About

Filing a live report

In the early days of my editorship of the FishingMagic website I wrote a regular column about my fishing exploits. I called it Digital Diary, a bit of a naff title I readily admit, but it seemed appropriate at the time as there were occasions when I took a laptop with me on some fishing trips and made 'live' updates to the site via a mobile phone connection. Boy, we had truly entered the digital age!

As the site grew (and by god did it grow!), I had less and less time to update the Digital Diary, after all I was running a site single-handed, editorially, with tens of thousand of members, plus moderating, again single-handed, a very lively forum, which is a job in itself.

That was one of my great regrets about the site becoming so popular, for it cut down the time I had to do the things I most enjoyed, and writing the Digital Diary was one of them.

Now I've retired from FishingMagic I'm filling my time with no problem at all by writing my usual comment column, 'Marsden's Musings', in Coarse Fisherman magazine, writing books, fishing of course, and following my other great love in life, photography.

But I'm used to being busy and I wanted something I could do when I'm not article and book writing, fishing and taking photographs, and resurrecting the Digital Diary could be just the thing that will keep me, and hopefully you, amused. It's a bit of self-indulgence too, as I feel I need to get everything I've ever written - or at least as much as I have on file - archived somewhere so that my children and grandchildren know where to come to find out what I got up to throughout my life - at least the fishing side of it!

And now I have no paymasters to consider I can write what the hell I want, within reason, and so this blog will be about fishing and photography, and anything else I want to get off my chest. I'll update it when I feel like it, which could be daily at times, or much less than that if I'm not in the mood or have nothing fresh to say. That's the beauty of doing this for fun, if it stops being fun, if only temporarily, I can give it a rest!

It won't be just a diary as such, for I'll publish some new articles and lots of my old previously published magazine articles under the banner of 'From the Archives', which many of you won't have read. Some of the comments in them, and the tackle, baits and methods, will of course be out of date, but so what; it could just be interesting for some to read about how it used to be. I'll also write a few reviews of some of the gear and bait I use and anything else I find useful, including photography related stuff.

'Digital Diary' is no more though. Instead we've got 'Inside Fishing & Photography', which I think is a better title as it describes exactly where the roots of this blog lie, or at least what it's about from my personal point of view. And it will be a personal slant on things, for I'm no expert on photography, and there are some who might say I'm no expert on fishing!

Blog? Modern blogs are more like a website aren't they? The first website I ever made, probably 12 years ago now, 'Graham Marsden's Angling Magazine', was less like a website than this blog.

I hope you enjoy reading these pages though. I know I'm going to enjoy writing them.