How – for the hundredth time – does Paul Selman account for those miraculous ‘mountains’ suddenly becoming a ‘power station’ after insisting ‘one million per cent’ for 25 YEARS that there were ‘mountains’ in the background? (It’s not as if he ever saw the pics!)

Paul has addressed virtually NOTHING in this debate; all he has done is shout ‘rubbish!’ at regular intervals and give us all ‘one million per cent’ assurances. Of course, Eddie Benham has proved to the world that they’re nothing of the kind! Eddie has revealed Paul’s numerous bombastic decrees as nonsense – time after time. Just about everything Eddie has said in all of this is sourced and dated – putting Paul Selman right on more than a few occasions. 

The Cliff ‘n’ Ed Camp has extensive backing from a good number of good men with nothing to gain, but Paul is clearly lacking support – other than from ‘Jamie’ on the other side of Planet Earth and, consequently, somewhat trickier to ‘do business with’. Despite one or two soothing comments on FM in Jamie’s favour, I have no faith in the Toronto connection: none at all. Why is this?

It’s because anything and everything Jamie has to say is rendered null and void by Paul Selman’s ‘one million per cent’ 25 year old mountains decree suddenly changing to a ‘one million per cent’ power station decree. I wish posters here would take this on board.

What’s wrong with Paul bringing in his fellow members from the Carp Society Steering Committee? Crikey, they were actually instrumental in declaring the carp Canadian! Surely there’s no need to rely on someone in Toronto when he has a host of Carp Society celebrities just down the road: what more could he want? 

 

In the last 24hrs Jamie blogged massively ….then deleted the whole thing! Why, I wonder. It’s certainly a shame that he did because there was so much stuff there and now we’ve lost it all forever (You couldn’t persuade him to put it back up, could you, Paul?)

 

The genuinely inquisitive will not forget that this scandal is predicated – first and foremost – on the ‘mountains’ issue. Without this, nothing else matters effectively. Indeed, all the (deliberate) obfuscation – lampreys, foreign plants, white shorts, primitive tackle ad nauseum are actually quite irrelevant. 

 

Eddie and I are as sure as it is possible to be that Robin Monday innocently misinterpreted what Martin Gay said. To Robin’s (undoubted) question: ‘Did you catch them while on holiday?’ we would put money on Martin smiling a silly smile and replying ‘Yes, I did catch them while I was on holiday!’ i.e. on holiday from work. We knew him that well. We believe Robin failed to see the play on words and dutifully reported back to his Carp Society colleagues.

Eager to ‘prove’ Martin had caught the fish in British Columbia,  Robin reported something ‘not quite right’ about the untouched photos which Martin had shown him; is this not why Robin described only a “…notice-board….but the background didn’t look very English”

See the reticence?

Knowing Martin would never be publishing the untouched pictures, we were told that the photos featured mountains and once they had successfully inculcated this into the minds of the nation’s carp anglers there was no way out for Robin Monday!    

 

This latest investigation has brought forth some illuminating comments from Paul and one need not be Sigmund Freud to put two and two together. 

 

Read this from Paul Selman:

“Cliff, its quite simple really. Martin always maintained again and again in private and public he went to British Columbia to stay with his relatives. You state that also in your article above. He actually stayed with his relatives who have always lived in Ontario Perhaps he was trying to protect those commons from the stampede of carp anglers going out there to catch them? Do you not find it odd: 

1. Why no one else in England has ever found this water when it can be seen from a road?  (How dare an all-rounder catch such a monster from right under our noses?)

2. That it only contained common carp. I have fished 70 odd UK waters all over and all contained at least a few mirrors? (One of my articles clearly shows a mirror carp) 

3. That he would go to such a secret water dressed as a summer tourist, white shorts and all?  (How dare a non-carp specialist go fishing without the statutory camo-clobber and make the headlines with such a huge fish?) 

4. That his fishing equipment was rather basic and primitive?  (How dare he catch such a record-breaking whacker bigger than anything we’ve ever caught and without the need for a 3-rod fishing station and a barrow-load of technology?)

5. That his photographs were taken by his wife. If you were trying to keep the water secret from other anglers why would you take your wife? (How dare a woman be his only witness?) 

6. Why would you block out the background if it just had a fence, a bit of grass and an unreadable notice? Just curious!” (No response necessary here: it’s perfectly obvious and Paul knows it)

 

Can I assume readers  share my astonishment at his opening statement? I almost feel the need to write nothing rather than dignify such rubbish. Selman is telling me that my friend of 35 years was setting me and other friends up over a period of many years! Have readers ever read anything more absurd? 

But back to Freudy stuff…the first five of his points here are, I believe, tantamount to an explanation of precisely why the ‘mountains’ story was introduced and why Martin’s reputation was rubbished – the Carp Society simply couldn’t bear being kept in the dark: they were the CARP SOCIETY after all. How dare he catch the heaviest common carp ever recorded in Britain on two grains of sweetcorn and from a water unknown to us ?

 

I believe those protestations from Paul tells us all we need to know.