Lessons are often best learned the hard way, something my father never tired of telling me. I think I may be morphing into him because I frequently hear myself offering the same advice to my own, now grownup, children and my grandchildren.
Many years ago, having bought a rifle and paired it with a budget scope, I found myself in a tower in deepest West Sussex, having paid a not inconsiderable sum to be there, waiting for what would be my first fallow buck. Said buck duly obliged, emerging out of the trees in the half-light as fallow are prone to do. I eased the rifle to my shoulder for what should have been an easy shot, only to be confronted by blackness.
What followed was some serious head bobbing; I could look over the scope and see him with my naked
