Oh my god how dreary.

Gonna eat you, fishy. That'll wipe the smile off yer face...

Used to go ice fishing from time to time as a child. Wasn't like this, though. Sitting over a hole with a stick and a string, freezing your arse off, waiting for something to bite.

Oh, no. The way my family did it was classic ADHD ice fishing. We'd take this big honking ice auger, drill 7 or 8 holes in the ice, about 10 yards apart, in random pattern. Then we'd put these traps over the holes. The traps were these odd wooden contraptions with a spool of fishing line and a flag that would get triggered when something yanked on the lines. Then we'd get on our snowmobiles and ride around like crazed hillbillies, trying to lose each other off the backs of the things, while looking around at the traps from time to time in case a fish bit and triggered the flags to go up.

Then, when we were bored with the whole experience, or tired of racing around the ice on our Ski-doos, or half frozen to death, we'd take whatever fish we'd caught, and go home.

The whole process, from drilling the holes to being bored and cold enough to want to go home, took about 2 hours.

(Hey, it's COLD in Maine. I bet most of you couldn't handle much more than a couple of hours on a frozen lake in northern Maine in February. Mr. Beer & Hockey excluded, probably. See, he's Canadian. The rest of you go ahead, try it. See how long it takes you - be it the cold or boredom, something will make you regret being born, as the wind wipes your facial features clean off.)

Then the dead fish would stare out of the freezer at us every time we opened it - until such time as we got sick of looking at them and tossed them. I don't remember eating them. But then, I probably didn't stick around if I knew we were having fish...the smell of gutted fish in the kitchen used to put me off eating and I'd wander over to my friend Jay's house, where something not so nauseating was being served. Like poo on a stick, for example.

Random thought: D'you know what doesn't go together? It's jelly belly sours and tomato juice don't go together.