Back in the happy days of the excellent Holt Bookshop, I used to pretend to be a highbrow reader, but fooled no one, especially given my passion for Jo Nesbo thrillers.

I‘m still hooked on Harry Hole, the erratic, dangerous-to-know hero, and I relish a quote on him in the latest tome. What’s driving him on, a colleague asks? The reply? “He’s seeking order. An answer.” 

That might not seem much to hang a column on, but it means the world to me because it exactly describes what really, really drives me to the riverbank pretty much every day of my life.

Okay, I’m not a gun-toting pursuer of serial killers and no one would write a book on my own quests, but they are central to me. The world of water, one which encompasses fish, insects, mammals, reptiles, flora and everything else of interest, never ceases to delight and to puzzle. Unlike a Hole novel, too, there’s never an ending, never a solution and in many, if not most cases, the more you investigate, the murkier the waters become.

Take water voles.  I read that there is a massive operation to return them to the Lake District and we all know numbers have crashed here in the East. No longer do we hear their musical plopping or see their cheery little faces. The expert naturalists, who are rarely seen on my riverbanks, blame mink and loss of habitat. Loss of habitat? Blimey, every yard of Wensum bank, every gravel pit, every farm pond is lined with perfect vole habitat, so how can that be anything of an answer? Predators? Possibly. Mink at some stage probably, but the real decline I witnessed was post 2000 when released otters were rampant and mink were generally in retreat, in all my patches at least. So, for me, this is still a mystery to be properly solved, not to be shelved or explained by convenient half truths at best.

A few years back, the Environment Agency set some of its staff to radio-track the movements of fish around Broadland. I think it’s fair to say that we were amazed at how far and fast pike, especially, will travel in a month, a week, even a day or two. Yet, whilst some of these fish seemed ever on the fin, other pike I have known well seem to have lived in the same swim year on year. Bream, too. One Wensum bream I saw caught six times over a span of  nearly 40 years came from the self-same bend each and every time. So, why do some fish roam and others stay almost constantly at home? You tell me!

Why do barbel turn on their sides so frequently, sending very visible flashes of flank through the water to a watching angler? Are they freeing themselves of parasites? Are they marking territory? Is it a feeding technique, stirring the gravel and dislodging invertebrates? Is it simple joie de vivre, a little like those crashing carp we sometimes see or those rainbows that sometimes fling themselves skywards for no apparent reason at all?

Fish feeding times are fascinating to all anglers for obvious reasons, but I’ve never 100pc understood why easterly winds are so completely the kiss of death. Do lunar phases truly explain anything? Is a falling river level really better than a rising one? I’ve never been convinced. And what about the perfect visibility issue? I used to swear that big roach loved water where a piece of flake could be seen at 18 inches, but was that absolutely the case or was I trying to make sense of a conundrum that had me absorbed through the 70s and most of the 80s?

Why did the burbot become extinct? We can guess, but nobody knows. Why are mullet easy to catch off the south coast but blooming impossible hereabouts? Where have the once tremendous runs of Norfolk sea trout gone and why have rudd numbers declined to nearly nothing in my lifetime? And what about Blakeney seals? There are thousands of them, but does that mean they’ll eat all the bass or does it mean there are inexhaustible bass numbers there to be eaten? I’ve chosen a dozen questions, I have a thousand more, but you get the drift.

I suppose that until fish, frogs and the rest learn to talk we’ll never know. Especially now that we are witnessing the passing of the 'owd' country boys (and girls) who lived in nature from the cradle to the grave. Last question: didn’t they know things impossible to learn from books and so-called data and shall the world ever see their like again?