I woke up this Christmas morning dreaming of a 100 lb salmon. It wasn’t actually me who encountered the fish, but someone else. This man told me that he had encountered a true 100lb salmon, and had then lost it. He had a number of blurred photographs showing what appeared to be a humungous fish, nearly the size of a small shark. By a clever sleight of the unconscious, I then transferred this story onto me, and the next thing I knew, I was playing this enormous fish, and shouting to my friend, Michael Mann, that he must take a photograph of it when next it leaped. Thus go wish fulfilment fantasies. I had a lovely time fantasising about playing the fish, but didn’t actually have the metaphorical balls to land it. It wasn’t really my fish for a start, bearing in mind that I had seconded it from another - okay, let’s face it - aspect of myself. One might probably call this the ‘wannabe’ aspect.

I did once catch a 47 lb salmon on the Lochy, whilst conducting out-of-season broodstock fishing for the hatchery. The fish took me nearly an hour to get into the net, an event both witnessed and aided by fellow fisherman Humphrey Stone, who had the good sense and presence of mind to insist we measure the fish three times. So I do know what it feels like to have a mammoth fish on the end of one’s line, and then let it go. Being a sometime writer about dreams [The Watkins Dictionary of Dreams 2007], it also occurred to me that something must have triggered the dream. Then I remembered that at Christmas Eve dinner at Michael Mann’s house, I had briefly seen a book about super-large salmon - thus both his and the salmon’s appearance in my dream.

Fish, in dreams, also tend to have mystical connotations, and Michael and I had had a discussion, that same evening, about Ramesh Balsekar’s book, Enlightened States, and we had also read a number of poems to the room-at-large, which included Eliot’s Four Quartets and The Magi, Edward Thomas’s Roads, and Rumi’s quite extraordinary poem which starts ‘What can be done, O Believers, as I do not recognise myself…’. Add to that a visit to Midnight Mass in Tisbury Church, and it’s hardly surprising that my dream thoughts had veered towards the mystical. What was wonderful about Rumi’s poem was that it so perfectly echoed the way I feel about God. Namely that all dogmas are misleading - all theology flawed - all religions expedient. God, as Rumi says in another of his poems, is only in the heart ['Finally, I looked into my own heart and there I saw Him; He was nowhere else.']. This tallies perfectly with my own religious convictions, that may be summed up in four simple words: ‘There is only God’. All the paraphernalia and brouhaha of organised religion seems to me a perfect way of distancing oneself from God. The Midnight Mass service was all very well, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But God is found in the heart and nowhere else. One doesn’t need church services to conjure him up. One simply needs to love and thank him. And my great fish, of course, was God.

I’ve just had a sales update on The Nostradamus Prophecies, and it appears that we have already breeched the 100,000 sales mark worldwide. Frankly, I’m delighted, as most of my foreign publishers [including the US] have yet to bring out their versions of my book, and this will no doubt serve as welcome encouragement! Buoyed up by the good sales - in what has surely been a very difficult period for publishers - my UK publisher, Atlantic, has just bought number two in the trilogy, and, in consequence, I’m really looking forward to working with the same team that has made such a signal success of the first novel. As far as my writing goes, I’m just putting the finishing touches to two non-fiction books, and then I shall be starting the third novel in my trilogy in the New Year. Trepidation mixed with excitement - the usual authorial equation, in other words.

Sad news on another front, with the death of my great friend, Tom Baring. I met Tommy in 1976, when he was running Stourhead Polo club, and, despite an age difference of 26 years, we soon became firm friends. Tommy had a wonderful eye for both a painting and a horse, and he was also deeply fascinated by the Cathars and their odd footnote in history. I remember numerous trips to Montsegur, 3000 foot high up in the Pyrenees, with Tommy standing below the famous pog, contentedly pointing out the spot from which some of the Perfects were forced to jump, and also the place where 220 of their remaining companions were burned en masse for refusing to renounce their faith. Another of Tommy’s passions was 1930s and 1940s jazz and musicals. It took very little effort indeed to encourage him to play his choice collection of 78 rpm records on his vintage player. I remember one particular evening, many years ago, in which with John Fowles and his wife Elizabeth, Tommy and I, capered maniacally around his drawing room carpet to the Boswell Sisters’ 1932 version of Sammy Fain and Joe Young’s ‘Was that the human thing to do‘. Tommy had had an American mother, Virginia Ryan, and he must have derived his instinctive knowledge of Transatlantic mores from her, because he was always very much at home on both sides of the Ocean. In many ways Tommy twinned an old world elegance and sophistication with a very up to date wit - it was an endearing equation. So this is by way of being a far too short appreciation and a far too truncated tribute to a very special man, whose friendship I valued, whose companionship I cherished, and who always made me laugh. Friendship is a precious thing, and I shall miss him.