Come on, girls — have a crack!

When I was asked recently whether I wanted to go shooting, I felt torn. It’s clearly very fashionable at the moment, as Charles Moore’s story about Cherie Blair and Lord Mandelson at the Rothschilds shows. But shooting is unutterably bloody, if you’re a woman.

It starts with a long drive to a big house, encumbered by a vast array of boots, hats, gloves, jackets and thermal underwear, as well as sparkly evening outfits. You spend the night carousing, and in the morning the men — henceforth to be referred to only as ‘guns’ — wake early and pad about in heavy, Scott-of-the-Antarctic tweeds that smell of gun oil, reeking breeks, and long, gartered woollen socks in amusing colours. A massive cooked breakfast is underway. The guns’ gossipy wives are wearing tight cashmere sweaters and showing off their bottoms in Austrian leather britches, and reading Richard Kay in the Daily Mail.

After brekker, everyone — i.e. guns, women in britches, dogs — totters out via the gun-room and gents’ and forms up in front of a selection of mud-spattered off-roaders that wouldn’t look out of place in Baghdad’s Green Zone. They listen to the head keeper’s announcements about not shooting ground game or each other, and the guns are handed their peg numbers. They all pile into the Land-Rovers and Subarus, etc, to sit packed like sardines with wildly aroused dogs who nuzzle crotches and try to get to second base with everyone on board. You want to faint from the combined odours of old Barbours, coffee breath and dog. You wonder what on earth you are doing there. The chatting, the flirting, the delicious meals, the dressing up, the hours on the M3 already seem like a distant, Vaseline-tinted dream. For it is now that the misery truly begins.