Your eyes would not have been deceiving you, because that’s exactly where Feargal Sharkey, the former lead singer of The Undertones, was to be found that night. Along with fellow members of the Amwell Magna Fishery, the oldest fly-fishing club in England, Sharkey was alarmed to find that the chalk stream had almost completely dried up, imperiling the brown trout for which his club has sustainably fished for almost two centuries.
LINK (via: Daily Mail)
If you type “Chiltern Rivers” into Google, you will see a list of streams and a map that shows their close, northern and western proximity to the huge, populous sprawl that is London.
I grew up fishing the Chiltern streams – the Colne, the Gade, the Misbourne, the Chess (one of only two British streams in which rainbow trout successfully breed in – I caught my first wild rainbow on fly from the then free-flowing, ranunculus-tressed crystal stream, when I was still in schoolboy shorts over fifty years ago), the Wyc or Wye (the little Thames tributary that provided some of the browns for the original New Zealand trout stockings) ….
These rivers have a “non-greedy water companies”problem, however – in short, several million of us newly affluent and heavily consuming, modern human beings wishing to shower two or three times day, wash our several cars, water our golfcourses and gardens (the Chiltern Hills, a very affluent, now increasingly only semi-rural, London commuter and retirement area, feature a notably extensive and fabulous collection of the last two) – wishing to live far too fat, whilst still complaining that our pretty little local rivers drying up “really is the thin end of the wedge (harrumph)”.
Hmm.
Some serious self-examination and big-time rethinking has yet to be done, chaps….
Word on the North London Street, October 8th
“Have you seen Fergal’s River Lea?”
“Yeah, it went THAT way, mate.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-london-49973877/finsbury-park-flood-burst-pipe-leave-homes-and-schools-without-water
The video probably won’t play outside for those outside of the UK, but you get the watery picture.