Decades of mismanagement and poor policy has left our rare and precious chalkstream environments in a perilous state

Two rare environments are close to my heart – Heather Moorland and Chalkstreams. Both are almost unique on a global scale and thus massively important.

You might think these are two very different environments; well, yes, they are – but there are many similarities. They are also supremely delicate; lack of management or the wrong sort can lead to damage taking a decade or more to repair.

I’ve been involved with grouse moors all my life – and have managed a famous stretch of the Middle Test for more than 40 years; this makes me a very old fart who’s experienced perhaps the most fundamental decades for both.

It’s hard to believe but during the Second World War it was only legal to make one type of regulation Cheddar in Britain – making any other sort of cheese was banned. Sixty years on, however, the British cheese industry is flying. There are over 750 different types, some of them ancient and others very new, and prizes for cheesemaking are hotly contested.

Patrick sets off for Norfolk to visit Mrs Temple, an environmentally-conscious dairy farmer and renowned cheesemaker. She shows him around the dairy and then takes him to see her Brown Swiss cattle that graze in the water meadow on their farm.

Amazingly, the Temples use waste whey from the cheesemaking process to fuel their biodigestor, which provides power for four hundred houses.

After visiting Mrs Temple, Patrick pops by the Walsingham Farm Shop to pick up some of Mrs Temple’s famous Binham Blue, which their best selling cheese by some way. Then he drives back to London and rings up Angus Birditt, the author of A Portrait of British Cheese: A celebration of artistry, regionality, and recipes. Angus has travelled the country talking to cheesemakers and he believes that to understand cheese is to understand rural Britain.

You can order Angus’ book here: https://www.londoncheesemongers.co.uk/products/a-portrait-of-british-cheese

You can buy Mrs Temple’s cheese here: https://walsingham.co/products/mrs-temples-binham-blue-cheese

What would be your choice for Desert Island Discs? I pondered on this while the Sealyhams worked a brash pile for a rat. Plastic Bertrand’s Ca Plane Pour Moi definitely, along with Noel Coward’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen if the BBC allowed it (unlikely). Then the sound of curlew in winter. And next, the scream of my old Sharpe's of Aberdeen trout reel.

The old girl was built almost 30 years ago and she was giving her banshee wail yesterday as the line ripped out attached to a very cross rainbow fooled by a home-tied Shuttlecock Emerger. In he came, the priest delivered the last rites and it was time for a cuppa, at which point one of my fellow Rods noticed the engraving on the reel’s side: Macnab Challenge 1998.

“So, what did you start with?”, he asked. “The salmon, the stag or the grouse?”

“Actually, it was none of those,” I replied. “It was a goose.”

When June weedcut is done and peace returns to the chalkstreams the trout become fickle and the fishing is engrossing

The time of the Mayfly hatch on the chalkstreams has long been one of the highlights of our fishing calendar. Normally through May and early June this wonderful insect that even us uneducated entomologists can identify have fishermen headed to the banks for their nearest river to participate in “duffer’s fortnight”.

For some it is the period after June weedcut and Mayfly is done that we look forward to most. Once again the river seems to find peace after the frantic activity of both fishermen and their quarry. I think of Mayfly as being the trout equivalent to a large juicy steak. By this stage in the year most trout have had enough steak and are really thinking of a nice salad. This can make them difficult to tempt into playing our game, but it is this challenge of catching the “educated trout” that I find most rewarding.

What if our uplands are already producing good biodiversity and tree planting will damage this and their potential to capture carbon? Is there time to rethink, or has the expensive rewilding express train already left the station?

Whilst few could argue that our country needs more woodland, the difficulty is agreeing on where we plant all those trees. We frequently hear politicians uttering the well-worn cliché “the right tree in the right place” in the hope that they won’t be pressed to expand upon that platitude. Politicians face difficult choices and whilst some progress is being made to get farmers to give up land for trees, it shouldn’t be surprising that our uplands are being targeted for tree planting.

However, having read a lot of science on peat uplands and talked to several of the leading experts in this field I am led to believe that planting trees in these complex and finely balanced ecosystems may not be the climate change and nature crisis silver bullet we are being told it is. And yet governments, terrified of Thunbergian anger over apparent inaction, are pressing ahead and welcoming anyone with a spade and a sack full of seedlings to head up the hills and get on with the job. After all who doesn't like woodland? so "blessed are the tree-planters."

I unearth some home truths about nature writing and try to explain why it matters

For the last three mornings, I’ve been up at 4.00 am murdering adverbs.

I have just finished my book on Britain’s coastline, and my agent thinks I need to reduce the word count by about 4,000, of which at least a quarter will come from adverbs. She is right. Adverbs are what I do when I want to use emphasis to camouflage uncertainty (‘absolutely’), indicate humility when I don’t necessarily feel it (‘possibly’) or can’t think of anything else (‘actually’ etc), and they are always first to go before the machine guns when the book goes over the top. I adore them, but it turns out I am in a minority. Next time I go on Mastermind - (oh, yes, I did; about 2007; specialist subject: Flanders and Swann. Long story)- adverbs will be what I take with me as my specialist subject.

If the editing process is a bit like kicking out children that you have spent a lifetime rearing, then the actual researching and writing is quite straightforward so long as you know what kind of book you want at the end of it. Many books start as one thing, and then gradually morph into another but, fundamentally, there are five categories of nature book...

The Norwegian Government has shut down salmon fishing on some of the country’s most storied rivers. Should it serve as a warning to us all?

Tom’s grandfather had a fine death. He was discovered lying on a gravel bank of the river Orkla in Norway, his hat tilted to shield his face from the sun. His fishing rod rested neatly beside him, and next to that was a bright 42lb salmon.

The family theory is that after fighting such a fish, at such an age, he decided to take a nap and drifted peacefully from this life into the next. He was repatriated back to North Norfolk and cremated. Half his ashes were buried in the local churchyard, alongside the 42lber, and the other half were fired out of his punt gun over the marsh.

Tom’s grandfather was one of many British sportsmen who traveled to Norway to fish. From the 1830s until the outbreak of the Second World War, British grandees would set sail each June, making the fjords their home for a month or more. And boy, did they catch some salmon.

Victorian and Edwardian sporting literature is chock full of enormous silver fish battled under the midnight sun. These aristocratic tourists become known to the locals as the ‘salmon lords’. They bought farms, fishing beats and built lodges, many of which are still owned by their descendants. Most of these lodges remain fishing meccas today, attracting well heeled salmon anglers from around the world.

Living and working in the countryside often requires a creative approach to problem-solving, best demonstrated by the improvised solutions we come up with. They may not be pretty, or even terribly safe, but they get the job done

You will, I am sure, be familiar with the concept of a ‘life hack’. Social media and the press are awash with videos and listicles called things like ‘The 93 life hacks that will change your life’. Many of these hacks use standard household items for a purpose different to the one for which they were originally designed. Using a loo-roll tube to subdue the vipers’ nest of cables behind your telly or desk, for example.

I’ve never seen a ‘hack’ that made me think that using it would ‘change my life’. Indeed, a great many of them seem not only too trivial to be truly life changing, but also, frankly unhinged, such as the one that I saw suggesting that you employ a power drill to make peeling apples quicker.

However, being a country lad, brought up on a farm, I am no stranger to an improvised solution or two. This is not lifehacking, though; this is the oft underappreciated art of The Bodge. For many, the term might be considered a bit pejorative, indicative of a slapdash approach, but to me the ability to bodge shows creativity, a can-do attitude and problem solving skills, as well as frugality.