Alastair Robertson: Shooting and fishing

We have arrived once again, in this household, at the quinquennial application for contiguous firearms and shotgun certificates. For those who have never seen or heard the word, let alone uttered it, the dictionary meaning of contiguous is: touching, adjoining or neighbouring.

I cannot believe it is a word used by anyone other than civil servants and the police. In the case of firearms and shotgun certificates it means that the two separate documents start on the same date and finish on the same date. Applying for both at the same time is one of the few occasions on which the law abiding citizen is rewarded for saving the state time and money. They very decently knock something off the full price of two seperate certificates – a state-aided "bogof".

About three weeks after the arrival of the application forms my friendly neighbourhood firearms officer telephones, knowing I have not even begun to fill them in, to arrange a visit and pick up the paperwork.

In the meantime I need to have found at least two people who are prepared, without financial inducement (very important) to declare that I am a superlative human being, safe and sensible around women and dogs and that they know of no reason why I should not be granted a licence for a small bazooka and a pair of Purdeys. They must then sign their name a total of, I think, four times including endorsing a set of hideous ID photos taken in Tesco. And this is just for the firearms certificate. The shotgun certificate is not as bad, but still needs four photos and the signature of a JP, doctor or person of similar standing such as, heaven help us, that byword of probity, an MP.

The firearms officer, now a retired bobby, will then arrive to drink a great deal of coffee, go through the forms and discover I have managed to tick the box admitting to a history of alcohol and drug abuse.

We must then inspect the guns in their "British Standards Approved lockfast steel cabinets" which is a terrible carry on because I cannot usually find the keys and cannot ask my wife, who does not have a certificate, and is therefore not supposed to know where they are kept or in which jacket pocket I have carefully hidden them so that no one, not even I, can find them.

Now while all this is very tiresome and could probably be handled better it seems to have the desired effect. No one in the Scottish government knows of any recent statistics relating to the number of criminal offences involving a legally held shotgun or rifle. So perhaps it's worth it after all.

This article was originally published in The Scotsman Magazine on Saturday 23 October 2010.