Trout in Dirty Places hits the road
With the razzmatazz of the book launch behind us, the Trout in Dirty Places show has been on the road out of London…
… first for a book-signing event and generally big night out at the Hillsborough Hotel microbrewery in Sheffield, complete with pints of deliciously hoppy Wobbly Wader beer (with 10p per pint generously donated to SPRITE, Paul Gaskell’s local Trout in the Town chapter, how could we fail to drink our fill?)
… then, a couple of weeks later, down to Theale to help Kris and Shaun run the Wild Trout Trust stand at the Sportfish Show, and naturally talk to anyone who’d listen about the joys of urban fly-fishing and river-mending.
Year on year, this opportunity for big-brand traders and product developers to meet their customers face to face just seems to get more internationally popular.
So it was a solid-gold opportunity to play with shiny toys and catch up with mid-Atlantic friends new and old: Marc Bale from Sage, Mark Hamnett from Partridge and Marryat, Toby Merigan from Funky Fly Tying, Luke Kozak from Woodland Water & Gardens, Paul Sharman from Fish& Fly, and the bloke who began all this my one-time fly-fishing mentor Simon Gawesworth from Rio.
(You’ve got to admit this guy’s good: the shock of seeing Trout in Dirty Places in print, and fully understanding what he’d started, didn’t seem to put him off his powerstroke at all…)
But best of all I loved the chance to sign a few more copies of Trout in Dirty Places, and meet and talk to people who’d already started reading and enjoying it.
For any writer, this is bound to be a strange, satisfying and slightly surreal buzz: for me, as a bloke who’s usually a totally anonymous freelance copywriter, there’s the extra little jolting realisation that this book with my name on it is out there in the wild, making a life of its own, getting people thinking, fishing and restoring their local urban rivers. And who can say where that will lead? On several levels at once, this can sometimes feel like quite an awesome responsibility…
No surprise, then, that the very next morning found me back pulling rubbish out of my own little Wandle. You can take the writer out of the river, but you can’t… well, you’ve been reading this blog, you know the rest!
Over the next couple of months, I’ll be signing copies of Trout in Dirty Places on the Wild Trout Trust stand at the BFFI (23 – 24 June) and the CLA Game Fair (21 July).
If you’re visiting either of these, don’t forget to stop and say hello…
