A quiet day for buying at Spitalfields yesterday with only a few books emerging from a box as the bells of the City tolled eight o'clock. The most interesting being Neil Graesser's 'Advanced Salmon Fishing'. 'Advanced' is not a word used often in Arcadia but luckily this is a book of memories as much as it is a book of instruction. And so I spent a quiet morning reading about a childhood holiday on the Tweed in February of 1940, 'When I woke the next morning, it was barely light. I lay in bed full of anticipation and was perplexed at the creaks and crunching noises which I could hear. I tiptoed to the window of my bedroom and peered out into the gloom. There was the river, a raging brown torrent, carrying on its surface huge ice floes buffeted to and fro, crashing into each other as they were swept seawards'. The author then recounted how he spent the day fishing the torrent with a mounted Golden Sprat from Forrest of Kelso as bait whilst kitted out in a pair short tweed trousers. In Arcadia that's what we call Advanced Salmon Fishing.
