Flighting The Festive Goose

Christmas and wildfowling are both family affairs in Jonathan Young’s household, where getting up early is not just about surprising Santa Claus

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UNDERWEAR strewn across the floor usually fills a page or two in bonkbusters but not in the plot of 50 shades of greylag. With a maximum of four hours’ sleep a night in a bedroom shared with a hulking son, you need to operate on automatic when the alarm clock shrieks. And the easiest way to dress without cursing is to work along a conveyor belt of socks – shreddies – shirt – trousers before stumbling into the kitchen for breakfast.

Richard and Raymond, being iron-hard Orcadians, seemed immune to sleep deprivation. Both had been up an hour before us, preparing the gear for morning flight and chatted amiably while the southern zombies could barely mumble, “pass the toast”.

Gratifyingly, the fathers seemed less bleary than the heirs. I grew up on fowling, Rob combines a hunt mastership with a ferocious City job and Simon’s body clock has been so disrupted by years of overseas travel he doesn’t much care if it’s 4am in the Orkneys or 4pm in Toronto so long as he’s got a mug of builder’s. The boys looked a little mouldy by comparison and that’s partly why they were there.

Since we did our reproductive bit, the papas had determined that our kinder would not be spoiled by too much covert love. It’s a treat to be under a stream of well-shown birds on a boys’ shoot and the offspring are damned lucky, but we wanted our young men to undertake the long armoury apprenticeship that served us and our forebears (airgun, small gun, 12-bore), join the beating line and appreciate that rabbiting, pigeon decoying and fowling are art forms that a proper sportsman should respect and love.