One day, Bob decided to take us fishing. It turned out to be a faculty event, with deans and vice-deans and a couple of wives and one 12-year old boy, who was called Lee in the morning but had changed his name to Cowboy by the afternoon. Here he is holding a very small and sweet puppy in my face.
It was a nice sunny day and we were out in the real countryside, at a very small lake behind some houses where people were drying peanuts.
I've never been fishing before but I had a sneaky suspicion something wasn't quite right when the fishing masters started attaching bits of grass to the rods as bait. They later maintained that the grass attracted the bigger fish but not a single fish was caught in this way and 31 fish were caught when they caved and cracked out the earthworms.
It was quite peaceful, sitting there in the sun, and I ended up catching 11 fish, once I got the hang of it.
Bob wasn’t quite so lucky. He was missing for most of the morning and occasionally we’d see him rooting around in the undergrowth on the opposite side of the lake.
No fish to show for his hilarious efforts though.
Here’s our bag of fish.
After we’d finished, Bob took us to a restaurant where we had another banquet and ate the fish we’d caught. I won’t lie, they did not taste great. But novelty is flavour enough.
The next day, Eric, one of our fishing companions, brought round an enormous fish for us (again in a plastic bag), and insisted that we’d caught it the day before. This statement was ridiculous, because we were all fully aware of the pitifully tiny fish we’d caught; also, the bag was quite obviously from a supermarket. But we ate that fish for dinner all the same.
