Publisher’s Overview
Packed full of fishing anecdotes and stories of his travels around the World, Sixty Years A Fisherman is beautifully illustrated with John’s own Photography
Sixty Years A Fisherman is the long awaited and updated new edition of much-loved angler John Wilson memoirs, an icon of the angling world! John reveals the real life story behind the camera lens of a man who was once a cruise ship hairstylist and who later became one of the most recognised TV personalities to have come into the world of angling.
Detailing his childhood living in a north London flat, without a garden or easy access to wild open places, he talks about how much of his early years was spent exploring local park ponds, streams and ditches, first with a net, then with a worm tied by thread to a garden cane and eventually using rod and line. Explaining how, when he was three or four years old his Dad first took him netting for sticklebacks, and how it was his Nan’s old ‘Nora Batty’ heavy-duty stockings which kept him constantly supplied with nets.
He takes you through several of his career changes, including being a hairdresser, on to a trainee lithographic printer and back to hairdressing – where in the swinging 60’s his life in the fast lane was fulfilling, hectic, extremely demanding, and exciting – yet strangely he felt there was something missing. This nearly led him to working in the US before he realised that anyone entering the United States on a work permit would be first in the line-up for drafting out to Vietnam! So he took the easier option of spending 2 years aboard the P & O liner SS Oronsay.
Of course, littered throughout this book of his life you come to realise that fishing has always been a major part of his life, and as John says “wherever I am beside water, be it a village brook or out upon deep blue tropical saltwater miles off shore that same sense of mystery prevails. I always want to know what lives down there, what it looks like, how big it grows, what it feeds upon, how it fights and how it reproduces. To me fishing provides the consummate challenge.”
The final chapter contains a complete list of all the largest specimens of every species of coarse, sea and game fish he has have ever caught both at home and abroad.
John will be launching his Autobiography with a Talk and Signing
At
Waterstones, 11-17 Castle Street Norwich NR2 1PB
On
Wednesday 3rd December – 7.00pm
