"KEEP your nose clean and there’s a full-time job waiting for you. Big announcement in February.” The new Rolls Royce polo shirts imparted along with those words were symbolic, perhaps, of a halfway house between contractor and employee.
TO its list of invasive plant and animal species, the impoverished Scottish ecosystem may soon have to add the pink, or humpback salmon, oncorhynchus gorbuscha. Averaging around four and a half pounds and significantly smaller than the Europe’s native Atlantic salmon, pink salmon naturally run the rivers of western North America and eastern Russia where they spawn in huge numbers. Despite anglers first reporting catches of the fish in east coast rivers around six years ago, the numbers were few, providing no significant worry that a breeding population would become established.
JANUARY, and an end to the hollow-black void of horror recognised in much of Western society as the festive season, but to the Scottish salmon angler only as the one in which he or she cannot fish. Tomorrow, the River Tay, serene and clear and largely indifferent to her votaries’ emotion, opens, and for half a day at least gives hope anew to anglers before the inevitable return of the realisation that pursuit of a fish which does not feed in fresh water, and in the middle of winter at that, is a mixture of blind faith and self-torture of such lucid cunning that it must qualify as a form of religion.
