Spring is here, spring is here, life is skittles and life is
beer!
Doesn’t it just fill you with joy, the spring weather? The
dappled sunlight through stretching trees, the burst of green on brown
branches, the smell of freshly cut protestant.
With the good weather comes the need to do things outside.
It was for this reason that I agreed, as some of you may have seen on my
Twitter feed, to go shooting last weekend.
I know what you’re thinking. And I apologise in advance. But
let me be clear from the start:
- I didn’t kill anything (physically)
- I’m not one of those. You know what I mean – the sort of person who casually drops into conversation that they’re off on a ‘shooting weekend’ as if it were no different from a spa break or a trip to Aldi for cheap terrible wine.
The word ‘shooting’ is largely equivalent to the word
‘supper’, in that it’s normally only used by people who still labour under the
belief that it denotes wealth and good breeding. And I don’t much care for that
sort.
An example - I read a blog post recently by a certain
socialite who documented just such a ‘shooting weekend’. There was sweet FA
written about the hows and whys and the wherefores of shooting, it was just pic
after pic of people strutting around as if they were in a Racing Green
catalogue. The whole thing screamed “look
at me! Look at me, I am rich, rich people go shooting!”
There is nothing impressive about putting on a wax jacket
and having access to weaponry, okay? I have a top hat and a scythe; I WIN.
As a result I was a little dubious about the excursion. But
it was for Lee’s 40th birthday (the boyfriend of my dear friend Kat),
so I couldn’t miss out. I trudged dutifully along to Greenfields Shooting
Grounds in Canterbury for a day of slaughtering clay pigeons.
Lee, if you must know, is a shooting machine. He has been
practicing since he was little and his family took him out beating*. He doesn’t
even have to look, he can just fire a gun in the air and an eagle will plummet
to the ground. The rest of us were less experienced to say the least, but who doesn’t
like firing a gun on a Saturday?
I overcame the first hurdle: the news that I couldn’t shoot
while drunk.
I put away my lunchtime tequila, and joined the girls’ group for a couple of hours’ shooting at five different stations, accompanied by a professional instructor.
I put away my lunchtime tequila, and joined the girls’ group for a couple of hours’ shooting at five different stations, accompanied by a professional instructor.
Each station had a different ‘trajectory’ for the clays –
straight up, rolled across the ground, overhead, away from you and across the
sky. They are designed to mimic the movements of the many birds and animals one
would encounter in the great outdoors, so that you can practice how to murder
them.
I was already confused when approaching the stand, as I am
right-handed but left-eye dominant. I spent so long trying to work out which
eye to close that the gun thought I was coming onto it. (The trick was to shut
my dominant eye so I would not pull left).
I was nervous; this was the first time I’d ever fired a gun. From what I
had read in books and such, I knew to expect the butt of the gun to ‘kick’ into
my shoulder, and that the noise would be more of a crack that a bang. I
practised aiming, and then muttered the immortal words: “Pull.”
Crack.
Instructor: “How did you find that?”
Me: “Uh, yeah, fine. It’s alright.”
Inside my head: “Ohhhhhhhhhhh yes! YES! This is what makes
life worth LIVING! Come and get me, you motherless dogs! This is my bombstick!
It’s CHINATOWN!”
“Miss?”
I blinked up at the instructor. “Hmm?”
“Are you okay, you’ve been shouting in Spanish for the last
three minutes?”
“Huh. I didn’t know I could speak Spanish.”
All jokes aside…wait, no that’s stupid. SOME jokes aside,
it is an immensely enjoyable sport. That first time you smash a clay in the air
feels like God having an orgasm. There are very few outdoor activities I can do
(even walking is pushing it), but I was secretly smug to hear the instructor
encouraging me and say: “very well done, you shoot well”.
I can’t see myself ever going shooting in the wild, as it
were. Not because I am squeamish, I just don’t think I can justify spending an afternoon rampaging through the woods slaughtering pheasants and then
stuffing them with foie gras, truffles and champagne on the basis that ‘it’s
just nature! We’re hunter gathers, we need this to survive!’
Also, I am a realist as a meat eater but I’m not excessively
cruel and have no interest in killing living creatures for sport. In hindsight,
this may come as a shock to the rest of the group - and the shooting club –
after I failed to hit any clays on the ‘chase the rabbit’ trap and then hurtled
onto the field and started smashing clays with the butt of the shotgun while
shouting “not so tough now, you fucking fucks! Die, die, die!!!” Also, on the
last station, I was so determined to hit more clays that I ended up fighting
with the instructor for the gun until both of us were crying.
In the end, it transpired that despite my incredible firing
skills, I was not top of the girl’s group. But I was a respectable 3rd,
with an impressive final score of 15!....out of 50. Well it’s still more than
any of YOU! And at least I beat Kat, but I can’t tease her about it.
She’s too lovely, it’d be like picking up a kitten by the scruff of the neck
and shouting “I control the milk!!!” in its face.
It was a shame that my beau missed out on the fun – he had
been invited but was already booked to slap bass with Green Diesel in Ashford.
This disappointed me as a) I think he would have enjoyed the boy bonding, b) he
would have been good at it, but mostly c) I would have been better at it than
him. Not having the evidence of this means that all my strutting around the
house and musing “yeah, you just gotta follow it, catch it, kill it” have
resulted in zero jealous flounces.
If you’ve never been shooting, I’d recommend it. It is good
exercise and instantly makes your penis bigger. Especially mine.
Here is some video footage to prove it (without penises).
Here is some video footage to prove it (without penises).
*beating means flushing pheasants and grouse out of the undergrowth so people can shoot them. It doesn’t mean that Lee’s family took him out, gave him a gun and told him to hit people with it.
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