The other thing it makes us do is dress up. There’s nothing like a bit of costume to make it feel and look like an adventure. (After all, how did the pith helmet become so emblematic of the Tropics? Or plus-fours the signal that someone was going to strike out across a Scottish hillside?)
Our latest costume adventure was to go fishing in Ireland, in a lake on the estate of the K Club, a country house hotel in County Kildare. It wasn’t that rural – only a 20 minute drive from Dublin – but it felt and looked like countryside in that damp, paint-box green Irish way. Just a short drive from the Book of Kells, the dress code was completely different to in the city. Our gillie Albert turned up in green corduroy trousers tucked into tall Wellingtons, a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, a flat tweed cap and a camouflage waistcoat with so many pockets stuffed with so many lures and flies, he looked like a piece of bait himself. Albert instructed the eight-year-old twins to pull off their Gap sweatshirts and trainers, and kitted them out in waxed Barbour jackets, quilted blue waistcoats and miniature long green wellies, ready to wade through the bullrushes.Albert taught them how to spin a line and pull it in quick enough to hook a trout. But they weren’t gazing in the lake to spot ripples from the fish, but to admire their own reflections. How fine they looked in their country gear.
Both the twins reeled in a catch; neither of us adults did. But they weren’t boasting about the one that didn’t get away at supper that night. They were remembering their waistcoats and jackets, and the way they could wade so deep in wellies that came over their knees.
The K Club www.kclub.com, County Kildare, Ireland.
We travelled there on Irish Ferries www.Irishferries.co.uk
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