Are you missing out on something by not following the latest trend?

I messed about with colours a long time ago, and found it didn’t matter what colour I used as long as I put it in the right place

I am what I am, and I make no excuses” is how the song goes, but sometimes people want you to be something else. The reasons for this, in my experience, are varied but very often it’s because they want what they believe in to be the best thing for you to use or do. Whilst I am open to change, I cannot for the life of me think of any reason to change a goddamn thing if they are working anyway. For those that do, the truth of the matter eventually becomes so clouded in bullsh*t that it is very hard to see what is right or wrong, good or bad. And that is when confusion starts to reign supreme, and in the end everyone either misses out on what they were trying to achieve in the first place, or the effort becomes far too expensive, not to mention the time invested in doing it. Confusing is it not?

Well, I have spent my life trying to keep things as simple as I can, whilst maintaining an element of fun. I suppose my feelings have come from a military life where, in essence, apart from advancements in the weaponry, things never really changed. And I do believe I was serving in the greatest Army in the world! Things could well be different today, but during my service the basic military ethos remained. Whilst we worked to a strict set of rules there were other countries, the Americans most of all, that farted around with their tactics and in the end cost the lives of soldiers who were confused and lacked the necessary understanding to use these tactics successfully.

I was tasked to monitor the US involvement in Granada back in the eighties, and with the greatest of respect, never was such meddling so starkly illustrated. The Americans lost a lot of men in that limited conflict, all bar one by friendly fire! Being an ally of the US we trained with them frequently, but never caved in to demands to change to their way of thinking, I really don’t believe we would have survived that.

For the life of me I cannot see that they have missed out on a single thing

I ran a whole host of marathons, but as the events were often held in big cities, my carbo-loading the night before was done in local hostelries, chasing the local women, and the ten pints of Guinness I invariably imbibed were usually the last liquid I drank before heading off the following morning on just over twenty six miles of pure unadulterated torture. As bad an experience as that was, I often did very well, but was always subjected to intense debriefings from those that thought they knew what they were talking about. You need to eat this, you need to drink that, you need to train my way, blah, blah, blah… All I could think about when they did was how boring their lives must have been, and surely they could do things much more successfully if they were happy and not thinking too much about failure? It is a situation that I have found myself in time and time again, and ultimately the one line that sends me into a catatonic state is, “You are missing out on so much.” Listen: we are the authors of our own destiny, and letting others tell you how to live it means you will never get out of it the things you want, not with any degree of satisfaction anyway.

I have to run the gauntlet of “missing out” quite a lot these days, and recent events have done nothing to ease my furrowed brow. I suppose the first thing that had me wondering what one has to do to make people realise I am quite happy doing it my way, was a social conversation about the colour of our hookbaits. Evidently I was missing out on so much because of my determination to do things my way. I explained that for many years (yeah, I have been doing this carp fishing thing for sometime now) I did muck around with colours, and never once did I believe they played a part. Don’t get me wrong here, we need to experiment, otherwise we learn nothing. And it was this that led me to discover I needn’t have bothered in the first place. It came to a head when I fished at Frimley through three winters, to begin with I never cast the same colour bait back out onto a spot that I had just had a bite from. And you’ll never guess what? It didn’t make a blind bit of difference, I just kept on catching. Now, as much as it makes me uneasy blowing smoke out of my own backside, I caught more than most during my time there, and I cannot see for one single minute how I could have caught more.

The action continues apace at Frimley, no matter what colour hookbait I used

Hook sharpening is another thing that I have absolutely no intention of doing. Most of the people that sharpeners think of as hook sharpeners are nothing of the sort, because they, like me, don’t think they are missing out on a single thing. And probably the biggest “missing out” outcry happened only a couple of days ago.

I am a very fortunate man, in that I present The Fishing TV Show on BT Sports, and if that sounds like a bit of plug then I guess it is! During the filming I have had the pleasure to fish with a whole host of different anglers, and just as importantly, angle for a varied array of fish. However, with apologies to the others I have fished with, there is one man that has had a great influence on my fishing over the years and he is Chris Yates. Of all the anglers I have ever met he is truly a person of his own design. He isn’t influenced by much, and gains his greatest joy from using rather old tackle, or at least tackle that was created in a bygone era.

We had been filming on one of his secret stretches of river, and I cannot even begin to tell you what an incredible day it was. Keen to tell people about the experience, the first person I spoke to about it asked, “Don’t you think he and his kind are missing out on so much?” It took me a second or two to shake myself from the coma I was drifting into, and all I could do was disconnect the call. Some people just don’t get it, do they? If you cannot be yourself by making your own way in life, then please don’t suggest for a second that I am missing a single thing, because I am not. Only my opinion of course. Laters.