WHAT breeds a Newcastle United fan? None can have arrived in the ranks more oddly than Geoffrey Bucknall. He came via his primary passion – fishing. A noted angler, author of a dozen or so highlyregarded books, he is also an expert flydresser. Among his successful flies is one created specially to catch trout that rise at dusk on Somerset’s Blagdon Lake – a phenomenon known as the Blagdon Boil.

Having identified a particular pupae that attracts the trout, Geoff mimicked it using black and white horsehair for its similarlystriped abdomen. Shortly afterwards, the Magpies won the FA Cup. We are back in 1955.

Geoff recalls: “Their captain raised the cup for all to see.

I noticed the black-andwhite strip he was wearing.”

Geoff named his fly The Footballer, and declares: “I have been a Newcastle United supporter ever since.”

Though now living in Teesdale, Geoff was not a North- Easterner then. Born in 1929, on the Weald in Kent, son of a village schoolmaster and his wife, he spent his formative boyhood years on Romney Marsh, another distinctive landscape, where he and his own wife made their home. Their move to Teesdale came when all was changed.

“There was hardly one Kentish fishery where I couldn’t hear the thunder of car wheels on the new motorways,”

Geoff reflects. Worse, the once-quiet lane where the couple lived had been adopted as an alternative route to London: “By the time we left in 2006, it was gridlocked with traffic by morning and evening. On windless days, the fumes stung our eyes.”

No such problem in Lartington, near Barnard Castle, where they settled. But we are running ahead of ourselves.

Mind you, Geoff would be the last to complain at that. For this account of his life, centred on his fishing career, ditches the conventional chronological path. Instead it swings back and forth, a pattern that, apparently, irritated some readers of an earlier edition, though I found the journey smooth enough – a tribute no doubt to Geoff’s facility as a writer.

No less helpful is that Geoff has much of interest to say – and not all of it about fishing.

For instance, there’s a sturdy defence of Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister castigated for his “appeasement”

of Hitler. Poking about for a magazine article on Chamberlain’s interest in angling, Geoff discovered enough to conclude that Chamberlain has been misjudged.

Within his own experience, Geoff also delivers a startling account of his detective work, only just concluded, to set aside a “misadventure”

verdict on a boyhood chum and fishing companion mysteriously found dead. Geoff and others are convinced he died at the hands of his headmaster, later convicted of sex crimes.

The Attorney General recently ruled that the absence of official records of the 1944 inquest precludes any revision. But it is only with the greatest reluctance that Geoff has accepted this rebuff of his efforts to gain justice for his long-gone school pal.

No rosy memoir this, then.

Geoff’s parents separated when he was nine. Fishing was an early escape and remains so. He admits: “Were it not for fishing, the graveyard or the madhouse would have claimed me long since.”

Yet in telling his story his aim, happily fulfilled, has been to reveal all while “not throwing too many shadows over the sunlit water”.

Probably very few anglers can match his breadth of experience, for he has fished widely on rivers, lakes and the sea, at home and abroad. Believing that “the greatest pleasure” is “to fish for anything anywhere,” he adds: “The place one fishes becomes more important than the captures. That is why I take my fly rod into the High Pennines, to the lonely vistas of Cow Green and Scarhouse reservoirs, where the trout are eager, though small, and I miss their rises when my eye strays to the cloud shadows chasing each other across the purple fells.”

Disappointingly, though, Teesdale receives less attention than might be expected after Geoff has explained that regular fishing holidays taken there over a period of 30 years encouraged him and his wife to retire to the dale.

The over-management of rivers elsewhere, creating what Geoff derides as “put and take” fishing, was another factor.

He writes: “There came a time to find a greater challenge, a wilderness where the hand of God put the trout into the rivers.”

Yet, a keen democrat, he now worries that the Upper Tees, like some southern rivers, is witnessing change by which raised rents imposed by riparian owners or landlords lead to the ousting of locally-based coarse fishing clubs in favour of “syndicates of affluent game fishermen”.

He insists: “This is no joke. I fear it is already happening in Teesdale where considerable runs of salmon have appeared after decades of estuarine pollution.”

Sometimes, fishing from a Teesdale rock, he looks back nostalgically to golden days on Romney Marsh.

“I am putting a dry Coachman to a rising trout. I can just see the tops of two church towers on opposite sides of the stream at Goudhurst and Horsmonden. Just as I was about to be overwhelmed by sadness, a merlin darted after a small bird across the meadow of my new abode in the North Pennines.”

His illustrator, Keith Linsell, depicts that pursuit delightfully in one of numerous line drawings that perfectly complement the text.

Izaak Walton himself would no doubt approve: a book that captures the joys and woes of fishing, its harmony with the landscape and its unique capacity to allow, even stimulate, the mind to wander.

Å Alive on a Rainy Day by Geoffrey Bucknall (Bright Water Press, £25) Coch-y- Bonddu Books, Machynlleth, Powys, SY20 8DG, or email orders@anglebooks.com.

Copies are also available to read at Durham Library.