Postcard from Norfolk - Guns 'n' Bras at Holt

Ah, Holt.  Unlike some towns, usually the sort of town that has butchers that have offerings still in fur and feathers in their front windows, Holt has never crossed the line from Posh to smug.  This may because it’s ‘Holt’, simply ‘Holt’, and lacks the ‘by-the-Sea’ of nearby villages such as the delightful Cley.  It’s not by-the-Sea and ‘by-the-arable-farm’ does not have the same appeal.  For all that the residents of Holt may wish their town to be regarded as posh, and for all that it is undoubtedly monied, a few things keep it firmly rooted in unpretentious.

The first is the art galleries.  Not a natural choice.  If one is grading on the Cotswolds scale of poshness of village as a result of the simple formula of art galleries per head of population (unlike the rural scale of depravation, which is number of pubs per head of population – a healthy ratio being 1:1, in case you are interested), then Holt is very posh indeed.  Luckily, the art galleries perform a public service of selling stuff that is either too expensive, or whacky, to actually buy.

Take for instance the bras carved out of driftwood.  Well, I presume they are carved.  It may be that somebody spends a lot of time beachcombing in order to find naturally occurring double dee cup driftwood.  Never seen any yourself?  Just proves my point, the Coastal Creeper probably got there ahead of you.  Even if you did, you would at most try and get the damn thing out of your dog’s mouth before it charged into the pub with it, or take a picture for the amusement of your more puerile friends.  What you wouldn’t do is fish it out of the surf, dry it, sand it, varnish it, masturbate feverishly over it and then sell it.

So hats off to the galleries of Holt for making visitors smile and move quickly on to the pub.

The other feature of Holt that keeps it thoroughly grounded is the local field sports store.  Now, this used to be in a tiny shop and was crammed with stuff.  It relocated a few years ago to a much larger store that allows them to cram even more stuff into it.  It’s a delight to browse there, if a challenge, because trying to find a camouflage hat in the camouflage section is something of a challenge.  My advice is to buy a duck lure furst, startle the hat and then make a grab for it as it takes flight.  Never seen a flying hat?  Might I suggest a stroll on Brancaster beach in October with insufficiently secured headgear.

Downstairs though, oh, it’s a delight.  That’s where they keep the Guns!  And these are real Guns for men.  These are not the sort of guns that feature in the news, they are not guns for small minded psychopaths, these are guns that are designed to be taken out of the house hours before dawn and held by their owners in darkness, in a hole, in a marsh, waiting for first light.

Because who the fuck needs an alarm clock in Norfolk, it’s rosy red dawn followed by enthusiastic goose calls, then a fusillade, then some likely shouting.

Honk Honk!

Bang!  Bang!  BangBangBang!

Fuck!

Sorry Nigel.  Shit, that looks nasty.

Later that day:

“What did you get darling?”

“Oh, one for the pot, one for A&E”.

That’s why fowl hunters crouch in holes.  It’s not for cover, it’s because some idiot thirty yards away is tracking at zero elevation and doesn’t see you because a) he’s concentrating on a low flying duck and b) you are wearing a camouflage hat, remember?

In short, Holt is lovely, but unglamorous.  Solidly Georgian, with good parking facilities, it remains the sort of Norfolk town that is much more suited to the Defender than the Range Rover Sport.  Leave that to the posh places.

Firearms review - Four Barrels Good!

In his guest post, Montague Steeplethorpe delights in the versatility and sheer destructive force of the latest offering from a famous York gunsmith.

Because the proprietors of every safari park we contacted were so bloody unsporting, we have been unable to test the manufacturer's claim that the 'Carnagecaster X-13 Jubilee Special Edition' can indeed stop a charging rhino in its tracks.  We can, however, confirm with authority that it is quite capable of stopping a speeding Honda Civic quite effectively, with our shot taking out first the engine block, the speaker system and finally, in a rather spectacular fashion, the petrol tank.  To that extent it is judged rather more effective than the flashing 'watch your speed' sign that was previously the sole deterrent in the village to the idiot youth who had made a habit of driving through the village with no regard for the speed limit, the safety of others or indeed that anyone else may not share his appalling musical tastes.

Other experiments proved that the Carnagecaster is equally effective against badgers, deer, duck, poachers and, on one unfortunate occasion, a very surprised cow that made the mistake of startling me.  I can also report that engaging 'panic mode' when unprepared, causing all four barrels to discharge simultaneously, until ammunition is spent or the thing overheats and explodes, results in the effective vaporisation of whatever you were pointing at at the time (in this case an unoccupied - one hopes - caravan), a dislocated shoulder and a short spell in hospital being fussed over by nurses.  Hearing returns in two to three days, preceded by a not un-musical ringing.  Any facial hair will return in time.

The Carnagecaster is such an impressive example of the art of the gunmaker that merely slipping it out of its case to give it a polish, as I did last week in a crowded train, had the effect of silencing the entire carriage with the exception of a few stifled sobs.  It is unusual but gratifying to see craftsmanship still move the travelling public, who I presume are working class, to tears.

And no wonder.  The detailing on the Carnagecaster is quite superb, and a great deal of thought has gone into its design.  For instance there is a sturdy rubberised grip at the end of the barrels meaning that when ammunition is exhausted, it can be wielded as an effective club.  That is of course if you have not decided to affix the optional 'Neptune' three pronged bayonet (which is also excellent, by the way, for digging potatoes).

Much has been made of the Carnagecaster's versatility, and rightly so.  Quad-barrelled shotguns have been with us for some time, but the Carnagecaster is one of the very few to allow different types of ammunition to be fired either singularly or simultaneously.  For my trial I elected a mostly straightforward combination.  Top left, a simple steel shot for game, manual load.  Top right, once again a straightforward choice for the rifle barrel, 'deerpopper 500' shells in a magazine of 20.  At Christmas of course, one can switch to the variety with the explosive tip, commonly known as 'red misters' for their effect on their surprised target.

Bottom left, always a popular choice, a blend of charcoal enriched iron shot and white phosphorous.  This is, I have found, useful not only for hunting at night, illuminating the target for a brief instant before cooking it, but is a remarkable deterrent against poachers.  The cartridges are belt fed but for the field come in a drum of a dozen, with one 'up the spout'.  Ask your munitions man for 'a baker's dozen gypsy candles' and he should be able to sort you out.

Bottom right, described by the manufacturer as the 'ordinance option'.  A somewhat difficult choice.  Originally I went with the 'Helmand hello!', a solid tungsten bolt used to blow the doors of opium traffickers off their hinges over there, before finally settling on another favourite from that part of the world; Depleted Uranium.  Manual load.  If you have to use more than one, you are advised to improve your aim.

The Carnagecaster offers excellent value for money (POA from Pressers & Co. of York), demonstrates that it is possible to be a master of all trades and ensures you are prepared for most rural challenges.

Not again!

Sickening news from the US, where it appears some nutter with a gun has committed an atrocity against innocents.

The coverage of this US shooting is essentially on two fronts.  The first being shots of (rightly) very upset people in a small town in Connecticut trying to articulate their grief and shock in a way that a news editor has deemed suitable for broadcast, when the actual but unbroadcastable reality is probably somebody sitting on their sofa, clutching a cup of tea, or a beer, and occasionally muttering ‘but…why?’ for several minutes, hours or days based on their proximity to the event, or empathy.

The other front is reporting the issue of gun control. 

This is very much an American thing, where the media clips that run with the story are invariably of automatic weapons, handguns, and row upon row of guns for sale in, apparently, ‘Guns R Us’.

The British attitude towards gun control was settled years ago, in tragic circumstances.  We had our tragedy and the Government quite rightly acted swiftly and decisively.  Anyone who bleated about an infringement of their ‘right’ to own as many bloody guns as they wanted was quietly taken aside and asked to stop talking, preferably about anything, ever, again.

But it’s more complex than outright prohibition.  If you are a responsible citizen, or have a use for them, there’s nothing wrong with owning a gun, or guns.  Certainly, if you shoot game, you’ll want to be able to select the right gun and the right shot to bag something for the table or hopelessly outclass the chap at the next peg, depending on the sort of day you have in store.  If you are keeping down pests such as rats or foxes, you won’t want something that is going to result in a cloud of shot and sudden air-conditioning in the barn.  If you want to deal with an urban fox, I suggest a thermos of scotch, a head light and a shovel.  Lastly, when dealing with the Taliban, one will need a rifle, a suitable sidearm as an auxiliary weapon, and, favourite of all, a mobile ‘phone with your mate who controls the Predator Drone in the area on speed dial 1.

What baffles me is the American fondness for automatic weapons.  Hand guns in particular.  What game are these used to bring down?  And in terms of home security, are they really as good as, say, a new front door with deadlocks?  Of course, I appreciate that many Americans do go hunting at the weekend, blending into the countryside in their camouflage trousers and high-viz orange vests, looking for all the world like elves who work for the Highway Department, and they take their automatic weapons with them.  And I know that fearsome beasts lurk in the American woods, bears, wolves, hillbillies, oh my.  But, seriously, automatic weapons?  For hunting?  Are the bears wearing armour?  If you are so shit at hunting that it takes you a clip and a half to put down Yogi, then you need to do three things.

First, you need to get your ass to the Highlands and learn how to stalk.  This is not the same as that thing you did with that cute girl from accounts that resulted in you having to move to another city after the court case.  This means stealthily tracking your prey.  First lesson is free – don’t crush your beer can while burping when a few yards from anything with more teeth than you.

Second, learn to shoot.  One shot with your eyes open is better than several hundred with them closed.  Remember that bit in ‘Predator’ where Arnie’s team level half the jungle?  Yea, good wasn’t it?  But they didn’t kill the Predator.

Finally, get your fat ass to Norfolk, find a decent gun shop and buy yourself a proper, man sized, grown up hunting piece.  I mean something put together by a craftsman.  It is not designed to make you look like a hard-ass in your Facebook photos.  It is deigned to bring about the sure and certain destruction of anything you point it at, which you better know how to cook.  And while you are there, get yourself a decent fishing rod and a tweed jacket.

There’s nothing wrong with owning a gun.  Or guns.  There is something very wrong with owning a gun, or guns, without good reason.

What happened in Connecticut was horrific.  And while gun control is not a UK issue, and it’s certainly not up to the UK to tell the US how to run their own affairs, it doesn’t, it can’t, stop us looking at the images from another school, another facebook photo of another nutter, and thinking, along with the throat-drying, heart-numbing horror of it all, ‘what the hell will it take?’.  Maybe the best way to protect innocents isn’t guns, it’s gun control.

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.

Postcard from Corsica – Corsicans

You can tell a lot about a place from the strength and attitude of its separatist movement. In certain, civilised, parts of the world the separatist movement is much less about bombing and much more about the sale of flags, mugs and tee shirts all bearing the symbol of separatism, usually a flag as this is so popular with the tourist trade. Some separatist movements, usually from the poorer parts of the world where there are less X-Boxes per capita and so people sit around fermenting discontent and apple based home-brew beverages in the evenings rather than playing Halo, do blow things and occasionally themselves up and this is generally considered by all to be a bit off, as it does nothing to help flag sales.

Corsica has a thriving separatist movement, judging by the amount of Moor’s Head flags on display. I’m not sure if there is any actual bombing, I suspect that all the plotters are too busy manufacturing and then flogging their flags to indulge in a spot of light terrorism. Terrorism would, in any case, be quite hard to distinguish from the general level of background violence on the island.

Violence is everywhere on Corsica. Not the pushing, shoving, spitting, hair-pulling violence one sees in the playground or after chucking-out time in town on a Saturday night, but rather the threat of violence. The local brand of knife (and that should tell you something) is called ‘vendetta’, one of the tee shirts has a picture of the island with an AK47 superimposed on it and something written in French which I’m pretty sure was either ‘freedom for Corsica’ or ‘fuck you, I’ve got an AK47 and I’m from a small, pissed-off island’, I’m not sure. Although, in essence, the two remarks are interchangeable.

Everyone on the island has a gun. Actually, I would guess that everyone on the island has two guns. The first gun will be an ancient, but beautifully lethal hunting rifle, which is carried out into the countryside and used to hunt wild boar and settle feuds with your neighbour. The second gun will be hidden under the floorboards, will be an AK47 or something quite dreadful left over from the war and is being kept ready for the uprising. This means that there are two guns for every person and as a rule of thumb, it’s advisable to keep an eye on any society with more guns than people.

Sitting by the pool at the villa in the afternoon, one would hear the crack, crack, crack of somebody trying to reduce the wild boar population on the island. Coming from a city where gunfire is still frowned upon as a method for pest control (although if I had my way I’d take out the Trafalgar Square pigeons with a cluster bomb), this is fairly disconcerting. One can only hope that the hunter has a good aim, is not as drunk as I was by three in the afternoon and isn’t the bloke I inadvertently nearly ran over that morning when I was doing the croissant run out to bag himself a tourist.

Everyone on the island is very polite. This is because everyone on the island has a gun, or possibly two, and probably a hand grenade or two left over from the war. It’s also because the island has its own knife factory and it’s also because the knives are called ‘vendetta’. The message is clear, if you are rude to me, my descendent will some day kill your descendant in a hunting accident.

Given the proliferation of guns, knives, alcohol and wild boar with tusks on the island, it comes as something of a surprise that the most dangerous thing to do, even more dangerous than hunting drunk, is go for a drive. The roads twist and turn round every bend waits a goat, cow or pissed-up Corsican driving towards you at speed and on the wrong side of the road. It does not do to respond aggressively when this happens, as goats can be malevolent, follow you home, and keep you awake at night with the gentle clang of their bells.

Mr Whippy's Corsican cousin; Mr Wrong.