Mine make me taller when I am bailiffing, and meaner, especially if I
accompany it with a pair of dark Polaroids and a sharp gaff, attached to an
old hazel stick, and used only for pulling out rubbish and debris from the
stream as I walk the beat. Mr small stream river Poacher ( don’t why I
have allowed him a capital P as poachers are thieves, not that they all
steal the fish from our streams, but they are stealing our fishing rights
and that is indeed punishable under section 2 of the Theft Act, but let’s
not go there today).
But with glasses he can’t see the whites of my eyes. Me. Menacing? Ha. There
is no one more placid. But I can’t go into print saying things like that in
case any Colne Valley river poachers are reading this and think I am a soft
touch. Not that cormorants and otters can read. Suffice to say I am very
protective of our Colne Valley club stream stretches…. But I do have a
warning for some Eastern European chaps ….. “stop eating our fish. Despite
our cultural differences, you have to abide by UK law when you are in the
UK. It’s simply not the done thing my good man, to remove our fish…nor
have bankside barbecues, not least because our streams are in the main on
private property…now be off with you and order a carp from the Co-op!
Where was I? Oh yes. Hats. Felt hats. Leather hats. Suede hats.
wide-brimmed. Small-brimmed. Brown, black, camouflaged. Pork pie. Woolly
(yes, sometimes in the depths of winter). Trilby. But rarely baseball,
unless for summer fly fishing where I need that extra shade over my aging
brows, and fading eyesight, to see that brownie over there by that patch of
ranunculus.
All rather fetching, rather becoming or, umm, according to a few friends
they make me look like a real billy nobhead: “Err Cullum, you there, Mr.
Tw*t in the hat!” Charming.
But my hats are no ordinary hats – baseball (except as above), beany, tackle
branded or bobble. They are respectable hats, and, in the main, as
oft-stated, wide-brimmed. And I have said it before and I will say it
again..
They keep the sun off my brow and out of my eyes when I am float-watching or
casting a delicate fly to a rising trout, and they keep the rain off my
neck.. and the bugs also when sitting undera large willow of a summer’s eve
merrying away a few hours while keeping one eye on the worm-laden quill,
another on a most glorious English sunset. Yes.. I favour wide brimmed
hats.. they are special. They are me; they are mine.. and they fit my head
as my tonkin cane fits my hand.
I only realised I adorn my head with such an array of hats when photos of me
with fish catches mysteriously started to appear in Angling Times earlier
this year, on the pleasure catch pages, for I am no huge specimen catcher,
or fish reporter, though I do aim to catch the largest fish in the streams I
fish. Perhaps that is specialist angling, rather than specimen angling, for
I do believe there is a difference.
Anyway I digress again. What caught my eye each week while I was trying to
work out which of my lovely friends was submitting pictures I had sent them
of a Monday morn.. was not the fish, but the hat I was wearing…In fact
that was the very reason my Preston-based business associate was sending
them in for publication. For my hat-trick! Such a cheeky chappy he is, and
me, the pr*t in the hat!
There was the summer light and airy palm leaf hat, made by local lad Patrick
with the big grin and colourful outfit on the beach in Barbados many years
ago. Succulent and green it was for some months on the pine dresser then
aged nicely as it dried. More one for a punt down the Thames, or for
matching to an MCC-style, and ‘egg and bacon’ coloured cricket jacket to
cheer on the Ashes squad from the Lord’s Long Room.
The autumn roach trotting leather wide brimmed bought years back while
wandering the Oxford indoor market, and now rather out of shape but
completely indisposable; and the sentimental suede wide-brimmed, which
travelled half way round South Africa on a three week safari after its
purchase in Zimbabwe by my younger daughter two years ago. The added bonus
here was the rough and raw porcupine quills, swept up outside the porcies
(pronounced porkies) home in a local shanty town… and later made into
sublime fishing floats by master craftsman Paul Cook of Watford
(www.artofangling.net). And the pork pie, brought home from a business trip
to the Big Easy, Norleans – New Orleans, for wearing on the river Lea with
Mate Mole while chubbing. A flexible friend which, with brim down, doubles
as a Walkeresque hat, of heavy duty felt which fends off the winter frosts.
It was the hat of choice in the last week of the past season and which
brought luck, for hats are lucky charms, when trundling a large prawn under
the snag festooned, treelined far bank. A pleasing hat, for combined with 10
feet of early 1960s Davenport & Fordham Avon strength cane and a half-bail
arm Ambidex, it brought the chubbiest of chevins to my waiting net. A giant
at six pounds and eight very solid ounces.
And it was the hat, still on the parcel shelf of my smelly car two days
later, the 13th of March, almost the 11th hour of the fading season, that
found the swim that delivered just one bite from a meandering Thames
tributary near Oxford, and which charmed in a feisty fighter of a two and a
quarter pound perch, to the best bait ever, the humble lobworm and a Mr
Crabtree Craftversa rod. 11ft 3 inches of straw coloured cane, a most
universal rod with a liking for lines of between 3 and 6 pounds. The perch
approved, I am sure, at its gentle action and wonderful curve.
Then there was the deep green woollen wide brim with leather band that came
back squashed in my suitcase from a business trip to Cork. You’d imagine the
jauntiest of Leprachauns wearing it while performing a traditional Irish
jig – which is what I did do in it the day Barbel dave photographed it and
its wearer holding a freshly caught three pound plus true Cru.
And my original leather Drizabone, from I forget where, which nabbed a
marvellous brace of clonking redfins, to totted breadflake from the tiniest
of brooks, or the bearded barbus from my beloved stream, not massive at just
over six poounds..but none the less a huge specimen for such a tiny stream.
Go buy a hat and may it bring you the luck, the fish and the happiness all
mine have brought to me.
Gary Cullum
