My fly box has become a matter of great personal shame and I would be mortified if you, or anyone else, were to look inside it. Mercifully, there is little chance of that happening because it tends to be so well hidden that nobody is likely to come across it. Half of the time I have no idea where the thing is myself!

I have become deeply envious of my fishing buddies who, within a matter of seconds, can lay their hands on exactly the pattern they want. The right fly is there and in the right size. They know where to look for it because each fly is exactly where it is supposed to be. There is not a single box either, but several. One is devoted exclusively to dries, another to nymphs, and yet another to streamers and so on. The contents of boxes like these bring to mind regiments on parade: every fly is well drilled and standing in line. They are organised with such military precision that when I look at flies in a box like this I must stifle a spontaneous urge to salute. 

If you were to lift the lid of one of these boxes box to examine, say,  rows of gleaming perdigon nymphs, they would look as pretty as gems in a jewellers cabinet and making a selection would feel like you were hovering your hand over that box of milk chocolates that you were given for Christmas. Forget the trout! Given half a chance I could ingest the contents of a fly box like that myself! 

Sadly, my own fly collection does not remotely measure up. To picture it just think of a battlefield. There are casualties everywhere. The dries and emergers and streamers and everything else are just tangled together or bundled into compartments without rhyme or reason. If you pick out a woolly bugger the chances are there will be a bunch of  little nymphs clinging on for dear life like shipwrecked sailors scrambling onto floating debris. My dishevelled motley crew of flies are the antithesis of those parade ground troops that fill the boxes of my fly fishing friends.

Apart from the inconvenience of wasting time in finding a fly on the riverside, the chaos of this fly box has another disadvantage. It is increasingly becoming home to a collection of ancient and decrepit flies that I know I will never actually use but may have some ridiculous sentimental value. It is a retirement home for flies gifted by friends. Throwing these things away feels like an act of betrayal. To be honest, there are also plenty of crap flies in there of my own tying and that also never get to see the light of day. A consequence of never actually using lousy flies is that their numbers cannot be reduced by bankside trees or submerged snags which are, of course, the ultimate repository of nearly all fishing flies. It would appear that I have unwittingly unleashed a subverted form of natural selection on the patterns in my fly box which ensures that it is the fittest that are eliminated and what remains are plethora of useless, entitled, self-serving freeloaders that have been living there rent free for as long as I can remember. An appalling truth has dawned on me: I am the owner of the fly box equivalent of the House of Lords!

What excuse do I have for my failure to get a grip on this? None really. The best that I can manage is that, yielding to a kind of fatalism, I have surrendered to a future determined by the second law of thermodynamics that tells us, more or less, that given enough time, everything in the whole universe reverts to disorder eventually. Why should my fly box be any different? If anything, I am helping out by speeding things along a little!

As excuses go, this really doesn´t cut the mustard. I realise that. It is time to face facts. I need to up my game. I´m done being shamed on the riverbank and I´m done with extracting 20 flies simultaneously when I just want to pick out one! 

The time has clearly arrived to welcome a new dawn of order and rigour! I can picture my revamped fly box of the future. I can visualise compartments for delicate dries and others for nymphs. A place for everything and everything in its place! The mayflies will be with their mayfly brethren and the stoneflies would snuggle together with the other stoneflies and so too would the caddis flies, nymphs, buzzers and all the rest of them. They will be as thoughtfully segregated as Noah would have insisted his animals should be as they were marched up the ramp and onto his arc. He would have been the first to insist that the lions should have been carefully sectioned off from the zebras, for obvious reasons. 

So the time has come to instil order and to overcome chaos. The box needs sorting. There is no time to lose! 

Only one obstacle stands in my way.

I don’t have even the foggiest notion of where the damn thing is!

I am deeply ashamed of this section of my fly box. Many of the flies here have fallen apart or should have been thrown away yonks ago. My fly box was upstairs in my man cave when I put together the post and, lazily, I browsed the internet for images rather than to go upstairs and mooch around. I entered “untidy flies in fly box” into a search engine and nothing came remotely close to shameful level of disorder that I have achieved!