I have two admissions to make.

I began writing for the Eastern Daily Press and the Anglers Mail about the same time, roughly half a century ago!

Secondly, the rivalry between the Anglers Mail and the Angling Times makes Ipswich and Norwich fans look like blood brothers so that even now the Mail has been gone two years, I still cannot bring myself to buy the Times.

Childish but true, so pals send me features in that paper they think I’ll find interesting and a week ago, that’s what happened. The question posed was whether fishing should be kept traditional, magical and simple or whether the whole gamut of modern day gadgetry, most of it electronic, should now drive the sport?

There is certainly plenty of the latter. If you have a few thousand quid to spare you can tool up with drones, 360-degree fish finders, GPS-directed bait boats, underwater cameras and rig cameras. In short, you can pinpoint your target fish in waters the size of the North Sea and watch exactly their reaction to everything you might put before them, bait, fly or lure.

What has happened to old skills, opponents ask, watercraft in particular? Where has the magic and the mystery of fishing gone, now stripped bare by electronics? Is this a simple choice between the old and the new, between tradition and technology? Or are we seeing something deeper? Is this symptomatic of the present divide in society between the desire for instant results and the counter-arguments of delayed gratification and its merits?

This is not a new issue in angling. Go back a century and the fly fishing world was riven between the camps of Halford and Skues. Halford preached the eternal virtues of the dry fly: Skues opined that if trout weren’t rising, it was fine and equally skilful to catch them subsurface on a nymph imitation. This battle is not yet decided. I have met and fished with anglers who would rather not make a cast to a rising trout day long than stoop to dragging a nymph around in order to make a catch. The question really is whether what we do is called fishing or should it be renamed catching, often at all costs? There are very many practices today that are up for debate, many of us are thinking, and we are not even talking electronic gadgetry here.

Bolt rigs, self-hooking rigs if you like, were a hot topic 40 years ago and they still are today. I’d guess 90pc of coarse fish are caught on bolt rigs of one form or another and there can be no doubt that they make catching easier. A vivid example of where the fishing side of the equation suffers is in the pursuit of crucian carp. Crucians have always been fiendishly hard to catch on a float, but a bolt/hair combination makes them far more vulnerable and easy for a while. Of course, this type of short cut eventually means that a big crucian won’t be caught by anyone using any method at all.

Bolt rigs are inextricably linked with long-stay approaches because they allow  anglers to cook, chat, listen to the radio and go to sleep, knowing they don’t have to sit on the rods and strike a bite. The self-hooking rig has allowed anglers to fish for a day, a week, a month, a lifetime and simply wear fish down by attrition if necessary.

Multiple rods are part of this 'catch at all costs' mind set. Three rods are the norm and legal, but away from scrutiny I’ve seen anglers use six, even eight rods if they know they won’t get caught. On a small water, every nook and cranny can have a bait placed in it by an angler sitting 50 yards off with a remote alarm set up in a breast pocket. It’s saturation fishing that is all about the end result.

I suspect that deep down, not many of us are overly happy about using livebaits and some of us, me included, tend to go there as a last resort where allowed and where the pike have made it clear that deads and lures are not going to work for them.

It’s not nice, but I’ll admit that at times I’ll grit my teeth, even though I refused to go that route back in the 80. Perhaps I have become less principled since then. After all, I do use bolt rigs and boilies and I will fish a nymph for trout and even trot maggots for grayling so no way do I want you to think I know where I sit on the catching/fishing issue. Like many of us, I sit on the fence and weigh up all the considerations on the day.

I’d like to fish pure every session but, damn it, I know I don’t. Perhaps unless we have never used a bolt rig, a bait boat, a boilie, a bite alarm or a bait that’s live, we have to admit we are all sinners in part. Me? I don’t want to sound like Meat Loaf, but he had it right... I would do anything to catch, but I won’t do that. No, there’s one thing I’d never do!