Fishing lines: Where did the spirit of adventure go?

A close friend got in touch last week and invited me to go fishing the following day. The pike were feeding well, he said. Good chance of a 20-pounder. He even offered to sort out the bait.

Sadly, I had to turn the invitation down. I worked out that, if I juggled things a bit, I could probably manage to free up 13 March.

"I remember the time when you would take the next day off without thinking about it," my friend grumbled. And he's right.

Whatever happened to those days when I could answer the call of the fish siren, because it seemed more important than anything else I had to do? What indeed.

Where once I worked to live, now I'm living to work. Something's gone wrong with the horizontal hold, and I can't seem to get the picture back.

The whole problem was brought home to me forcefully this week with the news that another old fishing friend, John Darling, had died from cancer at the age of 57. Now there was a man who had learnt the meaning of equilibrium.

A couple of years ago, I had a day free and, more in hope than expectation, I decided to call John to see if he was also free. He owned a boat at Seaford and was one of the finest bass fishermen in the country, a pioneer of catching very big ones on a whole mackerel.

He once told me he had caught so many over 10lb (the mark of a very big bass) that he had lost count. If I was going to catch a whopper, I probably had a better chance of doing so with him than anyone else.

So I rang him. "Any chance that you're leaning on your shovel and not doing anything tomorrow, John?" I asked.

"Well, I've got the boat out of the water and I was going to have the engine fixed, but what the hell... it will get us out there and back," he said. "I can get up early and put the boat in the water.

"Have you got a mobile, though? If you have, bring it with you; I'll need to cancel a couple of appointments tomorrow, and we need to leave early to catch the tide."

I'd like to say that we went out and caught a heap of monster bass. We didn't. We caught four or five decent ones, but had to come back early because the engine was playing up. That's not the point. The impressive thing is that John was happy to drop everything given the chance to go fishing.

That's how he lived his life. People called him irresponsible, said he was unreliable. On the contrary: when it came to fishing, he was the most dependable person I knew. He just had a different set of priorities to most other people.

Why can't I be like that? I'm not alone in claiming that family commitments, pressures of work, a senior position and responsibility for others mean I can't just drop everything and trot out of the door with a rod over my shoulder.

But why not? Most of us don't really want to earn a ton of money; we just need relief from the struggle for it.