This: I was bouncing down a farm track in a pickup with some deer managers, you know what these guys are like, they are always trying to sell you something, or some form of sporting endeavour where they can leave you in a field with the meter running and go for a nap in the truck .
DM: Do you do much pigeon shooting SBW?
SBW: There'd be little point
DM [ears up sniffing the wind, not the expected answer]: Why's that ?
SBW: I'm a total Chump with a shot gun.
I have form you see, the day I met my culinary hero in a pigeon blind in Fife I launched a whole box of carts/shells at birds swooping in to the decoys, and hit exactly none.
From this inauspicious start it's been up hill all the way.
In the UK shotguns are licensed in a similar way to rifles; the criteria are less stringent, but the process is the same. You can save a few quid by getting your certificates to run contemporaneously. I got my first shotgun because not that I expected to be able to do much with it, but because, like a historic rifle, you have to have one.
A friend with a massive collection of firearms was out of work, so on a whim I asked if he had one he'd want to sell. No surprise he did, I collected the most unpleasant semi-auto anyone has ever seen from him and gave him £100 for it and some 1022 magazines. I came to think of them as expensive second hand magazines and a free shotgun. I was traveling home by train with the gun in the worst gunship I've ever seen. Another 'freeby'. It was a nice-ish afternoon, I sat on the station platform, two Polish chicks came to sit on the next bench, the train pulled into the station, I hopped up and was making the ten step journey to the doors of the train when the slip disintegrated, the zip gave up the coast and the little leather strap parted company. The shotgun clattered to the floor. The Polish chicks looked over and totally unconcerned got on to the Tain and continued with their day.
I scooped up the gun and got onto the train. In the toilet I had to quickly work out how to dismantle a semi, so I could wrap it in what was left of the gunslip. It was a long nerve-wracking journey back to London as I awaited the intervention of the armed response unit.
Shooter [who you'll know from other adventures] invited me to shoot geese with him for my birthday, I tried to make excuses, 'my gun is a disgrace, I'm slightly worse' but he would have none of it. "Everyone should own a semi-auto, you can clean it with Fanta and WD40 they are a perfect thing, you just need to practice". We drove up north in perfect goose weather; blowing a hoodie, iced water flying horizontally into our faces. It was a spectacular piece of goose-ground. We walked out onto a strip of land with a fish farm on one side and a nature reserve on the other. a skien flew over at not far off head height, I missed the first one, manly through shock, downed the next two, added a shell and popped a third. The gun was now a proven slayer.
Based on its record so far I can neither call it solely an unlucky gun, or lucky gun, but it certainly attracted attention. Not just from the goddess of the hunt.
I took it clay shooting a few times with Foxy, the ACL, and SouthsideD. It's ability to hit things had largely deserted it by this point, but in fairness we did always say we were going 'for a laugh' and it provided those in abundance.
The slide release is on the opposite side to the port, so reloading is counter-intuitive on its best days. I have never cleaned it, so it has some mud left over from the goose shooting, some blood from the same trip and a few comedy feathers travel in the same slip, now held together with more than one brand of packing tape. Strangers laugh at it. The ACL was unrelenting in his mockery.
After a while I bought my Browning; in an equally undiscerning purchase, that by dumb luck turned out to be both a bargain, with nice timber, and a bargain that breaks clays.
I was short of space in the cabinet and I'd been trying to encourage Super Plumber to take up a hobby so he'd not be driven mad. I gave him a cabinet I found in a client's garden, and filled out the forms with him. He'd gotten his ticket back from the cops, but was still making excuses about buying a shotgun. The same sort of excuses made by tool-fetishists everywhere "I only want the XYZ and I don't have the 2-3-4-or 5 grand they cost'. total bullshit of course. You should always buy the worst rifle or shot gun you can find [pretty sure I achieved that] as it will quickly teach you more about about what you actually want than any amount of reading other people's opinions on the internet. Then you'll enjoy the ecstasy of 'new gun X never see than piece junk again'.
To give him his due, while it took Super Plumber a while to engage with the sport of clay-busting he's certainly been 'all guns' since he has.
He'd been roundly mocked by the first person he'd shown his gifted Semi Auto to, undeterred he thought he'd buy himself something cheap and cheerful at the auction. Cheerful maybe.
If you're used to buying stuff on Ebay you have a wildly over-favourable view of the auction experience. He'd bid on some piece of junk he could buy for the price of a couple of rounds of G&T's. Not receiving a 'you won it' notification, he shrugged his shoulders and tired again, didn't get a notification, bid on an inexpensive pair of Spanish guns, still nothing. Assuming that he'd been too Yorkshire [tightfisted] he waded in the next time. Nothing.
The following afternoon he received a gloating email from the auctioneer
Dear Super Plumber, we're delighted to tell you your bids were successful you're now the proud owner of six [shit] shotguns and you owe us £475 and 30% + delivery.
Needless to say, he's now on first name terms with his local gunsmith, and on the waiting list for a new gun that costs more than my car.
More shotgun shenanigans to follow
Your pal
SBW
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