'What else can we use as bait?' says Richard. The only food we've brought to the cottage is what we bought at a delicatessen seventy miles away. It is not traditional fish bait.

'Do fish like cheese?' I ask. 'Or prosciutto? We've got a lot of prosciutto.'

'Olives?' asks Marc, and we all laugh at him, because that's stupid.

'Bring me some speck!' shouts Richard, who really is becoming a man.

Marc and I run off and fetch some speck and a Portobello mushroom. We are suddenly in a rubbish, middle-class version of City Slickers, but we are doing our best, and that is the mark of a man.

'Will speck work?' I ask, panicking that we will lose our battle with the fish, of which we've seen nothing.

Richard looks at me, calmly.

'Danny, speck is cold-smoked slowly and intermittently for two or three hours a day for a period of roughly a week using woods such as beech at temperatures that never exceed twenty degrees Celsius,' he says. 'If they don't eat it, they're idiots.'

Marc says nothing, but closes his eyes and nods slowly.

Two hours later, we've used up most of our speck, and Marc has dropped and trodden on the Portobello mushroom. We've seen and caught nothing. The girls arrive in their jeep.

'What's for dinner?' they say.

I attempt to distract them.

'Did you know that by 1985, shortages and high prices of dairy products will lead to intense new interest in soybeans?'

I am ignored.

'Are you fishing ... with olives?' asks my wife.

'No,' we say.

We put our fishing rod and olives down and sheepishly join the girls, who have brought meat, and vegetables, and breads. I realise we are not men. We are boys. And no matter what we were told when we were kids, we will never be men. We will just be large, ungainly children. This has always been the future.

'Oh, look!' says Richard's wife, as we reach the cottage.

A fish has just made a beautiful, arcing leap, splashing down on to the otherwise calm, sun-dappled, early-evening waters.

Richard, Marc and I look at each other, vexed. I put my book away.

I could have predicted that would happen.

THE ANECDOTE

'And then he sort of stumbled backwards,' I say, to the small crowd around me, who are listening, rapt, to my every word. 'And he fell into the bath!'