A girls' guide to organising a shoot

We have had a girls’ shoot. The keeper went quite potty at the prospect and started making bad jokes about birds, which hinged on the word "over" as in bird over, under and over and leg over. It was thigh slappingly funny until you take into consideration the fact that your 16-year-old daughter is in the general frame and the keeper is unmarried and lusty. But we persevered.

It had been one of her friend’s ideas. Her father runs a shoot up in Aberdeenshire and found a day when the birds needed knocking in from the outlying hills and bogs for a big day later in the week. So we pitched up at the bothy, the four girls aged from 16 to 24 (so hardly all girls but never mind), to find one gun missing because she had gone to the dentist and her father had forgotten to tell her there was no petrol in the car. The invited boys included a charming Frenchman whom I had met several years ago as a boy in the real sense of the word, but who now appears to be running the sugar futures market in Lebanon. He had nipped up for the day from London: "ees very nice to travel" - you bet. Beats a Saturday morning expedition to Tesco.

So the idea was to push in the birds from the higher ground around the marches and over the girls and their friends armed with 20-bores, a 12 and a 16 (useless guns: no-one else ever has 16 cartridges if you run out, but 20s have become rather fashionable). The girls wore fetching cord or tweed knickerbockers, flat caps of the sort you see in unlikely "countrywear" catalogues, although the hostess elected to go for a Russian Army-style wool-lined bonnet - less hammer and sickle.

It was decreed for safety sake that there would be no shooting of ground game, rabbits or hares, although it would be OK to have a go at a fox, whereupon the keeper said absolutely not. I am not sure he would have made the same distinction had he had a party of similarly aged boys on the shoot, but "weemin" are a different matter. I can only guess that more women don’t shoot simply because they are not asked or encouraged to, and anyway feel uncomfortable showing off their prowess in front of men who might laugh - as they do.

Certainly the late Lady Sopwith, as in Camel, used to hold a regular women-only shoot. She ensured no man would have the chance to comment by insisting on female beaters. I think it’s more than likely that once women have tried it and found they can do it, they find it a monumentally expensive waste of time and would prefer to read the Booker list than freeze to death in a neep field, unless they are working a dog or fancy one of the guns.

Anyway I am happy to say that no-one seemed out to impress anyone on the girls’ shoot. My daughter dropped a high crossing cock pheasant coming right to left at 45 degrees and I can only suppose she simply forgot everything she had been taught by her father. I made all the right noises without going over the top - well done, darling, first pheasant - which apparently it wasn’t and I should have known that, as I was there when she got her first one last year. (I still don’t remember.)

But we had a go at the ducks, which proved a complete disaster because they flew the wrong way, which was the highlight of the day, watching parents leaping up and down waving their arms as the birds pushed off up wind. "Don’t you know ducks take off into the wind, daddy?" Flounce, flounce. But the bag, which we will simply say got into double figures, included one astonishingly high duck and a fast feral pigeon. But mercifully no leg overs and everyone is up for a repeat performance in January.