Meaty matters

I’m writing this in the Highlands. Through the window I can see Loch Maree, being ruffled into white-tipped skirls by the westerly wind and a squall of cloud that’s shrouding Slioch, the Place of the Spears. The Munroes are steeples at the end of the water, a bastion reminder of Scotland’s eternal war between the fastness and the wetness.

I’m up here for the stalking. I come every year. I haven’t taken a shot for some time. I love the stalk: stalking is to walking what opera is to whistling. And I also love going out with people who have never done it before, or for whom pulling the trigger is still the pinch-point of life, death and
everything. Watching a stag through a sight, an animal bigger and heavier than you are, that embodies so much yearning and lust, roars so fundamentally about our temporal mythologised lives, is always a big thing, a big ask.

I’ve taken the day off in the lodge, with a fire and an Arbroath Smokie tart, a cold grouse and a square of tablet, to pick some rowans and sharp apples for jelly and to write this. I am more sympathetic to Louise Gray’s book in the north than I would be in Chelsea.

The best chapter is about stalking with her father, and is less to do with killing than with the warm, vegetative relationship that daughters have with their dads. It has a different tone and digs deeper than the rest — but this is not a good book. It is a well-meaning one, and it is written by an evidently decent and empathetic woman; but niceness and goodwill don’t, by
simply wishing it, conjure up interest or a compelling argument. Altogether, it sounds like Prince Charles screaming Bridget Jones.