Instinctive Shooting Sometimes Stinks!

Why is it that one day we can shoot marvellously but the next day we can’t hit a thing — could it be due to ageing?

- Laurence Catlow

I confessed to shooting appallingly badly on my first driven day of the season (Odds and endings, 6 November). I only bagged one pheasant and I refused to say how many shots it had taken me to achieve this enviable prize.

This refusal still holds firm because, though I try to be frank with readers, I do have my pride. There would be none of it left — there isn’t much to begin with — if I knew that the whole world was talking about how many shots it took Laurence Catlow to kill a single hen pheasant.

Things have improved since then, though I have never yet come home from a day this season feeling that I have shot really well. This makes a disappointing contrast with last season when my kills-to-cartridge ratio was almost exactly one for two and I often returned from shooting feeling rather smug.

Satisfaction

Some time ago, I wondered how we might learn to enjoy ourselves knowing that every pheasant flying towards us had made a wise choice and was highly likely to continue on his way, untouched by the double discharge of shot that was about to salute him (View to a Kill, 1 March 2017). I concluded that, in such circumstances, it is difficult to find satisfaction in your contribution to the progress of a shooting day.

These huge differences of performance — ranging from fairly impressive to absolutely deplorable — have led me to consider the whole question of form. Why it is that for me at least, there are good days and bad days and extended runs of good and bad or indifferent performance?

I thought it might be connected with getting old, slow and stiff but I looked back through my diaries and found that, even in my 30s and 40s, things were somewhat similar.