During that first Covid lockdown, in the spring of 2020, when our movements were even more restricted than they would be later in the pandemic, people missed all kinds of things. They missed family and friends, of course, and the everyday normalcy that had mostly been taken for granted, until it was taken away. They missed going out for meals, hearing live music, and chatting with colleagues. They missed engaging with the world in all the many ways that bring a sense of meaning and of freedom to our lives. For me, one of those ways – and one of the things I missed most of all – was fishing.

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Ever since I was a little boy, the idea of freedom has always been at least partly an idea about water. That’s where my thoughts go when they’re meant to be focused on something else. As a crucial writing deadline approaches, my mind turns to footloose times; it turns to the banks of rivers and of lochs, where minutes can stretch languorously into hours, and where all of life’s commitments and complications can seem less pressing, less worrisome, than they do elsewhere. Even just the thought of being by the water is a dependable balm. It can help me to think better and help my imagination to loosen up.

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Back when I first started to fish, I didn’t really have any commitments or complications. I was eight years old. Life, on the whole, was simple. And yet, even then, fishing seemed to offer something I couldn’t find elsewhere, something I hadn’t known I needed until I found it. When a friend of my parents took my brother and me to a pond in East Sussex for a day and taught us how to cast, how to watch a float for bites, how to tell the difference between a roach and a rudd and a crucian carp, neither he nor they could have known how these lessons would change my life, how they would shape my relationship with the world for decades to come. At once, water became a place of mystery and possibility. It became a place of the utmost excitement.

This, then, is one of the paradoxes of angling: it is a hobby that offers not only relaxation and solace, but also nerve-jangling exhilaration. It can be both calming and thrilling at once.

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I say paradoxes, plural, because fishing – as I realised, when I began writing my new book, Illuminated by Water – is a complicated and sometimes contradictory business. When people ask me why I fish, I struggle to give a single, coherent answer. I feel drawn to it for different reasons from one day to the next, and every one of those reasons is important. Back when I was young, that draw was fierce. I had just learned that the water had secrets to reveal, and I needed to find out what they were. Fishing was a kind of quest, a seeking out of things that would otherwise remain hidden. And on those occasions when I found what I was looking for, when I held a perch or a coalfish or a flounder in my hands, it was a kind of revelation. There was something completely magical in those moments, and I can still recall the enchantment I felt even now.

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These days my obsession is more moderate. At least outwardly. But angling keeps me in touch with the passionate, obsessive child I once was. When I hook and land a trout today –especially on a fly that I’ve made myself – I’m reminded that the world can be startling, and that some of what is most beautiful and wonderful in that world cannot easily be seen. It can take effort and determination, and a bit of luck, to find it.

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Back in that stay-at-home spring of 2020, what many of us missed most of all was the sense of being connected: to the lives of other people, and also to places. The brief time we were allowed to spend outside each day, stretching our legs, never felt like enough. For me, living on the banks of the River Allan in Dunblane, every walk brought a reminder of what was then prohibited. I would pause often on the riverbank or on a bridge, and look for signs of life in the water – the subtle ‘rise’ of a feeding fish – and I would think of freer days.

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Angling, for some people, offers both kinds of connection: to place and to people. As viewers of the BBC’s Gone Fishing programme, with Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer, can attest, time by the waterside can bring companionship and laughter. It can bring a quiet closeness that is hard to find elsewhere.

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But even for those who fish alone, by choice or by necessity, this is not an isolating activity. For me, certainly, it is ­the opposite. One of the ways in which I feel most connected to the world – and to the natural world especially – is through fishing. The times I spend beside water are times of attentiveness, of looking and listening as carefully as I can, of embedding myself within a particular moment. Fishing is an immersive activity, in which the angler can come to feel richly entangled with the non-human world.

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Most of my younger life was spent in Shetland, a veritable paradise for those of us who fish, with its hundreds of trout-filled lochs dotted all across the islands. Among the many layers of intimacy I have with that place, the countless hours I spent fishing are some of the most significant. That way, I have seen and experienced parts of the islands that I otherwise never would, and it is to those hours of angling that my thoughts very often turn, now that I don’t live there any longer. I look back, and I remember.

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During that time when going out and seeing familiar places, or else exploring new ones, wasn’t possible, I was grateful for the richness and depth with which such memories have been imprinted. It helped to stave off the gloom of being stuck indoors for so long, of having no fixed date by which to expect the restrictions on our lives – or the terrible pandemic that led to them – to be lifted. I found myself turning those memories over, thinking back to the places I have fished in my life: to lochs in Shetland, to crystal clear streams in New Zealand, to tree-lined lakes in British Columbia, to ponds, canals and harbours. I turned also to the people I’ve fished with, especially to my brother, who remains my most consistent angling companion even today. I found myself writing about those people and those places.

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And all of that, ultimately, helped me to look forward.

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Because fishing, when it comes down to it, is about hope. Beneath the compelling complexity, it’s about putting yourself in the way of good things, and hoping they’ll take hold. It’s about casting your line out and enjoying the anticipation: the tense and tranquil waiting. I needed that anticipation very much over the past couple of years, and writing Illuminated by Water helped me to find and rekindle it. Fishing, I discovered, doesn’t just require hope; it creates it.

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Originally published in Waitrose Weekend