At ADS last year we were head down and tail up with statistical profiling of churches, finance companies, the 2010 Australian election, the ABS monthly unemployment survey and several private schools.
By last November (or Movember as you may be able to detect from my dreadful moustache at right) I finally escaped to Anglers Rest in Victoria, for a spot of fly fishing for trout. Sort of.
You see, my beloved spouse had been expecting our number two son in January (see Lumix review in I love gadgets), so I was being allowed out for the last fishing trip before parental duties interceded.
We’re talking babies, bodily fluids and poo here. Not to mention a displaced three year old mewling for attention and my visiting in laws begging for the keys to my cellar. Or was it the other way around?
On the work front, I had been overdue to talk business development, statistics, web pages, databases, browser technology and demographic mapping with three colleagues from around the country and the only way I could do any fly fishing for trout was to blend the two.
The blending part was not so hard, really. As I try to explain to my Australian Financial Review editors regularly, there’s a lot of overlap between statistics, election profiles, good journalism and fly fishing.
Think greedy, slippery, libidinous creatures with brains the size of peas and of course you’ll know that I’m writing about trout rather than politicians.
It’s the same with the stats – you do a profile, you get an obvious result, you dig down deeper, find another layer of meaning and hopefully causality and then … and then … your tired old brain runs out of puff.
But after a day flicking a fly line over the magic trout waters meandering past Anglers Rest, I rediscover the synapses linking politics, economics demographics, attitudes and behaviour.
This is the theory at least.
For our ADS statistical summer summit, we all stayed at Donald Beveridge’s Bundara Cabins, cooking with Helen Packers’ borrowed wok from The Willows and getting politely liquored up at the Blue Duck Inn, a short zig zag of a walk home from just down the road.
But anyone thinking I downplay the very serious role of work in the hectic ADS schedule should think again.
We actually managed to work out out the statistical and mapping details of our new profile package for the Financial Review, starting with the New South Wales profile then a few months away.
The whole process was so productive work wise, we decided to get together again in March to finalise our unemployment and education modelling and put the finishing touches to the New South Wales maps and statistical analysis. 
The trip was also about mateship and bonding and talking through the normal communications problems you get when four blokes in four different locations exchange some pretty big files and somewhat related ideas through the web. ‘Oh, is that what you meant?’ was the general thrust of more than one conversation.
But the natural environment and the fishing was sublime. And the trout were bigger and more aggressive than they’d ever been.
I landed four nice sized trout from one pool on four different flies, both on the surface and under it.
On the second trip, we found the bigger fish were already moving upstream on their spawning run, in sizable pods or schools and they tended to have loving on their minds. It was like a high school prom night, with the little buggers not in the spot they were supposed to be, but pairing up and moving fast to get away from teacher’s prying eyes.
We’d walk for an hour or more sometimes, without spotting a trout where you’d expect to find them, and then, around the corner, in a quieter pool, there they’d be – 20 of them – looking for a sexy spot of gravel, or finding it and afterwards quickly grabbing a bite to eat in the form of a floating grasshopper, while bumping away competitors. Like I said, a bit like our old high school dances.
To be honest, I felt a bit of an intruder interrupting their lovemaking. But I did.
Forty years working in politics, statistical profiling and in the media has inured me to finer feelings like respect for privacy or any semblance of sensitivity to the needs of others.
There has to be some upside.