What a different environment it is out there now. It is with great sadness that I have lost one of my indulgences — spending an hour or two just browsing an aquatic store at my leisure. Now it’s a case of queueing for my place on the conveyor before I’m carted unidirectionally around the fish house, prompted to move along by the audible throat clearing and shuffling behind me. I had taken aquatic stores for granted. Never again will I do so.

My happy experiences now have been mostly vicarious. I’ve even been revisiting old shop tour videos, just to get my fix of being there, in the moment.

As such, it’s been a hard month editorially. It seems that in absence of a real fishy fix, I’ve been trying to stick my fingers into all the fishkeeping pies at once. That’s why this month’s spread of content is a little more eclectic than usual, I was trying to sample all the things I miss. Absence really does make the heart grow fonder.

Nathan Hill, Editor