Thursday & Friday

Thursday was an interesting – and a little frustrating I parts – day.

We set off for Shrewsbury a little later than usual and thereby missed all the nasty motorway traffic. The excellent satnav got us to within 100 yds of our destination and we just needed to make a phone call to sort out the last bit.

Emtec were lovely, especially Fiona, who did our ear impressions very quickly and professionally. We now have to wait a couple of weeks for the new defenders to arrive!

From there we went north to West Midlands shooting ground at Hodnet for lunch and a 100-bird shoot. Lunch was a hot turkey roll (which was sort-of OK) and the we were squadded for the shoot.

Clearly, we were among experts who knew the shooting ground really well and were far outside our league. The marker/trapper was a surly and dour old git who really wasn’t very helpful: for example, we never knew how many pairs we were shooting an any stand, and he never called ‘last pair’.

The course was far more demanding than anything we’d shot before (and this was reflected in our low scores). One guy in the squad got 87/100 and wasn’t at all pleased with himself!

We had delivery pizza (50% off!) for dinner, which was fine.

Friday was shopping day. We’re entertaining old friends for Sunday lunch, so there was a menu to decide and ingredients to buy.

Friday dinner was faggots and mushy peas (I suspect that this sounds confusing to my American readers, but faggots are a sort of savoury meatball made of all the bits of a pig that most people don’t eat).