With our landscape gradually clambering from the murk of winter and feeling bright again, so to, Fishing for Schools.
With a Government Road map to guide the next weeks and months, schools now fully back and gradually a degree of normality returning, so we can advance plans that have laid, for the most part, dormant for nearly a year.
Just think; a year of turbulence, uncertainty, change and question marks. Now we can just get on, there is work to do.
Having already piloted and undertaken virtual programmes in the Eastern regions we can now celebrate resumption of actual sessions with Warren White leading the initiative in the Kent region and a new active era in the region begins.
As Warren says: "Tomorrow is the start of our Kent fishing programme for 2021. We are working with Rowhill school on their BTEC Fisheries course, these boys have come through the Fishing 4 Schools Cast Award course and now have progressed on to the BTEC fisheries course that is funded by the school.
"On this course they will learn all about fish - Life cycles, needs , internal and external features. They will collect invertebrates at a river to sample water quality. These are just a few of the subjects we cover. It will be great to see the lads again after the last lock down in November."
I think that this is a sentiment which will be echoed in every region. What will be sobering, will be the stories and unseen “issues” that will have undoubtedly been experienced by many through the draconian world of the lockdown.
If ever I get fed up with “my lot” , I always try to imagine a situation of a single parent family, caught in an inner city environment: and perhaps perched amid a big rise apartment. I am then immediately grateful for my good fortune….
We might not be able to offer total solutions; but we, at Fishing for schools can - and do - offer glimpses of another world within these peoples reach...that is why we do what we do.
Charles