Nature & Animals Quote by Norman MacCaig

Nostalgia gets undercut here with a dry Scottish shrug: the problem isn’t that the rivers have changed, but that the whole meaning of being there has. “I used to fish the Border rivers” opens like a pastoral postcard, then swerves into the modern humiliation of “queue up for a shot” - a phrase that makes leisure sound like a ration line. MacCaig’s genius is in how casually he lets bureaucracy invade the landscape. The river is still a river, but access to it has been reorganized into turns, tickets, and sanctioned moments. Nature, in other words, has been processed.

The subtext is less about angling than about ownership and belonging. The Border rivers sit in a region where land and water rights have long been tangled up with class and custom; “queue” implies not just crowds but regulation, commercialization, and the quiet assertion that the place no longer meets you as an individual. A “shot” is telling, too: it’s not a day, not a drift, not time - it’s a single attempt. Experience becomes a unit you purchase or earn, then consume.

“I can’t stand that” lands as a refusal, not a complaint. MacCaig isn’t romanticizing solitude for its own sake; he’s rejecting the conversion of a private ritual into a managed public event. The line carries his larger poetic posture: skeptical of systems, loyal to immediate perception, and faintly amused that modern life can even find a way to standardize a river.