Comedy writer on canals

An article in the Stourbridge News this week - 'Comedy writer Geoff Tristram on canals' - contains quite a few good insights into waterways users.

However, it's asking for trouble to openly describe someone as a 'comedy writer'.  It's as if the words can't speak for themselves and the reader needs to be told 'Ahem, this is supposed to be funny'.

The trouble is that when you say someone's a comedy writer, you are saying 'funny, ha-ha'.  But the point of good comedy writing in newspapers isn't that it's funny,  but that it's true - at least in a greater sense -  only with a happy ending.  You can't be a comedy Gestapo and tell someone 'Vee haff vays of making you laff'.  The humour is what we find inside ourselves as we read it.  

However, two thousand words isn't a column, it's an essay, and even Mark Twain would struggle to hold a newspaper reader's attention at that length.  The article needed, as I mentioned another time about Towpath Talk, an editor with a crueller blue pencil.

Nevertheless, I can never get enough invective about anglers, and I enjoyed Geoff Tristram's contribution on this subject:

The average angler is an antisocial, unshaven creature who prefers the company of maggots to his fellow man. It is as if God had granted him a mere thousand words to last him a lifetime, and he doesn’t like to use them up unnecessarily by wasting them on pleasantries such as ‘Good morning’, or ‘Sorry, let me move this roach pole off the tow-path so that you can get by.’

He will, however, be more than ready to part with a few of the coarser, Anglo Saxon ones in his repertoire should you accidentally ride over his £500 carbon fibre fishing rod on your mountain bike, because he left it across what he regards as his private tow path, and you didn’t see it in time. At times like this, he can even become quite articulate, albeit in a menacing way.

Worst of all is on match days, when the path resembles a never-ending line of NCP car park barriers, with hundreds of huge roach poles barring the walker’s progress.

I wonder where I can read the angler's reply, the invective about boaters? 

Anglers are mostly men of few smiles in my experience, and still fewer comedy words.  They are good at invective, though.  I'll never forget the one in September 2006 on the Grand Union near Milton Keynes, who expressed himself at Granny Buttons in maggots, mealworms and sweetcorn.  I was picking out the wriggling things from my cabin all day.  Hilarious.

Comments

[Andrew Denny]

Neil,
Well, concentrating is one thing, but when they have acknowledged your existence by raising their pole but refuse to look at you, and still scowl, it's hard to say thank you.

They don't all do that, of course, but I'm constantly left feeling that I'm an interloper on a fishing lake.

[zan]

I've rarely had any trouble with anglers myself. They're usually pretty friendly, although a lot honestly don't realise that the signs by the operation moorings apply to them until you point it out. There is only one in particular I can think of who was incredibly rude, and that was over a year ago.

[Neil Corbett]

I need to intervene here, being a boater and an angler! Perhaps the reason they don't smile is because they are trying to concentrate on what they are doing.

Live and let live. How cheerful are you to an angler who gets in the way when you are trying to disembark?

Personaly I generally chat to anglers as we pass in the boat and, given the right questions, they generally reply cheerfully. I also thank them for raising their poles as we pass.

However I don't like the way their poles (I don't use them) bar the towpath. By the way a £500 pole would be a relatively cheap one, they can go up to £3000!!

Where I fish, a small club lake, anglers are very sociable and we spend a fair bit of the day chatting. Most, like me, are retired and it sometimes feels a bit like last of the summer wine!

[Bill Rodgers]

As I continue to read about anglers or fishermen as we call them in the states, I wonder when the two species separated on the tree of life. Both species can be described as unshaven, but, here they tend to stay out of the way and will always give you a wave if you're in a boat. (Probably since they wish they had a boat.) Also, if you want nearly endless conversation, ask them about their catch, their bait, their equipment, the tides (ocean), the flow (river), etc. and the conversation will be endless. Of course, we lack the canal system that boaters and anglers both feel territorial over. It's too bad anglers over there don't understand that if there weren't boaters, the canals would probably be unfishable. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact you use maggots for bait and we use earthworms? (I actually think using fly larvae is smarter than killing a creature that enhances the soil.)
P.S.
Andrew, I always enjoy your blogs, they tend to evoke thought about things I don't usually think about.