Do you remember the Thames Salmon incident? The Thames Water Authority decided to restore salmon, where it had once been in abundance, but suffered a startling decline when the Thames became a sewer. TWA wanted to show – or rather to show off – what a sterling job they did in cleaning up the Thames, and it was salmon that would make their case.

Nice idea, but most remained sceptical, and we wrote at the time that we would sooner see the money they were prepared to spend on this quixotic lunacy put into the trout fishing on the reservoirs they controlled. In 2003 they spent £3 million doing salmon, some of which did actually return to the Thames, but by 2005 none were recorded. So that was three million up the Thames, or should that be “down the Thames,” which still remained polluted

Meanwhile, TWA sold out, literally. Queen Mother Reservoir, in West London, for which many of us had fought so hard to turn into a trout fishing venue, was sold, to a poor chap who was prepared to run it, who put everything he had into it, and failed to do the impossible. Barn Elms, the Victoria-era complex of four reservoirs, just over the Hammersmith Bridge, not all that far from the centre of town, was taken over by some wildlife group who didn't think we should be allowed to come fishing in this little jewel of a water that provided pleasure, and good fishing, to large numbers of people. There was nobody to fight for us, and we never fought for ourselves.

A copy of Modern Gamekeeping came through the mail slot the other day, a highly intelligent new newspaper directed at professional gamekeepers. This is the lot in Britain whom one might describe as a cross between God and Jesus Christ. Employed on the bigger and richer shoots, they bear the responsibility for insuring that the birds fly, and that they do so in the right direction, over the standing guns' heads. Let's say it's your land and your shoot, and you invite your mates around to join in. If things don't go too well, while your name used to be Lord so-and-such, now it's Lord Muck, and your friends find it difficult to express a kind word about you or your shoot. The gamekeeper gets the blame, and is crucified. If on the other hand all goes well, the keeper ascends to a permanent place on ground-based shooting heaven.

Gamekeepers are seen as notoriously loyal, and often are, having spent the whole of their working lives on one estate, feted at the Game Fair for having done forty years of service. The long-running radio programme (of sixty years) the Archers, on the British Broadcasting Corporation (in theory providing us with an insight into the countryside, - though most of us are rather sceptical) has a young game keeper, in prime position, whose father and grandfather have been notorious poachers in their time. The keeper, finding his father at it in his patch, tears him off a strip, lets him go this time, but makes it unmistakably clear that next time it will be a police matter.

True, the last gamekeeper hadn't done too well; suffering from depression, he killed himself.

Nedra and I were in the San Francisco Bay area and arranged to see Wildlife Photographer David Steinberg, who with his wife Annie, was preparing to go to the Solomon Islands to do some diving. [Hopefully we will all get to see some of their photographs one day.] They live on the western side of the Bay, high-up on a hill over-looking the water, in what has become a highly populated area, but is replete with wildlife. It would be a rare evening not to see at least one deer crossing the road.

David and Annie took us for a day in San Francisco. David bought us hot dogs from a stand in the street. The stand was commanded by a chap from near to London, whose family hailed from the Caribbean, and who now lived his life in San Francisco. His hot dogs are to be recommended, which we ate in Union Square, sitting in the sun, watching people passing by.