Money well spent

A couple of years ago, on a rather grey October afternoon, I was trudging around Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis with my good friend Will Martin, looking for the local goose guru. After knocking on a few wrong doors, we found him. Despite a bottle of Scotch as a peace offering, he looked at us rather suspiciously, gave us only a whisper of his knowledge then closed the door.

Disheartened, we went to fill up the car at Engebret’s, a petrol station-cum-gun dealer (perhaps the only place in the country you can get a full tank and a slab of cartridges). The £30 we spent on fuel and pick’n’mix led to a far more productive conversation than the one we’d had earlier, and after half an hour of talking geese with Engebret’s owner, we had gathered