I NEED LUISA’S SPIRIT TO STOP A ROAD

A lovely story meandered across the meadows of the broadsheet newspapers this week and even found time to look in at the hallowed portals of the ‘Today’ programme on Radio 4.

It might, with reasonable accuracy, have been entitled ‘Plus ca Change, Plus c’est la Meme Chose,’ for it concerned a seventeenth century Spanish noblewoman - Luisa de Carvajal - whose observations of an enforced sojourn in London some three hundred years ago have turned up, faithfully recorded in 150 letters, in the attic of a Madrid convent.

Which only goes to show that nuns, holy though they may be, are, in the earthly respect of housekeeping, no better than the rest of us when it comes to de-cluttering the loft. No doubt convent attics are built especially large for this purpose, which makes me wonder what else might be up there, steeped in that institutionally religious smell of incense, floor polish and boiled cabbage.

For what Luisa de Carvajal wrote might have been written about Londoners at any time, I suppose, in the intervening centuries. At least what we have been told she wrote; for it seems that from the 150 letters dealing with every aspect of the capital’s ‘mode de vie,’ from lavatories to executions, we are being asked to judge her work from a single short paragraph which happens to deal with cooking. She damns viciously with faint praise, does Luisa.

“The food looks good,” she writes, “but has no smell and almost no taste.” Well, what did she expect? Isn’t our cuisine reputed the world over for its blandness? Is that not why those clever people from ‘Goodness Gracious Me’ were able to write a beautifully satirical sketch about a group of Indians going for ‘An English’ and demanding ‘the blandest dish on the menu?’

Poor Luisa! One wonders why she didn’t send out for a packet of salt. Instead she wrote long and elegant letters castigating the barbarity of the neighbours, the thin walled houses, the rowdiness (always worse on Fridays) and the twenty-five thieves regularly hanged every month. And while we ourselves may no longer hang miscreants, they themselves seem determined to ensure that the quantity violent death available on the capital’s streets remains at levels sufficient to aggravate modern day Luisas into writing any amount of minatory missives home.

Still, it is not everyone who is privileged to have a name that would sound respectable even when attached to a Persian cat. And like a Persian cat Luisa emerges as a most superior being: someone accustomed to the highest standards and who had no time for nonsense. Her writing also shows her to be a woman of action. She may have been a Mrs Tittlemouse figure, used to order and neatness, now plunged into a London cess pool populated by so many Mr Jackson’s, but she was determined to do something about it.

Writing was her escape from this dungeon as it has been for so many before and since. The sheer joy of having in front of one a blank page on which to marshal thoughts and sentences, words and phrases as though they were troops ready for battle.

Sadly, though it is a joy that is being heavily discounted. Fewer and fewer people these days take any joy in writing at all. Even what is written is ‘dumbed-down’ to the point where it no longer exercises the brain so much as sends it to sleep.

Besides, a good letter not only demands a certain elegance and power of observation, but in a library or vault or attic, it will survive for 300 years. More in fact, for hardly a week goes by without some new archeological dig turning up this fragment or that, telling us about who was doing what to whom in the days of some long forgotten empire and enjoining us to remember to pay Sextus three denarii for the dogfood. No amount of convent attics will I fear do anything to preserve our electronic scribblings.

But the joy of scribbling also brings burdens. The other day I found myself enjoined to attend a public meeting in a neighbouring village through which, or rather around which, our dear Assembly government may be building a new road for the purpose of arriving marginally more quickly at a very much under-used airport.

No sooner had I been introduced to the meeting’s beautiful and erudite secretary, who had been allocated the job of committing our thoughts to paper and preparing a report for the great and the good, than I found myself urgently propelled into her shoes, so to speak, as she herself has had precipitously to depart on rather sad family business on a distant continent.

Oh dear! I have until Monday to read and digest the consultant’s report and then try to rustle up a little of the Luisa spirit to explain, carefully and calmly, why it is somewhat less than a good idea - with predictions of environmental catastrophe as frequent as bland cooking - to spend a ridiculous amount of money to build a major road to get to a minor airport.

I need Luisa’s spirit for it is obvious that the powers that be take little account of rationality. The statistics on which the report is based are five years and a $100 dollars an oil barrel adrift for one thing. I fear that in their minds the decision to build a new road is already taken. We are now just going through the motions. Facts, in the minds of the proposers, only exist to be rebutted.

What is needed is a little spark, a key phrase, arrowed where the mind is vulnerable; a convenient ladder from which a minister may easily disengage himself from a petard and climb down from his hook; that will disarm this countryside despoiling time bomb. And I have until Monday evening.

WHENCE COMES THE BANKER'S BONUS?

The other day Matthew Parris was writing in the Spectator about the collapse of the market in llamas. If I remember rightly, he called the piece ‘First the housing market collapsed. Now I fear the trade in llamas will be next.’ Of course, as things have turned out it has been not so much the trade in llamas as the trade in merchant banks that has gone squiffy. All those people in the City making fortunes quite literally beyond the dreams of avarice who now find themselves discomfited, much the same as us ordinary folk who have to fetch our own coal.

Now I always thought that that colourful expression ‘beyond the dreams of avarice’ came from the Bible. It has a suitably chilling ring of satanic temptation about it. But, no, I find that its origins lie with that obscure eighteenth century English dramatist, Edward Moore, with whose works you are no doubt horribly familiar, if only because they include ‘Fables of the Female Sex,’ which he wrote in 1744. A few years later he wrote the play called ‘The Gamester’ and it is there that he penned his immortal line.

In fact he was quite a dab hand at immortal lines, For he also wrote the one about adding insult to injuries which is, I suppose, what he might have felt about the fact that dear old Samuel Johnson seems to have appropriated his avarice quip and is consequently credited with it in some publications despite Johnson writing - or rather in this case speaking - some 37 years later in 1781.

Johnson on that occasion was assisting at the sale of a Thrale’s brewery, for some reason, and quipped to Boswell (standing guard in much the same relationship as Baldrick had with Blackadder), that “we are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.” And, he might have added, making a tidy profit for the bankers, too, who have gone on buying and selling money long after the breweries have withered on the vine, if you don’t mind me mixing a metaphor along with the hops.

Because it is bankers and breweries that I want to write about - or rather why it is that bankers are able to make money when there are no longer any real breweries to sell.

Permit me to illustrate with a parable. Let us return to the glorious eighteenth century again and to the first races at Epsom. Two brothers - let’s call them Ed and Sam - owned a village brewery and one of them had the bright idea of sprucing up their local trade by brewing a barrel of special ale and taking it to the Epsom races there to slake the thirst of eager punters.

The barrel was duly brewed and Ed and Sam set out on their way. Evidently trade could not have been brilliant for they had no cart and so were obliged to roll the barrel along the high road. Not long after they had set out, Ed says to Sam. ‘I’s a thirst. Give me a pint o’ yon beer. I’ll pay ye threepence for it.’ And Sam duly pours him a glass of finest ale and receives the threepence. Then, a little further on, Sam says the same thing to Ed. Another pint of ale is poured and the threepence is transferred from the pocket of Sam to the pocket of Ed.

Well, what with the summers being considerable hotter in the 1780s, and the roads considerably more dusty, this trade between two brothers with its accompanying exchange of threepences occurred more than once on the long road to Epsom - so much so, in fact that long before the brothers came in sight of the race course the barrel had been emptied and its contents duly recycled along the hedgerows.

“We mustn’t worry” says Sam. “A’ter all, we paid for the beer.” And so, in a manner of speaking they had. But no matter how hard they searched their pockets they could not find more than a single threepenny bit.

And that strikes me as the problem with merchant banking. A whole lot of people in skyscrapers are exchanging their threepences, betting on things going up or going down, but no one is actually doing anything even as useful as brewing a barrel of beer, still less actually putting any new money into the system. Whence then do the bankers’ bonuses come?

It is no wonder that the whole shebang comes crashing about our ears like a 51 card house. Meanwhile, with bankers out of work, there is no money to buy llamas, which, according to Matthew Parris, do a much better job of keeping down the grass than do sheep. Young male llamas are worth so little now, I understand him to say, that llama owners are giving them away to good homes, though the girls (who breed once a year, punctually and without fuss) still command a respectable price.

But even this depends on people who reason that if they buy a female llama (or two as they are herd animals) they will be able to sell the offspring. And that depends on people with unmown paddocks and those people are (or were) the bankers. It’s enough to add insult to injury.

A KAFKAESQUE MOMENT

Do you ever have one of those moments when you find yourself asking suddenly ‘what am I doing here?’ as if you had just woken up and found yourself at the bottom of some very deep rabbit hole? You do? Well then, let me join you, for I experienced just such a surreal and Kafkaesque moment on Wednesday of this week, an inoffensive sort of a day otherwise, when normally I should have been sitting quietly at this desk bashing out invoices for the labels that had been ordered that day, or sticking stamps on parcels, or just possibly operating our little printer and reeling up labels for some last minute order.

Instead I found myself in seat 451 of the European Parliament in Brussels, part of a great hemi-cycle, and desperately trying to stay awake as I listened to a French Minister droning bravely on about immigration and asylum.

I was surrounded by MPs and MEPs of all nations - regrouped in this chamber for an inter-parliamentary session on just those subjects. It’s a chance for the European Parliament to make friends with members of national parliaments and this particular session was organised by the French Presidency of the European Union as part of its efforts in the direction of Inter-cultural dialogue. All very worthy. And useful, too, in its own way.

But of course I am neither an MP, nor an MEP, though I might indeed have been one at one time had the voters in various places and various times been rather less careless in the placing of their crosses. That is a story that I have yet to tell. So there I was, seated in a row marked ‘Press’ - which wasn’t really helpful either as although I do contribute articles to a European journal, to describe myself as ‘Press,’ seemed not so much as being economical as vastly extravagant with the truth.

Nevertheless, there I was, with a glossy white photographic badge to prove my entitlement while I listened to the slow buzz of amplified and oddly stressed voices coming over the headphones from the interpreters’ cubicles while with my eyes I counted the myriad down lighters recessed into the ceiling. And after becoming bored with counting the lights I started this blog, reasoning that I would at least look as if I were being attentive even if I still felt I had fallen down a rabbit hole into somebody else’s existence - and, like Alice, I started to wonder who might have been the previous occupant whose legislative posterior had warmed the cushions of seat 451.

Of course, I did have a proper reason to be there to do with the communications project that I am working on with a team in Brussels and on which I endeavour to play some small part for the United Kingdom, which being a Big Country in the scale of these things, gives me rather more clout than were I to be representing a Small Country like Malta or Cyprus. I had an hour or two before catching the Eurostar back home and as some colleagues whose speciality was immigration were attending this Parliamentary meeting, they suggested I join them. “Why not,” I replied reasoning that one never knows who one is going to meet at the European Parliament.

Indeed I prefer watching people rather than listening to them and looking at the body language. I like absorbing the atmosphere too. Mostly this is languid and dull, but it quickens every now and then when, occasionally, someone says something original or interesting or even rehearses some tired old cliché with a bit of passion.

Here there is an atmosphere very different indeed to our Parliament in Westminster. It has something to do with the melting pot of languages, something to do with the vast amount of space - you could fit a respectable size tennis court in some of the corridors - so that the place resembles the terminal of an international airport rather than a quiet corner of contemplative deliberation.

Anyway, I soon had to escape my rabbit hole and my counting of downlighters and the immigration and asylum concerns of the various members and sneak back across Brussels, first to the Belgian chocolate shop - an obligatory stop on the way home - and then to Eurostar and so back to London in two hours or so.

I was fortunate that not to be staying an extra day, for had I been twenty-four hours later I could have found myself delayed by the fire that broke out the following day in the Channel Tunnel and was still raging this morning, fortunately hurting no-one. For such small mercies we must be thankful.

NORMANDY SPIRIT

Last weekend I went to Normandy, again. I say again for I have been there before to stay with old friends who live just outside Le Havre and blogged about it in this space, as they say in the newspapers. Just a quick visit, there and back, but a welcome breath of fresh air and a chance to see new sights.

Normandy is often held to be a poor relation to French provinces further to the south or west. It is the place that one hurries through after disembarking from a rough Channel crossing and hurrying towards Paris or Nantes. Perhaps it is slightly more romantic than Picardy through which one hurries even faster unless one is homesick for grey skies and stops to look in at Amiens or Arras.

Indeed, from a tourist perspective, one could imagine Normandy as a kind of Middle Class province, looking down on Picardy to the north, but looking up to Brittany to its west, though perhaps the Bretons themselves would never understand the allusion as they labour firmly under the belief that they are looked down upon by the rest of France to whom they feel themselves attached only in the most fragile manner.

Normandy of course is a province of two halves - lower and upper divided by the Seine. My friend, Chantal, who so kindly put me up this weekend and who has lived in Normandy all her life, hisses that upper Normandy is not really Normandy at all despite boasting the birthplace of William the Conqueror and the town with the shortest name in France - Eu.

Only when you cross the Seine are you in what she would regard as Normandy proper - the Normandy of the picture postcard, all dappled cows and orchards full of apple laden trees at this time of year. Thatched farmhouses, abound - all pleasingly shaped to delight the eye and almost like the orchards themselves with their vertical timber framing springing at angles from the ground to bury itself under the thatch.

Their visual beauty lifts the spirit, particularly when the houses are covered in flowers as so many of them are and when there are no ugly visual intrusions - modern concrete structures, or garish advertising - that it seems we in Britain have no control over and which most people do not even seem to notice.

We stopped in Gatteville (Eure) - there is more than one - to look at the small remains of an eleventh century castle, built by one of the Normans who crossed the Channel with William but didn’t immediately take to the grey weather of Sussex. After doing his bit at Hastings, William sent him (I’m afraid I have forgotten his name) home with a grant of land on which to build a castle and here was its remains.

I would have taken its photograph had I remembered my camera, which sadly I didn’t, and I would have photographed, too the beautiful farmhouse that sat next to it, long and low with a great overhanging roof at one end that sheltered an overhanging staircase. I am told this is known as a ‘Jay’s Bottom’ - but why is another matter.

When I did recover my camera, it was only to show that the weather was no better there than here, as you can see from the ship.

RAIN OR SHINE: A WINTER'S TALE

Of course it should have been a balmy summer evening, the sun sinking slowly into a furnace of copper, chilled Pinot Grigio on the Castle terrace and a light zephyr breathing the warm balm of Sicilia over the assembled company. But that was asking too much.

We motored over last Saturday evening to Goodrich Castle, a lovely old pile in South Herefordshire, built of that peculiar purple-ish sandstone they go in for in those parts, for the specific purpose of getting a good soaking and incidentally to watch the Rain and Shine Theatre Company perform Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. As they say on the quiz shows: the clue is in the title.

Rain and Shine are an excellent troupe who perform Shakespeare and other classical plays in a rumbustious, burlesque, street theatre-ish style. Lots of noise, lots of clever and comic ‘business,’ deliberately hammy acting and audience involvement: on Saturday, the actors (well, two of them) fancying a drop of wine during the performance, simply helped themselves to the remains of someone’s picnic, for instance. Well worth seeing if you get the chance; more: well worth going an hour’s drive to see. Even in the rain. Even when the rain itself was over-acting, assisted by its fellow meteorological thesps: darkness and a half-gale.

I had never before seen The Winter's Tale, so this was a first for me, and, given the generally humid ambiance, not one I am likely to forget. I rather enjoyed it, I have to say - though it’s a curious piece, starting as it does as a serious tragedy all about how a man’s jealousy can ruin lives and marital harmony. But then, after King Leontes has caused his infant daughter (who he believes not to be his) to be abandoned far from the shores of his Kingdom of Sicilia, for which his faithful servant is then attacked by a bear so letting Shakespeare write his most famous stage direction ‘Exit pursued by a Bear,’ the play switches to comedy. Well, it has to really, otherwise the whole thing would become too silly, and the rest of the piece is a comedy with music, dance and song. Shakespeare as Lloyd Webber, you might say.

Leontes, even gets his beloved wife back whom, he cast into prison where she dies in the meantime of the false accusations hurled at her. Someone thoughtfully makes a life size statue of her, which then comes to life when Leontes takes responsibility for his terrible behaviour and she, dutifully and in a triumph of hope over experience, accepts him again as husband.

I did, I confess, as the rain started to descend in stair rods during the last half hour, wish that that final scene would quickly draw to a close so that we could all go home. "Yes, we know the statue is real!" I wanted to say, "so you can skip the gradual warming up bit." Warming up! Everyone was frozen. Hermione (the statue) I would have thought especially, standing stock still as she was in the rain soaked gale for half an hour with only a wispy tunic to protect her.

Camped on the wet grass I noticed we were sitting next to a seventeenth century mortar called Roaring Meg. A squat, tubby black thing resembling an iron toad. It had been cast locally when the Parliamentary commander besieging the Royalists of Goodrich in 1646 began to lose patience at their defiance. So with Meg’s helped he lobbed a few 200lb gunpowder filled shells into the castle and the walls, in true Biblical style, came tumbling down. Or so the notice said.

I couldn't help thinking, watching the droplets of rain swirling on the wind like snowflakes in the luminescence of the spotlights, that the play might even have been performed before, in this same castle courtyard or in the adjacent hall, in happier times, before Roaring Meg (why are cannons always female?) brought the great castle towers tumbling down.

I can't think of another country, other than Britain, where the company would be shown the same spirit - not only of 'The Show Must Go On' but also of 'The Show Must Be Watched.' Only when I started drying out did I discover how wet I was.

But as it ended and we stood to applaud the bravura of the cast and they applauded us in turn for our determination to stay to the end, and we packed up and waded back the long quarter mile in the muddy darkness to the car park, cold and soaked, I knew I was glad to have gone. There is more to theatre than ice cream in the warm trappings of the grand circle.

OH, THE POWER OF THE REMOTE CONTROL

A week or two back a card dropped through the letterbox. It came from BARB - the British Audience Research Bureau telling me that someone would come calling unless, that is, I minded terribly. And yesterday a big bushy bearded fellow arrived, with suitable identification and laptop to see whether our household might be one worthy of joining the great mysterious panel that so accurately reflects the nation that whatever they watch or listen to may be multiplied by some tens of thousands to tell us the total size of the audience for the ten o’clock news or whatever.

All fiendishly clever. What happens, apparently, if you join the panel is that some magic box of tricks is installed next to your TV. This monitors remotely whatever it is you are watching and then, come the end of the day, sends it down the telephone line or by wireless to some base station somewhere. I’m a bit vague about this bit as if we are accepted on the panel we shall be at first on some sort of reserve list and only be moved on to the proper thing when a vacancy (for the species of work-from-home, pensionable household that we are, presumably) arises. Only at that time will we therefore get to see the wizard box of tricks.

There is some compensation for this invasion of privacy, though it seems pretty trivial - a few vouchers for the house - so we shall have to wait and see whether the whole schemozzle turns out to be more trouble than it’s worth. Anyway, I shall now be rewarded by a feeling of great power, knowing that in making my decision about whether to watch Midsomer Murders while doing the ironing I may be speaking for ten thousand other households and therefore can, by my choices, help to keep a programme on air. Or alternatively, extinguish it altogether.

*****

August is normally a pretty quiet month chez nous. I have some free time to walk and potter in the garden. Not so this year, however. I was to have directed Peter Shaffer’s play ‘Lettice and Lovage’ for our little theatre company this autumn. Sadly, my leading lady has had to pull out and there is no one else available to take over the role. The play has already been postponed once. It has now been advertised. The only thing I could do therefore was to take on the part myself.

So my free time in August is going into learning the role of Lettice - a role originally crated for Maggie Smith. It is a quite brilliant virtuoso piece, which I shall enjoy playing, once the lines are learnt, that is. The story concerns an eccentric guide who embellishes history to make it more interesting for her tourists and from this starting point the play goes on to make a protest against modernism in all its forms, but particularly in architecture. Although a comedy, it is essentially a play about loss and about seeking refuge from a hateful present in the fantasy of the past.

People who are not actors often have strange ideas about lines. ‘Oh I could never, ever, possibly, learn all that, they say,’ when they contemplate the 53 pages of the play most of which is either Lettice on stage by herself or with one other person. But learning lines is not that difficult. We learn all lines everyday when we hear a song or listen to someone speaking. Once is often all it takes to be able to repeat a key phrase or punchline. We all know, I should think, almost enough lines from Dad’s army to put together a respectable paragraph of script. ‘We’re all doomed!’ ‘Don’t panic, Mr Mainwaring!’ ‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’ and so on. It’s surprising what we know that we don’t know we know - to use what has to be called now, I suppose, a Rumpsteadism.

So learning lines is not difficult. It is simply a matter of repetition and with each repetition a little more sticks in the memory. Of course, one is not learning unconnected words - as from a telephone directory - but sentiments, opinions, responses. When you really know a part you no longer had to remember lines because you come out with the words automatically in the right situations. The lines become a part of you as much as perhaps ‘Hello, how are you today?’ is a part of you when you meet a neighbour in the street.

Anyway it is time to go a-learning once more. A quick half hour before and during my morning tea break. Then back again to the office to chase recalcitrant label customers.

WHO AMONGST US IS A TROUT?

Why are robust and curmudgeonly older women called 'trouts?' This has always struck me as a very strange quirk of language, the trout being as near to a sexless beast as it is possible to come this side of the molluscs and one that is actually rather timid to boot. If one were looking for a female piscean, armed with stout hat and umbrella, intent on putting watery public officials in their place, surely Pike would be a better species to pick on than Trout? But nevertheless ‘trout’ wins by a mile. Whence comes this usage, I wonder?

But why should I be asking at all, I hear you murmuring from your comfortable position in the hammock, glass of Pimm’s beside you and a light novel open across your lap?
“Because,” says I, envying this mythical land of perpetual August sunshine with the hazy drone of lawn mowing only just audible above the birdsong, “that was the word used the other day in a Times review to describe the character played by the wonderful Eileen Atkins - the stalwart but decrepit Lady Tressilian - in Kevin Elyot's adaptation of one of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple stories on the television last Sunday. And that set me thinking.

Despite my asking, no-one seems to know from where this odd usage of the word trout comes. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable does not even mention ‘trout,’ and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary is no help either.

There is a deep crevasse between the animals to which at various times and in various places we have aspired to be and the reality of who we are. We all have our favourites - I see myself as a racing hare, wild and fancy free, bounding over ditches, ears laid back and a coat of hair groomed to perfection by the wind. You, on the other hand, may picture me as a tedious variety of beetle or even a cow with hatstand horns. Still, while some of us might choose to be that King of Fish, the salmon, racing up waterfalls with the same energy that lesser beings reserve for the New Year Sales, few, I think, would voluntarily choose to be labelled a ‘trout.’

Alec Guiness used, apparently, to imagine the character he was preparing as an animal and then play that animal. He once demonstrated this on a chat show by turning himself into an elephant. A half bend of the back, a slight shake of the shoulders, a look, the slow raising of a leg - and there, in motion, was an Indian teak elephant. But what animal, I am still asking, would he choose to represent a stalwart matron or, for that matter, the chronic churl or buffer? Or do we have no option but to accept ‘trout?’

Powerful and determined women may look like many members of the animal kingdom, but not surely fish? Even in old age fish are sleek and wrinkle free, which despite fortunes spent chez L’Oreal or Laboratoires Garnier, is something few of us can claim to be. Real trout also emit no sound, unlike their human namesakes, nor organise jumble sales for the Red Cross and pronounce on morals.

Perhaps the word is anyway now falling into desuetude; a consequence of the feminist advance. In childhood I remember the word being applied regularly by my step-mother to those who had offended her in some way. Thankfully women can stand up for themselves today without attracting negative comment, whether from men or indeed other women.

Certainly ‘trout’ has a Blandings Castle, 1930s, feel to it, which is probably why it was the Times critic's word of choice to describe Eileen Atkins’ arresting cameo performance of Laddy Tressilian - the dying old matriarch (who nevertheless contrives to get herself murdered - this being Miss Marple after all) lying abed all day, chain-smoking cheroots, while issuing quasi-military orders to the household and listening to the beguiling conversations among her guests that chanced conveniently to drift through her open window. “Oh what does it matter?” she croaks irritably. We shall all be dead come September.”

I suspect, though, that even in real life Eileen Atkins would not mind particularly if people thought she was a ‘trout.’ She is not afraid to say what she thinks, particular when it comes to the guidance of young girls. Earlier this summer she condemned in no uncertain terms the laddish behaviour of young women who believe feminism is about aping the heavy drinking and sexual habits of their male counterparts.

"My skin crawls when I see laddish women presenting television shows who almost slap their thighs as if they're in panto," she is reported to have said said. "I think, 'Stop. This isn't what we meant by feminism.' It's gone completely wrong.” At the price of becoming a trout myself I say amen to that.