Slow life

Alex James

Wednesday, 12th November 2008

Flying high

It was a rainy morning on Friday when I woke up warm as toast in a small castle in Northumberland, surrounded on all sides as far as the eye could see by the immaculate, formal gardens still dancing under the weight of the winter sky and beyond them racing-green moorland stretching to infinity and eternity in all directions.

I’d brought my gun and my guitar and we’d all been up singing until the small hours, singing all the songs I could remember. Well, there were a few sore heads at the breakfast table but the atmosphere was jocular, festive. Most of the guests had known each other for many years and it was an extremely well-staffed, well-run house. Cooks in the kitchen and boys in the bootroom; porridge and papers, coffee and cigarettes; an English breakfast banquet. Fires were roaring and an elegant young man buttled around the banter, soothing and assuaging, dodging jokes, delivering eggs.

I was reasonably apprehensive. The Scott-Harden pheasants are legendary. Fast, high, curling birds. Pheasants fly the fastest of all the game species and there was quite a good chance I wouldn’t hit anything all day long. Then there’s always the chance of getting shot, or shooting someone. I wondered what would be worse over my third cup of coffee. Guns make me nervous. I’ve had a near miss. Everybody has. Our hostess had recently taken a pellet in the face, and her hat had been ruined. She was still upset about that hat.

Down tracks and alongside streams we bumped and skidded: loaders, goaders, pickers-up and eight tweedy guns in a cavalcade of 4x4s, dogs of all sizes in the back, arriving in a remote and silent valley, a flat grassy riverbed with woodland rising up on either side in smudges of mist. It was still early, still drizzling, but not cold. We adjusted to our surroundings, falling quiet and still, drinking in the landscape, listening to the faint sounds of the middle of nowhere, slowly becoming part of it all. It was beautiful, far from the present, from telephones, computers, families and work. Yes, beautiful, but the English countryside is all equally and impossibly beautiful, and, really, like dinner, shooting is only ever as much fun as the people you are with. I can only handle it about twice a year, but now I was among friends old and new, and I forgot everything as we waited quietly for the birds to rise.

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