One doesn’t often come across a book on fishing that jumps the tracks as thoroughly as this one does – and having jumped them, heads for the hills and smokes illegal substances and behaves like a bad puppy. They just don’t make ‘em like this that often and having flipped the title page I ended up reading the whole thing in one go.

The organisation of the book is as offbeat as its title, partly because it is written by two authors who write more or less alternate chapters and partly because the result veers between the sublime and the ridiculous; only having just read it, I can’t sort out when it is doing which. Take, for example, Chris Arelt’s description of chumming for carp on a pond full of hungry ducks, which had me howling on the sofa; or the days spent catching grass carp in a sewer; or Sebastian O’Kelly’s story of fishing light tackle for blues and stripers on a boatful of less than sympathetic construction workers and you get the picture. Most of the places this pair fish you wouldn’t want to go, except I bet you will when you have finished reading what they have to say about them. Very different, very unusual and very readable.