Ian Moutter is coordinator of the Scottish Angling Instructor’s qualification course, and started fishing at the age of four, which means, if his experience is anything like mine, that he will have seen more flies come and go than he will care to remember. He will have been through all my seven ages of fishermen, and at least three of my four ages of fly tyers (first, you want to tie a fly; next you want to tie a fly that catches fish; then you want to tie a fly that will catch fish when nothing else works; and finally you release that Marryat was right after all, and it isn’t the fly, it’s the driver).

Tying Flies the Paraloop Way is very well presented and it goes into the method – essentially, you wind a hackle around a floss post and then tie it off after pulling it forward – in enormous detail; but nonetheless it is a one trick pony. 190 pages on a single technique, however ingenious the patterns may be, is stretching the limits. Ultimately the quality of the text and the photography rescue the book from sheer self indulgence, and if you want to learn how to use a gallows tool you need look no further, but I can’t help wondering if it wouldn’t have been better value in a smaller format.