Go Fish

Today, I have been fishing.

You know, often people say fishing is a dull past-time. I find it frustrating more than anything else. You wait for ages, dangling the bait in the river, and you wait and you watch and you hope... yet at the end of the day, you may come away with nothing but a sense of defeat despite the fact that you haven't lost anything, you just haven't gained anything, either. How unsatisfying.

Then again, there may be a day where you hang out your maggot and a fish takes at the first dip. Suddenly, you feel the tug and the struggle and you tweak the line and you know if you move an inch in the wrong direction, you'll lose it, the animal will swim away and you'll have nothing to show for it. But if you play it right and you pull it at just the right angle, at just the right moment, you know, you might reel in something worthwhile.

However, once you get that fish out of water, more often than not, you find it's not all that fantastic and the rush, the adrenaline - that excitement that you experience when you finally get the fish you've been longing to catch for so long - just dribbles away almost immediately. It's an awful lot of waiting for a terribly brief reward. Is it really worth it? In the end, all you're left with is an ordinary fish that looks like any other fish and so you throw it back to the sea and hold out for the next one and hope it's bigger and better and wish that when you get it, you'll want this one more than before.

After all, there's plenty more fish...

All cats love fish, but fear to wet their paws

On the jukebox: David Gray ~ Babylon