I had one of those spells recently when everything got out of synch. The start of the problem may have been me forgetting that the MoT was due on the car. This resulted in the usual complicated arrangements for moving us and the kids around descending into chaos.
The old Morris Minor would be on double duty. And my fishing, with little time left before I had to stop for a while, was more than at risk. It was curtailed.
An astrologer would no doubt tell me that Pluto had been imbibing too much ‘Beetlejuice’, or some similar nonsense. I prefer to put it down to my periodic bouts of idiocy – a much more likely, if more down to earth, explanation.
After a couple of days, calm returned. The car was back – and exactly three hours remained of the day. In minutes, the old Morris was chugging (I nearly said ‘powering’, but I mean chugging!) its way through the fens. 
Half an hour later, I was easing my way gently down a grassy lane by the field (the farmer had rolled and grassed it for me a year or two earlier). Then I forgot that the Morris had rear-wheel drive and I promptly stuck the thing solid in mud while trying to turn it. It took me ten minutes of gathering broken bricks from the fields before I could attempt to extricate the vehicle along a little pathway of laid brick!
Not long afterwards, I stood on the top of the bank of the drain for about one second. A second after that I had completed a manoeuvre of which a downhill skier would have been proud, and I entered the water rather like those people going down slides at theme parks. Worse, I had about 5Olb of fishing tackle with me, which I don’t think is normally provided at theme parks.
My one-piece waterproof suit saved me from a real soaking, and, with perhaps an hour and a half to go to the end of the day, I was at least fishing.
There had been a steady drizzle, but as that ceased, I was treated to a fenland evening sky, the wind dropped and it was nearly warm. Then, of all things, I had a bite! Something had taken a liking to a sardine and kipper cocktail and my pike float was powering along the drain.
This pike gave a glorious battle, at times fast and spectacular, at times dour and head-shaking. It was deep below the rod top refusing to surface for the waiting landing net. Then, suddenly, it did surface and I knew from the breadth of its great jaws that here was a good 20 lb pike. And so it proved to be.
The chaos and bad times were over. I didn’t need an astrologer to tell me that things had changed.
By kind permission of the Cambridgeshire Pride Magazine
Barrie Rickards is a reader in Palaeobiology at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Emmanuel College and a curator of the Sedgwick Museum of Geology.
He is President of the Lure Angling Society, Chairman of the Pike Anglers’ Club of Great Britain and President of the National Association of Specialist Anglers.
