You know how sometimes it always feels like you’re trying to catch lightning in a bottle? There’s always a train or a bus to catch, but you can’t afford to wait for a later one to come along because, of course, the early bird catches the worm. Throughout the working week you’ll always feel as though you’re running to catch up, and those people you need to speak to always seem to say “Catch me when I’m not so busy.”
“Okay”, you’ll reply; “I’ll catch you later!”
To make life more efficient and convenient we come up with ‘catch-all’ solutions, trying them out and hoping they’ll catch on; maybe we catch a hint of something on the wind, a message perhaps, or a passing comment that you didn’t hear: “Sorry? I didn’t quite catch that?!” so that you spend half the morning trying to catch their eye or catch up with them at an opportune moment in between all the stories of who was caught in the act, caught red-handed, caught on the hop and was, simply and unequivocally caught bang to rights.
By the end of the week we invariably end up tired and so, in an effort to catch our breath, perhaps we’ll try to catch forty winks but we don’t want to be caught napping so we end up stuck in a catch 22 situation, snarled up with all the things that we’ve caught, or have caught us, during the day, with no apparent way out. Life always seems, no matter how hard we try to avoid it, to catch us like a deer in the headlights.
But sometimes, very occasionally, things can take a change.
If I allow myself to take a moment, I’ll sometimes catch sight of something – a jacket; a stray packet of hooks or even a reel that, in one of those rare moments, I might have left out to tinker with. It might just be my imagination, but I’m almost certain that, when I step out into the garden, I catch a whiff of salt on the air again.
Suddenly, my thoughts turn to other things: can I catch the tide? If so, is it possible that I’ll also catch a window in the weather? From nowhere, this idea that wasn’t there a moment ago will begin to materialise and take form, that desire will surface from nowhere again, freeing itself from all those gripping little hooks of the day that catch and tangle up time and energy and motivation, and it will begin to catch fire, consuming all thought and action.
I check the internet, send out a few messages, catching up with old friends and acquaintances to find out what’s being caught along my stretch of the coast. I run to the shed to gather together the fishing gear, and catch that smell as I walk through the door – that faint tang of salt and ozone that won’t ever go away no matter how much I wash and clean and scrub, a smell that I would never wish to go away anyway. And so, I take out the rods and reels and bags and boxes begin to daydream again of all those fish that might end up caught at the end of my line, hastily packing everything into the car before nipping indoors to speak to my wife: “I’m going fishing tonight, okay love?”
“Yes, alright. Oh, just make sure you put petrol in the car, put the dishes away and take the bins out first.”
There’s always a catch.
