If you see Sid, tell him

With a penchant for puns worthy of Punch, Neil Patterson, ad man-turned-angler, is as sharp as a fox in a world of piscatorial piffle-peddlers

- By David Profumo

I FIRST met Neil Patterson in Piccadilly: we boarded a No 9 bus and ended up in Havana. We have now been friends for decades, even if I did laugh aloud when he lost a Cuban tarpon the size of a donkey. One night on the mothership, he played guitar until his fingers bled into the strings. Even by the standards of angling authors, he ranks as a quirky character.

We have travelled widely together and he has wiped my eye in Norway (despite me describing his Spey casting action as resembling a tumble dryer) and Iceland (where he threw a line over my head as I crouched to change flies, promptly hooking the river's record salmon for the season). On the Arno in Florence, Italy, he landed an impressive catfish (they wax fat there on tourist pizza and careless embankment pigeons). Yet, on my visit, I never touched a thing. I have only once caught more fish than him and that was in a gudgeon tournament when I was using maggots.

His Berkshire home, The Lodge, which he designed himself, is situated on a fabled stretch of the middle Kennet comprising (in his words): 'Three miles of classic Southern English chalkstream that idles through ancient water meadows and a tangled cobweb of smaller woodland streams.' It is a numinous, secret place—and in many ways Neil is its genius loci. This year, he celebrates 50 seasons on the estate—an extraordinary record. He keeps his fly rod rigged and ready in a handy hedge and fishes in thigh waders from a Venetian hardware store, plus a gaucho's red beret (boina). On his sun-flecked terrace, beneath an immense fibreglass replica of a trout, we settled into conversation over a case of Malbec.