ArbDogs? Pics!

[Mick Dempsey]

1 hour ago, AHPP said:

Have you had much to do with shooting, Mick?

I used to look after a release pen for a couple of years when I was 16/17, went beating every Saturday for a few years. I actually wanted to be a gamekeeper, till I realised the servile nature of it.

Kept ferrets etc.

I was mostly used as a stop on pheasant drives, because of my age.

In West Sussex we have ‘ghylls’ streams with steep banks either side wooded with overstood hornbeam coppice.

Anyway me and another kid were stopping on the top of the banks and a pheasant flew over, the gun (stood at the bottom of the ghyll next to the stream) followed it and fired, catching the other kid in the face with a half dozen pellets.

The gun (an upper middle class sort) was devastated, never really recovered, went round to see the parents, chucked his gun away etc. the kid carried the pellets for years, the docs not deeming it safe to retrieve them.

I didn’t think too much of it at first, I actually envied the attention he got, but over the next few years I grew to be scared, not so much of shotguns, but me making a similar mistake with one, and I never wanted one.

 

Pheasant shooting? Meh, not all that sporting imo, but no real objection. 

 

 

Edited 18 hours ago by Mick Dempsey

[Mick Dempsey]

By way of an addendum.

 

There’s a saying I often use when I’m talking to some unfortunate employee about why I’m making some seemingly over the top safety belt & braces approach to a back leaner over a property or the like.

 

All the pheasants ever bred, will not make up for one man dead.

[AHPP]

I'm a rifle shooter, rubbish with shotguns and not massively interested in shooting driven game. I'll probably have a go on beaters' day to say I've done it and to see it from the other side though. I've only been beating a handful of times but getting into it because my mate goes, it gets me out of the house and it's good for the dog. Still learning the tactics but I get used for what I think is a stop? Like if a long wood is being driven the long way, I'll be thirty yards outside the wood steering the sideways escapers back in or down the valley.

 

On a different sombre note, after today going so well I thought to myself, "I know who'd love to hear of this triumph: Ray."

Ray's dead. Keen countryman, lived really well, kept really fit. Punished by a presumably vegetarian god for the amount of meat he produced with bladder cancer. Went from 100 to 5 in a very short time and died gasping for breath sat down. 

Edited 14 hours ago by AHPP

[Mick Dempsey]

Sorry to hear about your mate Alex.

[AHPP]

Thanks but it's not a particularly sad thing as these things go. He had people looking out for him and it didn't drag on as long as it could have. I urged him to not bother with chemo (or frankly anything) and just live and die as fast as possible. I had the good grace to not say I told you so.

 

He had a fabulously direct way of speaking that will amuse me forever.

"I'm not looking forward to this test tomorrow. They're going to shove something up my dick."

 

A few people on here knew him. I'll raise a glass to him tonight.

Edited 17 hours ago by AHPP