WHEN this covid business is finally all over, one of the first things I want to do is take my nine-year-old granddaughter Elise fishing,

She said via a family video link the other day that she would love to spend the day in pursuit of the finny tribe, and I am the very man to help her do it.

She holds no illusions about the angling skills of her granda, and is only too aware that our day on the water is likely to include me falling in the water, getting a hook stuck in my thumb or being eaten alive by midges.

There is only a small chance of actually catching any fish, but trying is going to be just wonderful.

My own fishing exploits started when I was much younger than her, and involved catching sticklebacks in a jam jar from an evil looking pond in the middle of our council estate.

Once you broke through the crust of weed over the water, the little fish with the wicked spikes were relatively easy to catch – presumably dazed by the sudden exposure to daylight in their green tinged world.

We would take them home and introduce them to the funfair goldfish in the tank my dad had made from spare bits of Vulcan bomber he had smuggled home from work.

They all romped round together for months, along with the tadpoles and snails from the same pond, but they one day disgraced themselves by eating a hamster which fell into their domain from the tank above – another of my dad’s home- made cages.

We did once catch a roach from a neighbouring pond – or rather it swam out of the water to surrender to us.

It was the most disreputable creature I have ever seen, with just one eye and covered in wens, but we bore it home in a hastily borrowed bucket as though it were a 30-pound salmon.

It died within minutes and was buried in the garden with full piscatorial honours.

My brother and I also took a great interest in the canal which cut through Macclesfield, for our father told it was the domain of a giant pike called Moby Dick, which was so big it had to swim to an area which was four times the normal width of the waterway simply to turn round.

We never actually saw it, but we always primly clutched our shorts very close to our nether regions if we ever ventured close to the water’s edge.

A beck ran through my uncle’s Cumberland farm where we spent our summer holidays. We used to get washed in it, whilst keeping an eye out for the resident crayfish, frequently monstrous beasts which could draw blood with one nip of their cruel claws.

Although it was only a couple of feet wide, there were also trout in the beck.

We used to try to guddle them but they would disappear with a contemptuous flick of their brightly spotted tails,

One day, I saw one holding station in the centre of a slow moving section of the beck, and decided to bring in the heavy artillery.

I selected a stone about as big as my head from a tumbled drystone wall, and hurled it into the pool with as much power as my 10-year-old arms could muster.

Water spumed everywhere – and there lying on the closely-cropped turf was the fish!

Gibbering with excitement, I tried to pick it up from where it lay stunned – just in time to see it flap back into the water and disappear.

I was in my 30s when I caught my first fish on a hook, hand-lining from a pier in the far north of Scotland. I was actually fishing with my sons for crabs, but an unwise flatfish foolishly seized by scrap of lugworm was hauled out of the water.

I don’t know if it was a dab or a flounder, but it was smaller than the palm of my hand, and contained less meat than half a fish finger – but it was delicious.

Since then I have caught innumerable fish on rod and line, from tiny parr to adult salmon in excess of 20lb, but suffered just as many mishaps.

I have had a sea trout stolen by mink, let another tagged sea trout with a £50 tag on its dorsal fin slip through my fingers to freedom and once lost a firmly hooked rainbow trout in the branches of a tree.

I was also swept away by a North Tyne flood one Friday the 13th, but if fishing brings as much pleasure to Elise as it has to me, she will be one happy little girl.