Sometimes, when I get a bit fed up with modern life, I watch a 1975 documentary called A Man Between Three Rivers. It’s the story of Ernie James, who lived at Welney in Cambridgeshire. Ernie was a fenman, a wildfowler, an eel trapper and an ice skater.
I grew up in the English countryside in the 1980s. I have no unduly rosy notions of what rural life was like, especially at the bottom end of the rural economic spectrum. But for 40 minutes, I choose to wallow in pure sentimentality.
Ernie was recognised by this magazine as one of the ‘12 great shooting eccentrics’but Ernie did not shoot like you and me.
