Postcard from Norfolk - Pull!

Once you have blended your own shot, you never go back to 'shop-bought'.  Like drugs and porn, the over-the-counter stuff just isn't strong enough.

They have refurbished the Victoria Hotel at Holkham.  Possibly this was because too many visitors were mistaking the distressed furniture and hard-to-achieve ‘shabby chic’ look as ‘shabby’, which is also hard to achieve, or at least takes some decades.  The place had had a makeover and very lovely, without a trace of shabby, it was too.

As was the young lady who served us our coffee.  She was also so very posh that looking at her was like turning to the frontispiece of Country Life magazine, where posh young ladies are presented for…well, I’ve never quite worked out why but suspect it has something to do with finding husbands.  The property is in the front, the small ads are in the back and Lady Jocasta Farthingham-Smythe-Smythe is somewhere in between.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being posh, or at least having a posh accent.  Maybe she was foreign and had learned English watching box-sets of Downton?

In between serving coffee and being from the upper classes, she was decorating the mantelpiece at the Victoria.  This was a simple, minimalist affair and the theme was ‘Autumn’.  So, you have your pine cones, of which there are many locally, you have your pheasant tail feathers, of which there are also many locally, and you have your empty shotgun cartridges, the abundance of which explains the feathers.

What struck me was the many varieties of shotgun cartridge on display.  Now, I am familiar with the simple red, and I know that people fill their own cartridges as well as buy them from a shop their own, but I never quite realised that this means you can blend your own shot like you can blend your own coffee.  Fantastic! 

One can imagine that if you are, for instance, a bank robber you want something that is half lead shot and half firework so that when you let off that all important warning shot into the ceiling, it really has effect, like an angry chrysanthemum.  If you are hunting, I suppose the different sizes and weights of the shot can be tailored to your particular needs.  For instance, when hunting pheasant, a bird so stupid that the only time it can be relied to go in a straight line is when it comes directly at your front bumper, you want a rather large cloud of shot to ensure that any scatty aerial zig-zagging doesn’t result in a miss.  And for those special outings, how about a little depleted uranium in the mix?  Just like Terry likes up his arse.

What I liked about the mantelpiece decoration was that it underlined that the only debate about hunting in Norfolk is what is the most efficient way to kill something.