My big grouse about the Glorious 12th

THINK about it. If you were a small brown bird looking for a quiet life, would you take off and fly over a line of people trying to blast your head off when you could walk quietly round them?

Or through them if it comes to that? Only the frightfully unsporting would shoot a walking grouse, and whatever the double-barrelled British shooters packing the moors in August are - insert your own quotes here - they aren’t unsporting.

The grouse, they point out, can fly approximately as fast as Concorde. Shooting it down takes skill and concentration. It’s a fair contest, with those grouse that survive birds of prey, other predators, ticks and worms in order to be shot, worth about 14 million a year to the economy.

Most years, the shooters are happy to make their contribution and take a chance. Not for them the charade of slaughtering hand-reared pheasants where the overfed birds have to be coaxed or chivvied into the air. Shooters, of nationalities other than British obviously, have also been known to blooter them on the ground, and hundreds might be buried - pheasants, not Italian "sportsmen" - after a splendid day’s slaughter because there is no market for them.

No, grouse get into the spirit of the thing, even if the so-called Glorious Twelfth is one of the most over-hyped dates in the calendar, with as much preview space given to this pastime of a few thousand people as to a Scottish international football match, although, come to think of it, the result is as predictable: Shotgun Pellets 6, Grouse 0.

Even the end result is discussed interminably - although if cooks say that game should be well hung for best results, why the rush to get the first grouse shot on to a restaurant menu that day?

Search me. I’m not against skilful shooting, only the hype that this branch of it seems to attract for no good reason. I could even say that some of my friends are grouse-shooters, but there is a limit to how much anyone can admit.

GOOD news yesterday that Britain was enjoying a respite from the searing temperatures of the past couple of weeks. That would be the searing temperature of 19C we experienced in our east coast haven on Sunday with two glimpses of sun, each lasting for about ten minutes, while the rest of Britain broiled, including the record 38.1C recorded at Gravesend in Kent. The previous day, Galashiels recorded 32.7C while our town temperature soared to about 23C.

Put another way, was 19C in our own garden preferable to fighting for space, ice-cream and toilets with 100,000 others on Brighton beach? Answers on a postcard.

ANOTHER bonus of cooler weather than the rest of the known world is that we are still speaking to each other. Experts in the art of announcing the obvious have decided that, rather like Edinburgh and its various festivals, hot weather makes people more irritable.

A specialist counsellor with Relate said: "When you are hot you feel more impatient and what might normally be a minor issue will get blown out of all proportion."

So hot weather joins a list that already includes family holidays, non-family holidays, Christmas, New Year, the teenage years, babies, traffic, job, no job and politics where a minor issue can acquire a life of its own out all proportion to its importance. It’s known as life.

FAME at last - mention in a book. My friend Neil Griffiths, raiser of hundreds of thousands of pounds for the welfare of wartime Gurkhas by improbable walks and cycle rides, has written an entertaining book about one of his fine efforts - Gurkha Reiver - Walking the Southern Upland Way (Cualann, 6 Corpach Drive, Dunfermline, 10.99).

In his tale of how one unfit writer walked 340 kilometres of tough terrain in just over eight days with four super-fit Gurkhas, Griffiths pulls no punches. There is at least one bed and breakfast on the route he can never return to and one British Legion - he is also editor of Scottish Legion News - hall where his name will not be first on any future guest list.

But his story fairly gallops along, rather like his four colleagues and, self-deprecating though he is, Griffiths himself as the ups, downs, flat patches and wonderful views of the Southern Upland Way come alive.

Personally, being likened to Private Fraser as a prophet of doom before his walk started, with a second mention for missing the final stretch to Cockburnspath, might not be everyone’s idea of fame, but I’m glad to help his efforts.

His heart is in the right place - and I’ve every intention of ensuring that so are several other parts soon after the next time we meet.