I remember greeting all the incidental delights of a fishing day: the dippers, the grey wagtails, the curlews in the sky, the light in the water, the budded branches stirring in the breeze. I remember such things but there are stronger memories, of a few spring olives with dark wings in the grey light, of two hooked trout and the thumping excitement of playing them, this and the sense of achievement and peace that flooded over me with the capture of the second, a trout that brought the season's first tears. I think it was then that I realised something that I have already mentioned: that it was because I have always partly defined myself as a fisherman that I found my exile from fishing so painful; that in going fishing again and catching trout I was in fact reclaiming a part of myself, which was why the river Wharfe and its trout were more important to me than the Howgill Fells, for all their spare and lonely loveliness and for all the relief they had brought to me when they were one of the few places where I could go without pain. But now that I was well enough, the Wharfe could give me something that I could never find in the hills. I went to the Howgills in search of comfort; I went to the river in search of fulfilment and in search of myself. I remember sprawling in the pale grass above Spout Dub, unconcerned that it was damp, and talking with Andrew and Kelvin with a feeling of perfect health and contentment. And this was the day when Spout Dub ousted Knipe Dub and everywhere else on the Wharfe as my favourite place in the whole world, because I recognised it as the place where the healing power of the river was distilled to an unequalled potency. And it was recognised as such because, sitting there and talking to my friends, I suddenly felt very close to the fisher of more than forty years ago who had come there in a hatch of blue wings and caught his first ever bagful of trout.

Sitting there by Spout Dub on that cold spring morning I suddenly felt whole again. I think I knew that this feeling would not last; I also knew that it would be waiting for me to experience all over again when next I came to Spout Dub.