A Long, Lost Skill

I’m an enthusiastic bodger. I’ll try fixing anything but there are unpredictable results. I once took my father-in-law’s outboard motor apart and once I’d reassembled it, there were enough parts left over to start a spares shop!

I’ll try plumbing, which usually results in a flood and I’ve had so much electric current through me when rewiring houses or adding lights or sockets, that it’s a wonder I don’t have permanently curly hair.

I’ve built patios and even a pool house but J has had to get the builders to finish them off and cover up my handiwork which, once they’d finished, cost me a fortune – the exact opposite of what I was trying to achieve in the first place.

I’m ok with cars as long as it’s nothing to do with the engine and I’ve even been known to repair the dishwasher until it literally blew up a few weeks ago. Whether the cause of the explosion was down to my fiddling, I don’t know.

So where am I going with all this ? Tonight I was watching a fishing programme and the guy was showing a selection of flies he was planning to use and it reminded me of a skill I once had which is probably now a lost art.

Back when I was about 13 or 14 my whole family was fishing mad – well the males were. My grandfather was a committed fly fisherman whilst my uncle John was a spinner (lure) enthusiast. My cousins, as well as my father and myself preferred throwing a worm into the river and just lying down on the bank waiting for a bite.

One day, and I’ve no idea where it came from, I found a large box in the house, absolutely filled to the brim with all the materials you would need to tie flies. There were feathers from hundreds of different birds, some quite exotic and probably illegal. There was a variety of silk threads and tinsels in glorious colours, and all sorts of wax for waterproofing the threads used to tie the flies. Finally, there were the vices to hold the hooks and literally thousands of hooks of all sorts of shapes and sizes.

Now, I’m not person known for intricacy. My philosophy is that if you can do a good job in 40 minutes why take 1 hour to do a fantastic job? Maybe that’s why the dishwasher isn’t functioning, but when I found this box of materials, I was fascinated.

I bought some magazines containing patterns and started tying flies, and amazingly, even my earliest efforts were praised by my grandfather who could spot a badly tied fly a mile away. A few months later he was actually asking me to tie specific flies, which was probably the greatest compliment he could pay me. Such was my enthusiasm for my new found skill that I would rush back from school, complete my paper round in record time and then spend hours tying flies. I suppose today’s equivalent is when Guy rushes home from school and  is on his laptop before he’s even taken his jacket off.

Unfortunately, after a couple of years of my fascinating new hobby, the box of materials was sold without my knowledge. I have no idea where the box originally came from, but I came to realise that it contained a lifetime’s collection of everything you needed to tie flies. Recreating it was an impossibility, and so a skill was lost.    

By the way - the trout fly shown in the picture is a Teal Blue and Silver ....... just in case you wanted to know.