Shooting and Fishing: Consequently the perfidious English declared we would need a referendum

After a couple of years’ forgetting to invite me to shoot, my little brother woke up two weeks ago and asked if I would like to be his guest at the syndicate he helps run in Hampshire.

After making the usual complaint that I thought only hedge fund managers were allowed to shoot in Hampshire, I graciously accepted. Rather than take a gun on the plane he agreed to lend me his son’s 12 bore, which had come second-hand from a local gunsmith for £350.

It had been made, he said, by some little-known Spanish maker. This turned out to be Pedro Arrizabalaga, who if you look him up is not just “some” Spanish gun maker, but one of the best from the Basque region, the heartland of Spanish gun making.

So it rather looks as if he had unwittingly got himself a bargain.

When we turned up, nine guns in all, it transpired that five of us either lived in Scotland, worked in Scotland or had been born in Scotland. Consequently the perfidious English declared we would need a referendum.

The Scots being in the majority would win it, secede from the day’s proceedings and leave the English minority to get on with the shooting. This is half the point, well almost half the point, of a day’s shooting: meeting people you might not ever meet in other circumstances.

Apart from my brother I knew two others vaguely and the rest not at all, yet the day was, as they say, good craic and made all the more so thanks to the referendum “row” as a topic of universal interest. Even the English were showing interest. Given the fact that seven of the nine guns were in investment or finance of some sort, it was not surprising to find that no one could see the point of an independent Scotland, which would cost everyone huge sums of money and frightful anguish for years to come, all in the name of “self- determination”.

The general view, even among the English, was that the First Minister was clearly head and shoulders above any other Scottish politician – the rest were haltingly dull and sounded like policemen appealing for witnesses.

The PG Wodehouse expert (there is always one) gleefully trotted out the line: “It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.” Other than that it was a completely cloudless, sunny day.

The birds flew astonishingly high over the chalk down valleys, an experimental drive was declared, even by the guests, to be a disaster but worth trying.

My own shooting was erratic, but just about excusable and I managed to go through Gatwick security on the way home with five forgotten cartridges in my shooting jacket. Oops.