Perch were one of Greg’s favourite fish. No other fish pulled quite like it – they jagged, swerved and, if it was a particularly good one, made the odd deep dive. On the bank, they were a good catch too. There was nothing that made the heart soar like lifting one in your net with its golden flanks, striped with black like a tiger, and the bright crimson fins. Old Stripey. On a winter’s day it was a real tonic.

His friend’s customary three rods were fanned out around him. Greg himself didn’t like to catch fish after fish, after fish. He liked a challenge. Liked to work at it. He preferred to sit with just his tipping rod and move the bait on the bottom. It usually meant that you waited longer, caught fewer fish, but when you did there was a chance that they’d be better specimens.

‘Picture, matey. Picture. I’m saying cheese,’ Ray instructed, holding his little perch aloft in the time-honoured pose of fishermen, keeping the fish high on the chest so that it appeared bigger. It was a ritual that Greg had long got used to.

He put his rod to one side, lifted his friend’s mobile phone from the top of his tackle box and, obligingly, snapped a photograph. Since technology had allowed them, recording every single fish that Ray hooked had become unavoidable. His friend even had his own website gallery to display the photos.

‘What d’ya reckon?’ Ray grinned at the lens. ‘What d’ya reckon?’

‘Nice fish.’

Greg could only remember taking a picture of one catch in recent years. He’d been sitting on the bank late one evening with the hot summer sun sinking over the horizon and the fish coming to the surface for a last lazy bite, when he’d hooked a monster Mirror Carp with nothing more than a piece of stale bread and a four-pound line.

It was unusual to see carp above ten pounds in the canal, but this beast weighed in at twenty pounds. He’d played it for two and a half hours, terrified that it would manage to snap the woefully inadequate line before he had a chance to reel it in. Just when he thought he’d won, the fish would power off again on a long, surging run. Greg had tired before the fish and had called Ray down to the canal to come and help him land it. That had been a fish to photograph. The flanks were chestnut brown, fading to a creamy white belly and it was thickset, strong and muscular like the prize-fighter it was. Carp were the fish who rewarded the anglers who worked hardest at their fishing, and the variation in their size and colour and scale patterns were as endless as in a fingerprint. Who could fail to marvel at that?