‘To capture the fish is not all of the fishing,’ insisted that dentist-turned-bestseller Zane Grey; and, whilst that may be true enough, I feel my spirits sink whenever I see an angling book promoted as being essentially ‘about’ something more profound. There’s only so much room for stuff about inner rivers, rites of passage or the inevitable pèlerinage de l’âme, and if you can’t manage metaphor and insight like Norman Maclean or Tom McGuane then you’ll end up merely plumbing the shallows.

The latest book by Scottish poet Andrew Greig is not, to be fair, primarily a piscatorial work – but its initial premise is the quest for a wild trout. Over a final dram just before he died in 1996, the author’s mentor, the poet Norman MacCaig, set Greig