Jon Day – Introduction – L ike the narrator of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, I have always been haunted by water: by the things it contains – both fish and meanings – and by the things it hides. As a child I was an obsessive angler. I spent my weekends exploring the waterways of north London with a cheap plastic rod my parents had given me for my eighth birthday. I mainly fished the Regent’s Canal, which ran on a spur near the end of my road. I didn’t catch much. But every so often, usually when I had just about given up hope, I would catch something alive: a small, brilliantly coloured perch, with its armoured cladding and crest of protective spines, angrily raised; a roach with silvered, shivering flanks. Sometimes, at dusk, I caught eels: wide-eyed ribbons of yellow and gold, preparing to head off to their spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea. Once I caught a pike so big it broke my wire leader. I was secretly relieved when it swam off into the weeds. I have fished many waters since, but the canal was my first love, and its hooks are buried deep. Back then I thought of my fishing rod as a magic wand which I could use to probe the humdrum xiii