
