“I first set foot into an antique fishing tackle auction some years ago – and I was horrified by what I saw.

Men. Old men. Old, musty-smelling men. Old, musty-smelling men dressed in green. I did not belong. I panicked. I couldn’t breathe.

However, there were other things too. There were split cane rods, greenheart rods, fibre glass rods, carbon rods, and even metal rods. There were reels: fixed spool, closed face, centrepin, multiplier and fly. There were reels from my youth, and before. Reels made by Walter Dingley, Allcocks, Mitchell, ABU and K.P. Morritt’s.

There were flies, lures, boxes of books, and bits and bobs (bobs are rarely seen without bits).

There were silk lines and nets and taxidermists’ delights and failures. There were paintings. There were letters from one famous angler to another.

There were bespectacled men lifting 16-feet salmon rods and swishing them in the cavernous vaulted roof of Chiswick town hall, which was where the auction was due to start in a couple of hours.

There were hushed whispers from groups of similarly dressed men, and there were occasional gales of laughter. I spoke to some of the men. They were funny (not bad funny, but good funny).

So I stuck around.

This was an auction run by Neil Freeman whose company, Angling Auctions, still holds successful twice yearly sales in Chiswick.

Rather than laughing about the musty men, think on this: any money invested in top-of-the-range fine condition quality items (such as a good B James & Sons Richard Walker mark IV carp rod) 20-years-ago would be out-performing any money invested in the banking system by approximately eleven-fold. Actually, this is a random number that I have just plucked out of the sky as I can’t be bothered to do the research, but you get my drift.

The sale started and before I could do anything about it, I found myself bidding on a beautiful Phantom fly rod. I won it.

It was made in 1961 by Hardy Brothers, those legendary tackle makers of Alnwick, from split cane.

This particular version of the Phantom was nicknamed the ‘one ounce’ rod. It was a bit like an apprentice-piece to prove that Hardys could make a rod from cane weighing just, well…one ounce.

Laughably, it is only four feet and four inches long as a result. I still use it occasionally, though, for catching (or missing the bites of) dace on the Thames. I believe old fishing tackle is to be used rather than sent to a museum.

When I got it home after the auction I looked in the mirror. I was grinning with delight at my new purchase. Then I looked more closely. I was wearing green. And although my jacket was clean, it had lain in the boot of my car for a couple of weeks and did have a certain gentle odour to it. And were those crow’s feet I was starting to notice around my eyes?

And then it came to me…

My name is Michael, I am a musty man. I don’t care, though, for I am a musty man with my very own Hardy’s Phantom."