W ITH leisure time to burn, I am contemplating rooting to the back of the garage and disinterring my fishing tackle.

I know it’s in there somewhere, behind the disabled exercise bike and wallpaper pasting table, and underneath the golf clubs which have not been used since 1992.

I acquired virtually all my fishing tackle in a job lot from a Courant advert in around 1976, risking the sack by responding to the advert before the paper was on the streets.

I think I paid something like £20 for a canvas bag bulging with reels, lines, boxes of flies, bags of feathers, animal skins and silk for tying flies, a multitude of vicious treble hooks for salmon fishing, many spools of nylon of varying breaking strain, and pots of lotions and potions which I still don’t know the purpose of.

There was also a commodious landing net, a pair of thigh waders which were just my size, and about six rods of various lengths and thicknesses, most from Hardy’s of Alnwick, so it was all good stuff.

Remarkably, I still have most of the flies, although any fish which was foolish enough to take one of the rusty relics would probably die from lockjaw rather than being grassed.

Despite having all the best gear, I am a contender for the title of the world’s worst fisherman, but there is something hypnotically visceral about pursuing fish in their natural element.

It started when I was a small child, when my brother and I were taken on Sunday morning tramps through leafy lanes with little streams tinkling alongside my father as he worked up a thirst for his Sunday lunchtime pint.

We would take a break on a bridge over the stream, which was just a couple of yards wide – and there, lazily finning for position in the shade, would be three or four plump brown trout.

My brother and I would clamber down to try to catch them, but we might as well have tried to catch the wind, as they vanished like smoke in the wind, only to reappear in exactly the same spot by the time we had got back to the bridge.

We had more success in the stagnant ponds covered in green slime on other walks, where the mysteriously turbulent waters, belching oily bubbles at irregular intervals, would yield prodigious quantities of thuggish sticklebacks, their spines bristling with indignation at being scooped unceremoniously into a jam jar, which they had to share with generous gloops of frogspawn and ponderous water snails.

The whole lot would be tipped into a tank at home, made by my father from off-cuts from Vulcan bombers, and we would watch avidly as the frog spawn turned into tadpoles, with one in a thousand living long enough to become a frog.

Summer holidays were spent wandering about my uncle’s farm in Cumberland, which was criss-crossed by tiny becks, each having a population of vicious crayfish with slashing claws and spiky legs to draw the blood of any unsuspecting paddler.

The becks were only a few inches across, but twinkling among the crayfish in unlikely fashion were trout of up to six inches long.

To my enormous delight, I once succeeded in blasting one out of the water with a well-aimed boulder, leaving it quivering on the springy turf.

Alas, as soon as I touched its shimmering side, it produced a mighty leap back into the water, leaving me close to tears.

It was many years before I became a proper fisherman, using a rod and line rather than a jam jar, but the fish of the North Tyne were completely safe from my clumsy efforts for many months.

My fishing flies spent more time up trees and embedded in my clothing than in the water.

Many riverside hours were spent unpicking yards and yards of nylon with the aid of a fishing hook, after it had somehow transformed itself into something the size and consistency of a golf ball.

Once in a while though, I did manage to get the odd fly into the water, and on even rarer occasions, an obliging and naive baby trout maybe four inches long was foolish enough to accept my fly as a tasty morsel.

They were so small that many of them were jerked abruptly out of the water as I tried to cast, and found themselves dangling from a tree branch, as I despaired at the fact my casting was unfortunately getting worse rather than better.