Bertie awakes from a Clumber slumber

For more than a decade, my shooting season has followed a comfortingly familiar path, with a couple of driven days — one at the beginning and one at the end of each season — interspersed with rough and walked-up days peppered throughout.

I spend eight months of the year waiting, training and dreaming of the season and it is what my Clumber spaniel, Bertie, lives for. But 2021 has been somewhat different, somewhat of a blank. You see, my wife and I increased our brood in 2020, bringing us to the uncomfortable conclusion that our house was no longer big enough.

Therefore we have begun a large house renovation, leaving no money for driven sport and, even worse, leaving me living away from the contents of my gun cabinet. The latter