You may not be aware, but it’s been a wonderful year for grouse. Extraordinary. Never seen a season like it. Five invitations I’ve had, and each one of them to a well stocked moor, and each moor with a jolly nice shoot hut and ample liquid supplies. None that one indulges of course.
“Can’t, driving, old boy”
“Really? You should get a driver old son, I don’t know how I’d get by without mine”
Pah. Bloody estate agents. What have we come to, with estate agents paddling across grouse moors; and having drivers, for goodness sake. Rum lot, probably spend the day lotting the moor up into suitable parcels for development. But I have to admit this one could shoot.
He had arrived in a white gold lined Range Rover Sport at 9.25am, just in time for the instructions, his chap handing him all the kit out of the back. All new and shiny of course, and a triumph of cheque book over taste. Orange socks as well. Dash it all. What is matter with blue or red, I ask you, orange! The final twist was from the host and moor owner, one of those tenth generation old colonel types who breed so well in the north, who looked at the socks and the white Rangy and the tweedy man unzipping the Purdeys and through the upper lip caterpillar snorted “Bloody bankers”.
I pointed out that he was not a cutting edge professional such as yours truly, but it was obvious that such distinctions of class were lost on our host, who said “It’ll be traffic wardens next” and marched off to the beaters, a finer class of chap altogther.
The estate agent was not phased by any of these matters and proudly told us he was about to pull off the property deal of the year and brandished two mobile phones at us.
“Better not let the Colonel see that” one of our team said, seared by the Colonel’s reaction to his i-phone going off in mid-drive the previous year; “Lead shot direct to the bottom would be less painful”.
“Nah, this is the big one, I’m not losing the deal or the day. Move with the times mate, this is business. In’it?”
We went to our pegs and business commenced. It really was a superb day, lots of the little g-birds and very challenging. I did notice our Two Phoned new friend had his head at funny angles at various times between drives and there was a lot of maneuverings between pockets, but also that the grouse near him were coming down; he certainly had a good eye. But so, I noticed, did the Colonel, who was waving the old eyebrows in his direction at frequent intervals.
On the 3rd drive Two Phones and I were not in butts, but in grassy tussocks in a shallow valley. The whistle sounded to warn us to pay attention to the start of proceedings, but now Two Phones was in serious action, Nokia’s fully deployed, one in each hand, gun tucked under his arm. And I could see what he could not, which was a fully primed British Army ex-Colonel advancing at fast march from the rear.
“You! You! What the devil are you doing? Damn it sir, the drive is underway.”
Not easy to deal with this sort of rear attack when fully conversational on two mobiles, but the shrug and the toss of the head was not the best calculated response.
The Colonel stepped it up “Mobile telephones are forbidden on this shoot. Forbidden, not allowed, I have never…”
What he had never we shall never either, because his attention had been distracted by a brace of grouse approaching from the left. I think we all saw them at once, I began to raise my gun, but old Two Phones in one swift manoeuvre dropped both phones, applied Purdey to upper hip, fired both barrels, ignored two grouse crashing to the ground, and retrieved both phones: “Sorry mate, bit of action on the other line.”
The Colonel swerved at this point and went rather pale. As he passed I said, unable to think of any words that exactly fitted the situation “Lovely drive, Colonel”
He paused, with the look of a man who is contemplating an immediate sale of the ancestral lands, snorting so hard the upper lip fungus blew around like a palm tree in a hurricane.
“I should send him home; but the [military term deleted] bugger is too good for that.”
And so it did prove. By lunch our hero was sitting next to the Colonel and the body language strongly suggested the Colonel was about to invest in real estate in a big way. And that there was a gold Sports Rangy on order to replace the white one.
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