Never complain

As I drove through Carmarthenshire, it started to strike me as being a little odd that there were no signs for the Welsh Game Fair. I doublechecked the postcode and concluded I was heading in the right direction. “Perhaps it’s just a bit smaller than the Game Fair at Ragley,” I reasoned as fields of sheep passed by my window. When I arrived, or at least when my satnav told me I had, it seemed pretty clear that something was wrong. A quick Google search confirmed that things were very wrong indeed. I was at the former site of the Game Fair in Wales — three and a half hours away from its new location in Bangor. I had just 25 minutes until I was due to be on stage talking about Shooting Times.

It was raining hard and I sat there in a farm gateway, listening to the radio. A 98-year-old who had served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) with HM The Queen was being interviewed. “‘Never complain’ — that was her motto,” the ATS veteran said to the presenter, cheerfully. I turned the car round and headed back to London, thinking about what a remarkable lady Her Majesty was. Patrick Galbraith, Editor

Follow Patrick on Twitter @paddycgalbraith