September, A Silver Green Rudd.
I’m sitting on a wooden bridge over a little weir. The August lake is still just full enough to be falling over the edge. Cool and wet and dusty with pale pink blobs of scum lounging aimlessly by the reeds, there’s no hurry here. Shapes are formed and stirred and reformed by dust and air and fish. Duckweed shivers and reconfigures. A bank of willow herb gashes the watery green with a livid pink scar.
And two boys arrive with fishing rods and a tin of sweetcorn. Pumped up by an evening of extreme fishing videos and tales of epic battles with silver monsters from their brothers, they wordlessly get down to business. Sweetcorn on hook, hook in water, fish on hook. There’s shrill excitement as the treasure is examined. It’s a silver green rudd, light pours through it’s blood red fins. Estimates of it’s size are hugely exaggerated as the hook is removed and the fish is returned to the water. And off they go again. And again. And again. They get high on their success , they get bitten by a water beetle and then they got bored. They leave, happy in the knowledge that twenty three is a record number of fish for one hours work. Bigger brothers can’t help but be impressed by that.
As their voices subside, more pink blobs of scum, from who knows where, slowly close over the disturbed water and inertia lazily steals back over the lake.
