Waiting Until Bed Time.

All through my teens and early twenties I was a keen angler. I well remember what used to take me back to the waterside time and time again for fifteen years, sometimes every day during the school holidays.

You leave the bustle of everyday living and go to some quiet lake deep in the countryside. There you bait the hook and cast it far out where the bait sinks into deep, impenetrable waters. Only a small, coloured float is visible to keep you in touch with the quest. Now you’ve done all you can, and so you wait and watch.

The float sits unmoving on top of the water, and the wait seems tedious... frustrating. And so it is, but it’s also exciting because it’s pregnant with expectation. There’s mystery here because you can’t see beneath the surface. For all you know the lake might be empty of fish, or they might all be over on the other side, or they might not be feeding today, or there might be a dozen big ones all eyeing up the bait at that moment and about to take it. The fact is, you don’t know. So you wait for an hour, two hours, all day. And when the float finally trembles and shoots beneath the surface, the adrenalin rush is magnificent.

Life is a bit like that, only it isn’t bait you’re casting into deep, impenetrable waters, but words. And the words aren’t intended to capture a fish, but to attract something of much greater consequence; something that is at least your equal if not your superior, something you’re not going to return to the water at the end of the day but keep beside you to enrich, and maybe even legitimise, your existence.

The stakes are infinitely higher, the wait infinitely more tedious and frustrating, the expectation infinitely more engaging. And if, at the end of the day, you have to go home to bed without so much as a quiver of the float, you know you’ll be back again tomorrow.