What an absolute stonker! What a bristling, buccaneering beauty!

This picture is of perhaps the biggest UK perch I have ever seen in all my decades of fishing and it could have been mine but it wasn’t for a very satisfying reason. It happened like this...

I came across great mate, Ian, trotting a nice glide for roach, dace, chublets and anything else that might come his way. On his inside margin, just off the current, lay a large, nigh on bottomless hole, fringed by trees. As I sat, watched and chatted, I noticed that fingerlings were regularly topping in this slack, surely indicating some predator moving beneath them?

I set up his second rod and as a tiny dace had expired, hooked it up and flicked it out under a float set at eight feet or so. The 'hole' was dark and deep and the float wafted about in the rhythms of water, the little silver fish bait fluttering beneath. Drama! The float shot away and I hit into a fish I knew instantly was no jack pike, but a big perch. The heavy nodding of the rod tip gave the game away and for a moment I hesitated before thrusting the bent rod into Ian’s hands. After all, it was his swim, his rod, his session and above all, he is one of my three best mates!

It was quite a fight, Ian insisting the gamely fighting fish was a pike and me yelling that, no way, it had to be a giant stripey. After a bruising couple of minutes, the behemoth hit surface just as the sun appeared from behind a cloud. It lay before us gleaming, this monster perch, and heart in mouth, I hustled the net beneath it whilst Ian gawped, petrified, as though the sight had turned him to stone.

What followed was pure jubilation and oodles of childlike joy. What other sport can reduce two OAPs to such gibbering fools in such a way? Doing a Geoff Hurst in a World Cup final comes not even close.

In a glow of contentment we talked the whole episode over. Clarky, Kate and Ratters came to admire, congratulate and bask in the extraordinary moment. The autumn afternoon positively oozed excitement, awe and good will. The fact that this glorious fish was shared between five of us this way only enhanced every ounce of pleasure it gave us. And away! We watched it glide back into the river and complete silence ensued before the others wandered back to their rods under a bubble of contentment.

But what of this 'Old Ghost' I promised you? We have to go back to 1961 for that story and Blenheim Palace lake, just outside Oxford. I was a tiny tot, but even then enthralled by my fishing and had longed for this special, annual angling club outing for months. The match had drawn to a close and I had weighed in a couple of pounds of baby perch that had won me first place in the junior section. I was on a cloud higher than nine and fished with my equally young pal Geoff for the last two hours of a golden afternoon, before the coach was destined to leave.

Then Geoff hooked something. He hooked something way beyond our ken. Whatever it was slowly, steadily took line in an unstoppable journey out into the middle of the lake. You have to understand Geoff’s experience, like mine, was limited to jam jar fish and also that kid’s tackle in those far off days was basic in the extreme. That fish, submarine, Nessie, whatever, simply frightened us to death. Soon, thankfully, we were ringed by the adult members of the club and advice spewed forth. Wind. Don’t wind. Keep the rod up. Keep the rod low. Loosen the clutch. Tighten the clutch... you get the picture, but, despite it all, Geoff hung on and after 15 minutes, whatever was out there began to weaken.

I had begun to notice that the club secretary, a grizzled man of enormous age it seemed then, had come closest to us and had assumed the role of advisor-in-chief. I was almost tearfully grateful to him, but as the fish yielded yard after yard of line, he became quiet. A big landing net was produced, the float could be seen circling just two rod lengths out and the secretary took the Woodbine from his lips. Whilst everyone’s eyes were fixed on the water, with a blur of his hand, he drew the fag’s lit end across the line by Geoff’s reel. With a groan of despair, the assembly watched the cane rod spring straight and the float disappear into the depths of the lake.

For 60 years the evil of that sight haunted me. It was perhaps my first realisation that man is capable of extreme badness and in some strange way, for years I felt in part ashamed, even culpable. I won’t overcook this because you’ll sense my trauma. All I will say that after all this time, the communal happiness that Ian’s perch engendered has made those Blenheim scars recede. In the days of Putin, it is easy to believe badness is winning out in this troubled world. Perhaps not.