surface of the world. I liked the fact that you never quite knew what lay beneath until you’d fished for it. Any stretch of water might contain something wild, and each cast had the potential to connect you with it. The anticipation mattered more than the catch. Even after you had caught something, you could never exhaust a water’s meanings.

I continued to fish through school, and then at university. On afternoons when the spring sun had warmed the water, I would leave the library and cycle a few miles to a local stately home, where the gamekeeper had stocked the slow-flowing river which ran through the grounds with fat and sluggish rainbow trout. Here I learned to fish with a fly – an artificial bait made of feather and fur tied to a bare hook – casting elaborately, using nothing but the weight of the line to carry my lure out into the stream. Fly fishing was a dance and, though I was and am still an awkward partner, I learned to love it too.

After university, life intervened, and I forgot the pull of the water and packed up my rod. But a few years ago I moved with my family from the centre of London to the suburbs, looking for space to start a home. The land around our new house was low-lying, damp and waterlogged: criss-crossed with streams that snaked their ways between the terraced houses. At the end of our road ran the Dagenham Brook, an old agricultural ditch now deadened by industrial runoff and foaming with jolly reefs xiv