Gambit, Barwick and Command Centre Central

How!

I'll pause there because I've come over all nostalgic with regard to all things Fred Dinenage.

Is he still with us?

Google confirms that Fred still retains a pulse although the work has dried up a tad. Plans are afoot for a revival of Anglia TV's quiz show "Gambit"

Apologies, bit of a false start there. I do find myself being easily distracted of late.

Negotiations over the furnishings in the executive washroom at Command Centre Central are ongoing with Jimmy Bevan speaking out again regarding a precarious water supply in these Isles.

The general consensus of the public response on a phone in I caught one lunch time, appeared to be that there was plenty of water and it was a public right to leave the tap running when attending daily to the canines and molars.

Which was a bit depressing so come on Sir Jim, there's a message that needs to be made many times in order to make a few pennies start dropping.

While we're on Command Centre Central, an underfunded and over stretched Government department, our local "Big Fish Water" have been on to say that they have received a request to fit expensive screens to all of their rearing ponds to prevent any interference with the passage of salmon and sea trout.

You may add Sturgeon and Shad to that list, as neither of the four species run this river.

Any producer of fish is subject to rigorous checks over what they do with their water and fish and costs are subsequently incurred.

There are some who hold the view that there is a policy of making smaller fish producing units economically unviable, as a few larger producers are easier and cheaper to monitor.

It flies in the face of a push for localism,

there would be revolution if this theory were applied to cheese.

Years ago fish were reared in smaller units to supply a neighbouring stretch of river. The fish were reared from adult fish taken from the neighbouring stretch of river and stocked at a smaller size, because fish food technology had not advanced to the stage that it is at today along with fish transportation.

Again I find myself saying "Well, we are where we are"

and I'll add a "You couldn't make it up",

but it's symptomatic of the first years of Command Centre's centralisation when our annual application to introduce a small number of brown trout to this stretch of the River Dever was declined due to Bransbury being sited on a sensitive stretch of the Upper Itchen.

Spookily this has just dropped through the door.

A request for monthly returns for the abstraction licence for our fish rearing ponds.

Fish rearing ponds that we mothballed in 2013 and an Abstraction Licence and Consent to Discharge that were subsequently revoked the same year.






News just in: Brian Barwick has resigned the post of Chairman of the RFL.

An old adversary of mine, we once shared a urinal in the top tier of the Warner stand during a Lords Test Match.

He was CEO at the FA at the time, while I sat on the Committee of Barton Stacey Football Club. I had a long list of questions for El Capitano, top of which was why a hoard of money accrued by my local county FA from fines issued in the grass roots game was not reinvested in the game at grass roots level.

I posed the question and Bri responded by zipping his solid gold zipper and exiting stage left.

I think I made my point, the chap on my left sniggered and said "well done" which seemed like a kind of an endorsement.

The Loos in the top tier of the Warner Stand by the way, some of the best in these isles. You can take your ease while keeping up with the cricket through a long thin window at eye level.

They think of everything at Lords, it's one of our favourite days out of the year.

In other Capital News, we popped up to the smoke the other day for lunch at William and Rosie's, before jostling our way across Leicester Square to the Prince of Wales Theatre to take in The Book of Mormon.

A tremendous romp with an awful lot of effing and jeffing, I don't know why we were so late coming to the piece.





Last weekend the regular rods turned up for lunch and a walk up the river. Always an enjoyable day and a nod to an impending season, they all seemed reasonably pleased with work undertaken over the winter. Some have fished here for over thirty years and have seen the valley go through quite a period of change.

On completing the task of stacking next winter's logs I received the gift of lumbago. Connoisseurs of the wood pile will note the Flemish method employed in the pile on the left.

Currently we have King Cups in flower along with inky black sedge. We've had a few frosts this week and the Wisteria has gone into "shall I or shan't I mode" I've seen several large female pike nosing up sprung ditches and hoorah for the small number of grayling that are charging around on the top shallows and below the ford across the Mill Stream.

The mower's been out for its first outing of the year and will now be employed every week through to the end of October. I may have made mention, but for the fifth spring in succession we've no spring in spring bottom.

Everything is waking up now and making preparations to take a restorative tot of water, so we'll have to go with the current level of groundwater, which isn't great.

It remains a bit of a worry that data collected and presented by government agencies and private companies doesn't demonstrate the actual state of play in the field with regard to groundwater levels in this valley.

Oft dismissed as a crank by those who purport to know better, the loin cloth, beard and life of a cave dweller once again appeals; with the occasional appearance to shake a fist at an outside world in which we continue to be increasingly led by loons.