Not for ages, alas. I used to tickle trout and then fish by myself in various burns and lochs, in the sea off St Andrews when I was a schoolgirl (never caught anything but it was lovely to get out of school) and salmon with my father usually in the Tay near Dunkeld. Those flies are mine now but were my father’s. I have a nice ancient split cane rod in its little bag somewhere that I can’t have touched for the last 40 years…
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I still have my first rod, a spinner, and reel, a multiplier, given to me 65 years ago, age 5. The reel still has its original box and velour bag. The rod has it’s original bag.
Your father would be astounded at the price of tackle now. You can spend over £500 on a fly reel!
One of the conditions associated with ‘thingism’ and ‘stuffitis’ is ‘choice overload’. Never so well illustrated but by the plethora [the true meaning being an ‘excess of’, not ‘a lot of’] of fly lines now available.
My first fly line, 60 years ago, was one of the first synthetic alternatives to silk. It was a floater, of course and level. Then along came ‘double taper’ - tapered to both ends on the basis that you were going to own it and fish it for so long that one end would wear out and you could turn it round and use the other.
Now, on the John Norris website, one of the leading UK mail order sellers of field sports products, they sell 147 different fly lines! Floating, sink tip, fast sink tip, intermediate [barely floats], sinking slow/medium/fast/super fast. And all these different sink rates come in different profiles. Single taper, weight forward, long weight forward, shooting head … It’s choice overload gone mad.
Get your children to save up their pocket money for your next Christmas present
Or 
+
2p change from £1500 but the reel comes with a fly line and backing. 
In fact, I think the £xxx.99 pricing, at this level, is an insult. You don’t sell Aston Martins and Bentleys to the people who can afford this tackle for £174,999.99
It is a bit odd
The 1st two reasons I learnt for xx.99 pricing were a) to make prices look smaller - £9.99 is somehow psychologically much more than 1p shy of £10.00 but that does seem a bit implausible at these prices, the other reason was that the sales assistant has to make change so is forced to ring up the sale on the till (always thought this one was weak - what is to stop an unscrupulous sales assistant keeping a supply of 1p coins).
£xx.9x pricing is also used by some stores to flag that goods were bought on offer at reduced price.
None of which seem to apply here.
There are encouraging signs, according to reports from reliable bibliographic sources, that the epidemic of bookcase backgrounds has reached its peak, and is on a slow downward trajectory.
Interviewed in his impressive library, Professor Emeritus Marginal-Scribbles of Columbia University revealed that solid evidence was coming to light of a reduction in the number of books stacked haphazardly horizontally on shelves, and an uptick in potted plants and obscure but reassuringly commonplace knick-knacks , creating a less congested and ostentatiously studious ambience for viewers, for whom books may add to the sense of oppression, alienation, and loss of the will to live.
There is a new awareness around the importance of visual-field features like oddly shaped lightfittings, out of fashion ceiling mouldings, miscellaneous trailing cables or flexes, and doors that lead nowhere in particular: items that draw the restless eye away from illegible titles, or gaudy book jackets. Amazing progress was being made by public-private consortia towards an increase in bookcase capacity, by emptying shelves of volumes, and sharpening more pencils, he added.
“There is light at the end of the tunnel”, the professor smiled, tapping his pipe on the bust of Shakespeare on his desk, and scratching his head with an ivory paper-knife. "And it’s coming down the tracks incredibly quickly. "
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I would be hard-pressed to find a bookless place in my house, almost all my walls are books and I currently have upwards of 20 thousand; I can’t imagine how or why that would bother someone else, nor do I think it says anything about me except that I like reading and have a large family who also like reading.
Perhaps people could commiserate over the absence of televisions etc 
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I thought that remark about book-gloom might provoke a response, and it was intended to be entendu au deuxieme degré 
… too clever by half.
A few years back I inherited a library of about 10,000 books about Buddhism from a close long-time friend. I was incapable at the time of taking possession of them as I had no space and the other executors of the will insisted on clearing the two-bed flat he had occupied because it was jammed full floor to ceiling in every room with Buddhist books, journals, papers and paraphernalia.
I took as many as I could home and the rest went to clearance, a tragedy. I tried to find a Buddhist organisation to accept them, but none was willing to bear the expense, which disturbed me somewhat. I am confident some of them were very valuable and rare.
Most of those I kept are in UK in my wife’s second home, but I bought about 100 to France.
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I thought so, but bit all the same, because I have been on the receiving end of remarks about trying to appear superior/special/intellectual because of having books/lots of books/too many books/ useless books/ needing to get rid of them/have I actually read them/ why do I keep them etc etc for pretty well as long as I can remember, from all sorts of people.
Grrrrrrrrr
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That’s not just click bait - that’s some genuine, lust-producing library porn! Wow-zers.
Thanks for sharing, Geoff and for posting, Peter!
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The first bedroom I can remember (aged about 3) had a huge bookcase (to the ceiling) opposite the end of my bed. I was not allowed to open the glass doors, only the wooden ones below and then, only under the watchful gaze of my elder brother.
We kids were encouraged to investigate whatever books took our fancy. All hardback in those day… and not new, but books from the childhood of my parents as well as educational, classics, whatever …
Absolutely magical…
I still have a house full of books… not enough shelves/bookcases to contain them, … so some are in boxes - sadly
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It’s rather lovely and terribly cunning. Reminds me a bit of a very professional and presumably very expensively dressed window in an exclusive boutique. Not a criticism, because it is very well curated. But don’t you feel a need to replace it every month or so to keep up the novelty? 
That’s given a real boost to my enfeebled ego, Jaye Lynn @Legs, which will curdle the milk of many readers, but I enjoy tossing some mis-shapen roots and hairy stems into the wok now and again, and watching them sizzle and pop.
Thank you for the encouragement! 
Peter, I will admit to moving stuff around every month or so, I have gathered so much crap over the years that I have one of the attics full. Every now and again some of it has to come and share the space that is my playpen.
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My wife is the same. She has accumulated a lot of good quality stuff, and even some tasteless dross I’ve contributed, but everything is respected and cherished, as if it were a living entity.
She has a feel for ‘feng shui’ although her heritage is sub-Saharan African, and she has no connection with Asia (that could be evidenced). But she has feel for the power of spacial relationships, and knows when “énergies are not flowing” to best effect. I guess you are on the same wavelength. I have the same inklings, but not so well-developed. 
A great deal of the ‘stuff’ is sort of cherished, collected over a long time from all over the world and closer. My school Rugby colours and Blue Peter badges (2). The crocodile skull that I found in my garden in Vientiane, the gun that sits on my desk from very close to the now infamous Wuhan. A Trilobite that, under instruction, I excavated myself in Erfoud. If I have anything that I really value it two silk scarves given to me by His Holiness the Dali Lama. As previously said, cherished but not necessarily ‘valuable’, but woe betide herself moving things about, I do mine own dusting.
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Sadly, too many people only think about the monetary value…
Our home is full of “heaven knows what”… but virtually everything holds a special place in our hearts and thus is priceless …
Re: “Grrrrrrrr”
I shall not tweak that tigress’s tail again 
One of the things that I love about SF is how threads can see-saw between the intellectual or metaphysical and the eminently down-to- earth practical.
Unless one views books primarily as some sort of interior design element (spurious and easy to spot), and ignoring sentimental value, hanging on to books should really depend on whether or not one intends to read/re-read or continue using them (even if most of us aren’t normally quite so ruthless). Secondly, I could (but don’t, honest!) divide friends into those who on first visit look at my book shelves, and those that don’t.
Our non-book-shelved books in storage in a nearby building fall into two categories, fiction and biography, virtually all are quite old paperbacks, cheaply bound and printed on woodpulp paper that’s likely to crumble before you get to their literary (as opposed to their literal) end. The best use for these might be to cut off the spines, combine them into an artwork and compost the rest. However lingering sentimentality is definitely an obstacle
Conversely today, while trying to write an exhibition catalogue essay on contemporary paintings of waterfalls, I’ve consulted my tattered 1793 edition of an English picturesque tourist guide, first published in 1778, that I bought for an entirely different purpose in 2005 and the first Chinese accounts in English of the philosophical principles of early Daoist landscape painting, published in 1937, that I bought (again for an entirely different purpose the following year). In other words, although books, whether fiction or non-fiction may age physically, their content doesn’t necesssarily become irrelevant, but instead can be a window onto when they were written. I believe that window is far more transparent if one can read the text in its original form rather than from a presentday e-version.
The article below is from yesterday’s NY Times, do you think they follow the SF postings of the esteemed Peter Goble?