Czech nymphing

Sitting on the loo at the home of an old school friend’s parents and unable without reading material to perform the function that had brought me thence, I reached for a thoughtfully located stack of magazines. Had I been in my friend’s loo, these would likely as not have been back issues of ‘Asian Babes’ but, as I said, it was his parents’ gaff and they are fishing nuts. Thus I found myself idly reading a leading article in ‘Trout & Salmon’ on recent advances in fly-fishing techniques.

I was just on the point of concluding that this wasn’t going to be one of my longer sojourns in the bog when two words caught my eye: ‘Czech nymphing’. According to the writer, ‘nymphing’ is nothing more exotic (or erotic) than a means of catching trout using three flies designed to mimic nymphs – an aquatic, immature stage of certain insects – that sink rather than float, as conventional flies do. Apparently the technique was invented in the Czech Republic, hence the full, glorious name.

A Czech nymph

A Czech nymph

Given that fishing is a hobby almost entirely practiced by men and knowing something of the fraught relations that can exist between obsessive men and their female partners, I couldn’t help but wonder whether alternative terminology would have been safer. I mean, imagine the conversation over breakfast.

Her: ‘Darling, I thought we might go to that new Ikea today, you know the one conveniently located only 400 miles around the M25.’

Him: ‘Sorry, love, promised Dave I’d go Czech nymphing with him this morning. It’s supposed to be infallible. Might try a spot of Norwegian naiading or Belarussian bottom baiting if we don't pull them in quickly enough.’

How differently things might have turned out had this revolutionary technique been invented in an earlier era, when men could get away with that sort of thing. In the Gospel according to St John, Jesus is reported as having said to his disciples ‘Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men’. If he’d known about Czech nymphing, however, I reckon he’d have abandoned those hairy bastards in Galilee, smeared lion dung on his donkey’s ass and pointed its nose towards Prague.