The great escape
Fly-fishing in Italy. Getty
The priceless solitude of fly-fishing
Polo and shooting have long been regarded as the “sports of kings”, says Tom Chamberlin in Air Mail, but fishing is “fast encroaching on their sovereign territory”. Historically, proper fly-fishing was the preserve of aristocrats and rich Londoners who would decamp to Scotland on a Thursday evening and ensconce themselves in what are euphemistically called “lodges” on vast estates devoted to fishing. But unlike shooting, where a day on the peg is full of noise, action and regular opportunities to kill, fly-fishing offers something far scarcer: “solitude, the rush of gin-clear water, and the very real possibility of catching nothing at all”.
As Scottish salmon numbers have sadly dwindled in recent years, devoted anglers have looked further afield. The great hot spot used to be Russia, where a week’s fishing might yield 50 salmon and the Ponoi river, just north of the Arctic Circle, offered “extraordinary solitude”. This is a large part of the point, says fishing guide Tarquin Millington-Drake. The trend among clients these days is for small groups to take whole rivers to avoid unwanted company. “I know two guys who, for five years in a row, took all 21 rods on a Canadian steelhead-trout river,” he says. “They had more money than time.” Taking it one step further, the English billionaire Jim Ratcliffe has become the largest private landowner in Iceland after buying 400,000 acres for around £40m, including some of the finest fly-fishing rivers in the world. In a recent interview, while standing knee deep in one of his very own ice-cold rivers, taking in his tranquil surroundings, Ratcliffe, apparently without irony, explained the appeal: “There are some things money can’t buy.”
Property
THE MILL HOUSE This Grade II-listed former water corn mill in Sebergham, Cumbria, has been restored over 50 years by a retired architect and a garden designer, says The Guardian, and retains its original water wheel, timber miller’s screen and mill machinery. On the ground floor is an open-plan kitchen and family room with a dark blue Aga, oak beams and granite worktops, along with two bedrooms, a garden room, a bathroom and a utility. Upstairs is a sitting room with a vaulted ceiling with an original sack hoist, plus three further bedrooms and a bathroom. Outside, more than four acres of south-facing gardens include a wildflower meadow, a potager, a pond, a gravel beach and river frontage on the Caldew. Carlisle is an 11-mile drive. £950,000.
Comment
Putin at the Victory Day military parade in Red Square last week. Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Getty
Putin’s paranoia
Vladimir Putin’s “sheen of invincibility” has well and truly worn off, says Simon Nixon on Substack. At the weekend, he made a rare trip out of the bunker he now hides in to show his face at Russia’s “dramatically scaled back” Victory Day parade. Usually the highlight of the Russian state’s calendar, this year’s event lasted a brief 45 minutes, showcased no tanks, missiles or fighting vehicles and was attended by fewer foreign leaders than usual. Snipers and soldiers with anti-drone weaponry were stationed around Red Square, while ordinary people were put on high alert and prevented from entering the city centre. So nervous were Russian officials that Putin had even gone begging to Donald Trump, asking him to persuade Volodymyr Zelensky to grant a one-day ceasefire – a deal that required Putin to agree a 1,000 prisoner swap.
What’s becoming increasingly clear, says Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic, is that the de facto deal Putin struck with his business elites four years ago – “support my war in Ukraine and in exchange you won’t have to think about it” – has been broken. Security measures now regularly render phone signal coverage in the capital and across Russia non-existent and the state has cut access not just to Western social media but to the Russian-built Telegram and most VPNs too, hampering oligarchs’ ability to do business and making necessary public services such as ATMs and ride-hailing apps redundant. These inconveniences come on top of high inflation and soaring interest rates that have for months weighed on rich Muscovites, who have already been stripped of personal wealth to boost the Kremlin’s war coffers. Putin’s reign isn’t over yet, but a “vacuum has opened” and sooner or later, something, or someone, else will fill it.
🇷🇺🪖 I’ve attended many Victory Day parades on Red Square, says Steve Rosenberg on BBC News, and this year’s was markedly different. In previous years, I’ve had to sprint from the media bus to nab a decent spot in the press area at the side of the square. This year, “no running was required”. Once I’d leisurely arrived in position, a Russian TV crew rushed up to me and started filming. “Steve, you’re proof that foreign media have been allowed in,” the reporter said. “Not really,” I replied. “I can’t see any others.”
Life
Slenczynska performing a minuet in G major by Beethoven in 1930, aged five
“You mean that plays the piano?”
The American pianist Ruth Slenczynska was the ultimate child prodigy, says Guy Dammann in the FT. She gave her first recital at the age of four and made her orchestral debut in Paris aged seven. Two years later, in the same city, she was asked to stand in for the legendary Russian composer and pianist, Sergei Rachmaninov. When Slenczynska – who died last month aged 101 – was taken to meet him afterwards, he towered over her and pointed the index finger of one of his famously massive hands. “You mean that plays the piano?” After calming her nerves with a photo of his treasured speedboat (with sound effects), he asked for proof, and got it. “In one year,” he told her, “you will be magnificent. In two years, you will be unbelievable… would you like some cookies?”
Rachmaninov spent the next two years training the young girl to strengthen her fingers – he compared them to “overcooked spaghetti” – unaware she was also being mentored by his great rival, Alfred Cortot. “Play each note as it comes,” he told her. “Each note has its own time, its own weight, its own colour.” It made for a sharp contrast with the teaching style of her bullying father, a violinist whose musical career was ended by a World War One wound, and who, fuelled by jealous ambition, moved to California with the express intention of raising “the greatest musician in the world”. He forced his young daughter to practise nine hours a day, and punished her with a “magic stick” (the wooden handle of a broken spade). She ran away aged 19, and only returned to performing in her late twenties, after her father was dead.
🎹🇺🇸 Slenczynska played for five US presidents, including Harry Truman, who asked her to join him in a Mozart duet he’d been practising. Years later he knocked on her dressing room door in Kansas. “Did she, he asked, by any chance, remember playing with him?”
The Knowledge Crossword
What to watch
Bella Mclean and Alex Hassell as Taggie and Rupert. Disney+
Rivals, the gloriously knowing adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster of the same name, is back and as brilliant as ever, says Benji Wilson in The Daily Telegraph. It’s stuffed with nostalgia from Betamax to potato waffles, garish jumpsuits and use of the word “ninny”, as well as plenty of rumpy-pumpy, whether it be in a hot-tub, in a swimming pool, in the shower, on the stairs or just bare-buttocks getting thwacked with a riding crop. The incorrigible Rupert Campell-Black (Alex Hassell) and his arch-nemesis Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) feud over a TV franchise, while the ever-wondrous Katherine Parkinson and Danny Dyer revive Lizzie and Freddie, whose series of yearning trysts are tender and unpredictably moving. There’s also a “beautifully conceived” secret romance between TV producer Charlie and Campbell-Black’s assistant Gerald which plays out against the backdrop of the 1980s aids crisis. The whole thing is preposterous in the extreme which, like Ladies Day at Ascot or Keith Floyd, is what makes it such enormous fun.
Quoted
“There is no reciprocity. Men love women. Women love children. Children love hamsters.”
Alice Thomas Ellis
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