Written in the form of an angling autobiography, this work begins with boyhood expeditions to a pond in the shadow of the West Yorkshire slag heaps, and proceeds, via specimen-hunting trips to the lonely lochs of north-west Scotland, to the delicate business of conjuring trout out of the streams around the author’s home in North Yorkshire. ‘I only had one defining principle in writing this book,’ says John Aston in his Foreword, ‘to describe how it felt’. In that aim he has succeeded brilliantly.