Back in the gloomy days of post-war austerity that I call "childhood", most anglers aspired to owning two rods, a 10'6" bottom-rod with a built-cane tip, the rest whole cane; and a Nottingham-style one, eleven feet and (perhaps) a bit, with built cane middle and tip (
very posh and pricey).
What schoolboys and men with families to feed usually ended up with was one bottom-rod for "best", and a broken one, with the tip ring whipped back onto the remains of the tip, for legering and pike-fishing.
Only the well-off, and hard-working single men, could afford specialist match rods and MkIV-style specimen rods. We mere mortals read of their exploits and dreamt.
Then along came fibreglass, and almost everyone had access to at least one half-decent rod, even if it was only a standard bottom rod with a solid glass tip replacing the split cane, and most started to need a rod-holdall.
I became an angling schizophrenic: the scientifically-trained, Walker-inspired late teen scraping his dosh together for a Taperflash and a North-Western carp blank; the romantic remnant of the "Winnie-the-Pooh"-reading, Peter Scott-watching boy still hankering after the cane beauties I'd never been able to afford.
Eventually, cane prices tumbled, as carbon pushed glass into the history books, and I established quite a thicket of bamboo, and a lab cupboard of carbon, but I never lost the mind-set that most coarse fishing outside the "specimen hunting" realms of carp, pike , and post-modern super-barbel fishing, could be covered with a bottom rod, a Nottingham rod, and a "match" rod.
I now find myself packing a "Harcol" Nottingham rod, a Milbro bottom-rod and a nameless, ferruleless, Spanish reed, twelve-foot match rod as my Go-To trio, but I feel naked with fewer, unless I'm going for a one rod, one method quickie, or doing something that forces me to break out the carbon (glass, if lightning threatens).
If that puts my head where the sun doesn't shine, I can only wonder why the view is so pleasant.