I only met the new King once, God save him.

We happened to be at a music event at Thornham on the North Norfolk coast and we were introduced - fellow anglers and all that. He asked me what I did for a living and I blurted out that I wrote fishing columns for the Eastern Daily Press and the Anglers Mail.

“Well,” he replied, “I suppose somebody has to.” But I noticed a twinkle in his eye and we got on fine when I mentioned I fished the Dee just up from Balmoral where he and the whole Windsor family have enjoyed sport with salmon for a century.

Bizarrely, I also confided that I preferred crucian carp to salmon and he assured me he’d check out the Sandringham lakes and let me know if these adorable little crocks of gold were present there. I actually received a letter from the estate a month or two later lamenting that there was no record of crucians and that is where our bromance ended!

Of course, when Charles’s mother Elizabeth gloriously ascended the throne 70 years ago, East Anglia positively oozed crucian carp. They were so prolific that when I was 10 I used my first swear word, infuriated I couldn’t get past the little beasties to the tench that I craved. How things changed for the crucian carp through the reign of Elizabeth.

Crucian pools dried up, notably in the heat of the 1976 summer, or were ploughed up or were built over. Crucian populations hybridised with released goldfish or were bullied into extinction by the ever-increasing number of stocked mirror and common carp.

The tsunami of released otters quarter of a century back was catastrophic for many large crucians and the ever increasing numbers of overwintering European cormorants did for thousands of smaller ones. By the time of Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee it is possible that scores, if not hundreds, of crucian waters in East Anglia had disappeared and estimates suggest the number of fish was down 80pc or more. Crucians hereabouts really were approaching extinction.

This was some sort of tragedy for younger anglers who had for decades, if not centuries, cut their fishing teeth on the crucians of village ponds and field marl pits. How many blissful summer evenings had been spent watching dithering red quill floats, bikes on the ground, empty cider bottles in the grass, the local maidens watching on? It was a tragedy for the crucian specialist anglers of whom there were more than a few but above all, of course, the demise was a tragedy for this beloved fish, an almost anonymous treasure embedded in our natural and national history. Thankfully, crucians found their champions, starting their work here, in the east.

Carl Sayer, Bernard Cooper, Chris Turnbull and many more stalwarts set the scene with the Norfolk Crucian Project and their work restoring ponds and seeding them with young crucians has proved so successful that the initiative has radiated out from our home county.

This very week, I am heading for a crucian pool nigh on 200 miles from Norwich that is relatively newly-created and inspired by the work of our own pioneers. This is all great to report, apart from the fact that I am scared stiff. Back in the early days of Good Queen Bess, I regarded myself as a crucian kid of high talent. Now it is so long since I had a decent one, I fear I have no talent at all. Crucians have always been tricky and temperamental and even small ones have sometimes proved impossible to tempt. Right now, I’m faced with big, old, wise fish that I fear might have the better of me by far.

Crucians are the Solomons of the fish world. They are fastidious. They feed early, late or not at all. A shift in the wind or a drop in air pressure can have them snoozing for weeks. They never move a millimetre from the densest undergrowth they can find. They don’t like this bait or that one and when they do suck in a morsel of something, they do it so fast you need the reactions of a gunslinger. They also take a bait so gently not even a dust shot is moved and a float does no more than curtsy. Sometimes they bubble and sometimes they roll but sightings are a torture because you know they are always just out of your reach. Crow-quill, crystal waggler, stillwater blue or pole float? Micro pellet, hemp, corn, maggot, caster, meat, flake or mini boilie? My approach is mired in a frenzy of doubt and I know I risk the danger of psyching myself out of the game. I need my 10-year-old mentality back, and quick.

So, I hope we are all saying prayers for King Charles and his wonderful mother and, probably, quietly for ourselves as well. Perhaps a prayer for the extraordinary crucian would not go amiss while we are at it.