My favourite rivers

Ever since I caught my first trout with my father, John Profumo, in 1963 – shortly after he had resigned from Macmillan’s government – my life seems to have been embroidered by the course of various rivers.

My angling education proper began at Eton, on the (where, as a notable part of its liquid history, Izaak Walton himself fished in the 1630s). There I learned to floatfish for perch and bleak – little beauties, with nothing ‘coarse’ about them. I also discovered that angling is good for you: