Access all arias

Richard Negus believes every shooter should have a ‘Luciano Pavarotti’ in their gun cabinet because, no matter where you are, it won’t let you down

- Richard Negus

I give my shotguns names. My AYA No 3 I dubbed ‘Lazarus’ because, thanks to my friend Adam Bragg’s craftsmanship, it was brought back from the dead. My Lincoln Premier is named ‘John’ (as in Wilkes Booth). I don’t like the Lincoln and am determined to get rid of it. Finally we come to the third gun in my cabinet, a Hatsan Escort Magnum called ‘Luciano Pavarotti’.

Pavarotti has become a reliable friend on the foreshore. It can shoot the largest of magnum loads and is robust; I once used it as an oar when an outboard motor malfunctioned. It has been dropped numerous times in a gutter, smeared with rotting sea life and now sports an immovable patina of estuarine mud.

The cleaning it receives is nothing more than a pull through with a bore snake and a spray of Napier gun cleaner, yet it rarely jams.

On the downside, the safety catch is small and fey, hardly suited for freezing fingers on a January marsh. Upon firing it ejects spent cartridges prodigious distances; this has necessitated me training Mabel to retrieve cases. The only time it did jam was just as a party of mallard swooped into my pattern of decoys. In Pavarotti’s defence I had strip cleaned it the previous day and, as my friend Pinhead Lange has always maintained: “Never properly clean a wildfowling gun.”

Newfangled