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Malcolm Plant takes you through the steps required to analyse how to shoot successfully

- Malcolm Plant

The phone conversation with William about his ‘bovine rump and banjo problem’ – or words to that effect – began something like this: “Hello, is that Malcolm? John in our roving pheasant syndicate suggested I have a word with you.”

“Yes, that’s fine,” I said. “How can I help?”

My new client was in his fifties and had shot all of his life. However, he had never had a formal shooting lesson. He classified himself as a “few days a year on pheasants with my farming chums, hit a few and miss a few, the social game shooter”.

Nothing wrong with that.

He uses an English sidelock, side-by-side, which, when I saw it, turned out to be a very nice 12-bore. We talked a bit more on the phone about how he shot, what he would like to explore – style, technique – or not. We then agreed on a date.

Approach with care

There’s a whole raft of things that could be going wrong in circumstances such as this, but with a middle-aged gentleman it might come as rather a blow to discover that the gun he has used for 30 years does not fit; or that he has been battling on with an undiagnosed eye-dominance problem; or, worse, he has just spent £20,000 on a new gun that doesn’t fit him. That does happen but can usually be rectified, fortunately.