Blogcoven

Enough time has passed and things have changed enough that I’m going to assume nothing and here, therefore is a recap of the story you need to know to find what I’m about to tell you funny. I’d break my glasses and stick them back together with elastoplast and speak in a high-pitched whine while I did this, but both of those are audio-visual effects that are poorly conveyed through this textual medium, so I shan’t bother.

So, Me, Savage, Doc Dev and Mr E were, long times ago a fairly tight quartet of Weshtern gamers. We used to gather at my gaff for games sometimes and some of those times, for whatever reason, we’d go on rambles. If you’re seriously ambitious, you can get from my house down the lane through the ‘right of way’ that isn’t over the end of the old great house and around the end of the lake to Hazelwood of the W.B. Yeats poem. I’m from Yeats country. Jeez, once I start taking this from first principles I have to fill in a lot. Anyway, Hazelwood – we didn’t go there. We went through a hole in the wall into the old great houses lost grounds (untended, overgrown, foresty) and were standing around there arguing as we often did over the best way onwards (we were all of ten to twenty feet off the road) when Mr E’s phone rings and he answers it. It was the Wanderer whom Mr E knew at the time and the rest of us may or may not have, I’m not sure when this story happened. Conversation goes something like.

Wanderer: Are you going to be in town later?
Mr E: No, I’m fairly sure I won’t be.
Wanderer: Ah – are you down in the Muck?
*Mr E looks down at general mud, squitter and leaf detreitus all around, laughs*
Mr E: Yes, Yes I am.

I thought of this because today I went to go kill something which involved a lot of squelching about in odd fields and hedgerows just a few miles from Mr E’s old abode, part of which involved an actual traipse across a bog or moor – one of those ones where you’re warned not to step on the bright green bits, because those are sink holes and I swear to God the hand of man has never rested on that hill top. Its got the same lichens and thingies it always had I bet nothing grows there except mosses and heartache for whatever sheep farmers flock grazes it.

Then we had classic gorse thickets, horrible cow fields with the paths which are 50/50 mud-manure mix, and the meadows with the sinkholes without even the courtesy to be virulent green and just hiding under more moss. It was great, I nearly shot three blackbirds through mistaken identity. We the group got some birds, I didn’t get a shot off. Pheasant was too far away, woodcock went behind a tree and the one perfect, textbook, low clear left to right shot (another woodcock)…

*pull trigger*
*realise safety catch is still on as bird vanishes*

Pish. Much, much more practice required, but it was fun, good to walk the land again, reconnect though I went and got too much oxygen and I’ve a headache. Weasels…