… you know when a bored friend sends you a random email suggesting a random activity and you’re bored too so you accept and the main reason is that because you’re both probably having a middle age existential crisis?
Yes, that.
First of all let me tell you something. I don’t like guns. If it was up to me people would not be allowed to hold guns ‘for personal defence’. Of any type. When it comes to hunting… I’m a little bit more ambivalent.. if you kill for trophy it’s a bit NO NO, if you shoot a couple of pheasants and then make a gorgeous pheasant pie… why would that be different from eating a piece of a cow that someone else has butchered? Also why is it worse shooting a bird dead from the sky than hooking a fish from the water? Are birds more sensitive than fish? It is a HUGE subject and I’m absolutely too knackered to tackle it this morning on only one cup of coffee.
BUT I don’t really see a problem in shooting clay discs out of the sky, or shooting at a paper target etc. It may sound hypocritical … and it probably is in certain respects..
Anyway, back to our day out: it was soon much fun!
It helped that is was a glorious day and we were in a gorgeous location near the Malvern Hills, at South Worcester Shooting Ground where BASC had organised a ‘Ladies Shooting Day’ to encourage more women to participate to the sport.
We got split into groups of 6 and allocated an instructor; we got lucky and got Becky who is the local instructor at the grounds and is absolutely brilliant. Patient and knowleadgable and super nice.
A lot of the lesson was – obviously – about safety and security. You don’t want to willy nilly hand rifles to a bunch of peri-menopausal women an let them loose, right? We were there to shoot ‘clays’ (discs made of pulverised limestone that are actually very friable. There are ‘organic/and biodegradable’ clays out there which are becoming more and more popular, but although the ones we shot weren’t, they weren’t made of plastic either), which looked like this:
(although in the name of honesty… the ones we attempted to shoot down were a little bigger…)
That’s me aiming at the little black speckle in front of me.
I destroyed quite a few, suprising myself, especially because my dominant eye didn’t match the shoulder/side I was comfortable shooting on so I had to close it but I can’t wink so I had to cover my glasses with masking tape AND the eye that I was left with was the bad one… it’s never simple.
Say no more.
We had a gorgeous buffet lunch with lots of game pies and home baked bread and pates…
All in all a fabulous day. I highly recommend it.
while you're ahead... 