Excellent, quiver, arrows, wellies, laser range finder, tab, glove, bracer, pencil and paper....
Bugger, I hadn't put the bow in the car!
Of course it's raining today, so I've been out in the garage and taken careful force/draw measurements right back to a rather nervous 26".I got a good set of data and a linear force draw curve.
Then I got a call from my mate JT to go to the flight field... well things took a turn for the worse...
JT forgot the Wonky Warbow, then we couldn't find the flight arrow I'd shot from from the spliced Yew, while we were looking...
This bloke (who I've never seen before) comes walking towards us, so I go up to chat to him and he asks what we are up to.
I explain and say we have permission from the farmer.
"No you haven't. I'm the farmer"
Every time I try to explain the course of events from over a year ago when I asked for permission he'd interrupt....
"No you didn't, I've never seen you before in my life" or
"No I didn't" etc
Eventually I asked if he could just let me explain my version of events, which was briefly as follows.
I got permission from farmer's wife. A few weeks later the farmer came over to the field to ask who we were (he thought we were travellers casing out the field) and we explained, showed him the bows etc... he said no one had told him about us shooting but it was ok.
Later in the year I left a bottle of scotch at the farm shop for him.
We packed up to leave and JT remined me that the bloke we saw originally was Shane, so I drove over to the farm shop and made enquiries there. The farmer was in the office with a woman, who came out to talk. It transpires that Shane is the man who "looks after the fields" and doesn't have authority to allow us to shoot.
Fair enough, it's the farmers land, we won't shoot, but what really pissed me off was his attitude. I may be all sorts of thing but I'm not a liar.
He wouldn't look me in the eye, and he must have known that it could have been Shane that we'd spoken to, but he wasn't going to let on and would rather imply I was a liar!
Still we had a couple of years occasional shooting for a bottle of scotch, and I'm glad Shane got it not the farmer!
I told the woman that I just wanted to straighten it out so that the farmer didn't think we were taking the piss, and to reassure her that we wouldn't shoot.
The woman said she'd talk to Shane about it... dunno WTF that is going to achieve... maybe if they'd been straight with me when I asked permission in the first place and they'd actually talked to eachother. Anyhow for those who think I'm a grumpy old git, think yourselves lucky you haven't met this farmer!
Enough of that, the frogs are making merry in the pond!
'there's nowt as queer as folk'
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