Shooting Times & Country Magazine
It’s just not cricket
Richard Negus looks back on the start of the season. It was 25°C and not a shot was fired but everything was right with the world
Iparked my truck under some towering ash trees, the sun still high above their branches. The car radio was tuned into the test match. While the commentators prattled away, foretelling of an English victory over India, my eyes strayed to the vehicle’s thermometer, which registered 25°C.
I watched the yachts as they made their way up and down the Alde, only their sails visible, hulls hidden from view by the sea wall. These are not the conditions, sounds nor sights you usually associate with stepping on to the foreshore in pursuit of wildfowl. But this was no regular day; this was the first day of the new season.
The opening day of the wildfowling season is not famed for bulging game bags nor memorable shots. Early September is cricket, ice cream, your son trying on an oversized school uniform. Nevertheless, I waited in my vehicle, for the arrival of my friends Darren Sizer and Ian Lange, if not with expectation with some hope of a shot at a teal, which I had seen feeding on a splash nearby the week before.
A bumping behind my seat reminded me that Mabel, my young cocker spaniel, felt she had spent sufficient time in her travelling crate. Time to go.
Darren pulled up in his battered van, Ian grinning in the passenger seat. Each dent and crumple on the dirty blue Vauxhall told of an inadvertent meeting with a Suffolk laneside hedge or bank as its driver scanned the skies for geese. Guns in slips, game bags, rucksacks and cartridge belts were pulled out of the backs of our respective vehicles. Much of our kit was still daubed with last season’s all-pervading mud.
Extravagance
To our amusement, Darren had invested in a pair of sparkling new waterproof leggings, the evident cheapness of which contrasted considerably with the extravagance of my coat. My new garment, a Schöffel Ptarmigan Pro, costs an eye-watering £599.95. The Editor sent me this pristine “most technically advanced shooting jacket” to trial out wildfowling, beating and hedgelaying for a future article.
New clothing forgotten, we gathered our kit and put our dogs on leads so that we
26 • SHOOTING TIMES & COUNTRY MAGAZINE could make our way to the river through a vast open field inhabited by horses, many with foals at foot. To our left, the alluvial grassland played host to grazing sheep, incongruouslooking alpacas and one enormous, dark chocolate-coloured hare.
The sun, though lower in the sky, continued to spread a holiday warmth. Hosts of midges and
of
new