PART TWO
B*TCH-CREEK NYMPHING & THE MILLENNIUM BUG
Could this be true? Was my boy finally after all these years evincing an honest interest in something so seminal as fly tying? Was this moment a harbinger of things more glorious to come? I warmed with an inner glow and paternal pride welled into my eyes.
I showed him around the tying table, with each shelf baize-lined and compartmentalised, every part snugly filled with neatly-fitting tubs and containers, the translucent canisters packed with premixed dubbings, the threads and waxes, the furs – muskrat, seal and rabbit. And then I pointed to the skins, in olive, furnace, blue dun, cream and amber, the dyed buck, squirrel and calf tails. We went through the feathers of jungle cock, golden pheasant, woodcock, grouse and old English game cock, the teal and mallard wings, the widgeon and ptarmigan. And the hooks: sneck, snell, limerick and perfect, in every size from minuscule thirty-two’s to the brutal sixes and fours. I opened the tool drawer so that he might help himself to thread bobbins, cement needles, hackle pliers, whip finishers, wing burners, teasers and parachute hackle gallows.
“Wow,” he said.
The moment was deeply emotional. Overcome almost, I left him to it, concerning myself elsewhere so that he could find his own pace and unsheathe his own creativity. When I went to bed a few hours later he was still hard at work, hunched over the vise and surrounded by a halo of light that in my conceit seemed to radiate from his very centre.
Days later, I tagged him.
“How did your flies turn out?” I asked ingenuously.
He dug into a pocket and removed a pair of oversized hooks cunningly dressed in a rainbow of colour. But the points had been filed down and coated, each with a neat blob of pearlescent epoxy.
“I call them millennium bugs,” he said smugly.
“Whadaya do that for?” I asked, perplexed. “You have entirely wrecked a pair of very fine titanium-coated, chemically-sharpened fishhooks.”
“Can’t you see they are earrings? It’s R’s birthday and I forgot to get her a gift,” he said, nonchalantly slipping them back into a pocket. “Daddy dear, if you think they’re for fishing, you’re still a horse’s ass.”
After all these years, my boy remembers and it helps not a jot to bemoan the passing of innocence.......
ENDS
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