Saturday, October 06, 2007

Fly fishing


This is the Fisherman's Cot at Bickleigh, where I had planned to have lunch earlier this week. (Perhaps now you will understand why I felt grumpy about missing out!) I love to sit there on a sunny day with a glass of chilled Chardonnay and one of the FC's delicious salads, simply looking at the River Exe. Sometimes we've been lucky enough to see a kingfisher and occasionally we have watched a fly fisherman in his waders, casting and dreaming, lost in a world far from twenty-first century cares. Fly fishing must be the only sport which has tranquility as a major attribute.
I have just finished reading 'Salmon Fishing in the Yemen' by Paul Torday. Several people assured me that I would enjoy it and indeed it has rescued the Richard and Judy Summer Collection from being a totally disastrous purchase. It is well-written with proper sentences, good grammar and vocabulary chosen to inform and describe rather than shock. Torday uses what is becoming a cliched convention of telling the story through reported letters, emails, interviews and passages from newspapers and books but, in this case, it works well. It helps the pace of the book and it is an effective way of depicting the different characters, relationships and viewpoints.
I don't belong to a book reading group; if I did, I would love to tackle this book. I can imagine that there would be as many opinions about it as there are characters in the book. There is humour, politics, war, intrigue, spin, pain, hope, love and death. At its heart, I think it is a book about faith and communication; I loved it.

9 comments:

  1. Thanks for the push, I might have discarded it with the rest, otherwise.

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  2. I do hope you get to Fisherman's Cot in the not too distant future, although the weather for sitting outside will soon be over. Do you remember the rather lovely wooden pavilions they used to have dotted around the gardens overlooking the river? (Ideal if there were a shower or when the sun had gone down.) Our local council made the owners remove them all, on the grounds that they breached Health and Safety regulations. (Danger of flooding . . .)

    As the owners pointed out; when there's a flood alert nobody sits in the pavilions but it cut no ice with the council - the same council that is so poorly run that it is now in dire financial straits and may yet be put on special measures, like a failing school. Herrumph.

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  3. What a gorgeous place. Next time book for a weekend so you won't get waylaid by an errant phone call.

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  4. D: If we get the Indian summer we have been promised, perhaps we could meet up for lunch there?

    I'd rather not think of the horrors wrought by the local (busy)bodies! I didn't know about that particular one but nothing surprises me. How did the human race survive before Health and Safety?

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  5. An Indian summer lunch sounds just the ticket - I will start checking the five-day weather forecasts and report back . . .

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  6. That will be good - I'll email you.

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  7. So glad you enjoyed Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. I was sent it to review some time ago and was not sure when I started it how I would get on but I loved it. At first it would appear just to be a funny book but on further reading you realise it is not. And yes it is about faith and how if you believe in something you can move mountains. So glad to find another reader who likes it as much as I do.

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