It’s 6.30am. Time to get up for the most important and stressful day of the season — beaters’ day. Beaters’ day is a chance to say thank you to people who have given up holidays, weekends and more to help out over the season, be it lugging wheat, making the best shoot day sausage rolls in the country or just listening to a stressed keeper vent. They all play a vital role in producing a memorable shoot day and season. It’s an opportunity to see if the beaters can walk the walk as well as they talk. The role reversal, beating for beaters, is an act of thanksgiving and a chance to see how the shoot works from the other end.
With kit laid out religiously the night before, North Korean radios charged and the bar basket full, it’s just a matter of collecting the beaters’ trailer from next door. Out of the corner of my eye I see a
