Fairness, first and foremost

Tom was showing a video to the group of people huddled around his phone screen. Someone in Texas, wearing a camouflage-print shirt and red bandana, was talking with an incomprehensible Southern twang about ‘huntin’ hogs’ and holding a military-looking rifle. The group laughed, either at the Texan’s unsophisticated zeal or his accent.

Whatever it was, it was a far cry from the scene around us: elevenses on a driven pheasant shoot, the crowd bedecked in tweed breeches and Schöffel coats, and all clutching a silver beaker of sloe gin. There can be a sense of superiority on the shooting fields of Britain; a sense that we shoot in the most sophisticated way,