The Second Best Day In December

When Christmas Day is done and dusted shooting folk can then concentrate on what always promises to be a fun day out with family and friends

- Giles Catchpole

The Boxing Day shoot is – or should be – the occasion when the youngsters become involved. When I was a lad it was the day when the junior members of the big house got to have a go at the pheasants and the rest of us would be dragged away from the new Scalextric to join the beating line. My mother prescribed fresh air and exercise on Boxing Day, while my father nursed his port and mince pie hangover in the relative calm of Bracken Beds, until he was allowed a hair of the dog for elevenses.

There was always a degree of informality, if only in the sense that lunch was taken en masse in the fragrant surroundings of the hay store. The size of the bag at the end of the day was less important than the fact it included somebody’s first ever pheasant. Hurrah!

It has been a while since I attended a Boxing Day shoot, but I dare say they haven’t changed too much. Hosts tend to come in a limited variety of flavours. Father Christmas himself on the one hand and Ebeneezer Scrooge on the other, with a limited palette of versions in between, all of which depend on the degree of dyspepsia occasioned by a massive consumption of food and drink the day before.

Those who have done the sensible thing and eaten and drunk only a little – but of the finest quality – tend towards the Jollity Hall end of the spectrum and will be wearing not only the wittily emblazoned “Bang! Bang! Bugger!” shooting stockings but the full reindeer antler earmuffs and Santa hat, complete with tinkly bell. Those who have overdone it completely, meanwhile, will be wearing a motley collection of gardening clothes, purple Aviator Ray-Bans and the remains of the flowing white beard which the children decided to dress him in after he passed out on the sofa after lunch but which, rather unfortunately, they chose to attach with waterproof Bostik. The former will run the day with the unrelenting vigorous enthusiasm of a