CHRIS RUNDLE

FOR A LIGHT SUMMER DISH, LOOK NO FURTHER THAN TROUT, SAYS CHRIS

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MAURICE was the very worst kind of social climber. He was the local chief inspector and had made his way up through the ranks from being a humble PC-a rank which many of his contemporaries felt he was best suited to anyway.

But having applied himself assiduously to cramming for his various promotion exams Maurice had worked almost as diligently to ascend the social ladder. If he was a chief inspector, he argued, then he was going to behave like one.

So he equipped himself with a pair of halfway decent 12-bores and inserted himself into the local shooting community where his ignorance of etiquette (and ignorance in general) soon elicited a lot of sniggering behind his back on the part of his fellow guns and beaters alike.

Most wildfowlers, for instance, prefer to give their quarry a sporting chance and shoot them on the wing. Maurice, on the other hand, would hide behind a hedge and wait until they had landed on the water and had become, literally, sitting ducks.

But his most celebrated moment came as the beaters were working their way through a dense stand of bamboo on one of the local estates and put up, amid a deal of squawking and violent flapping, a large and ungainly bird which took to the air with all the ease of an overloaded Lancaster straining to leave the Tarmac on its way to the Ruhr.

Alas, the keeper's warning cry of "Don't shoot - it’s a guinea fowl!" was punctuated by Maurice’s gun going off as he dropped one of the feathered watchdogs the keeper maintained to scare the foxes away from the pheasant pens.