... in the Market have closed. This is terrible news for those who, for half a century, have relied on Fellers. And it will be a loss for passers-by who, every December, could relish the Rubensian cascades (you're right: Snyders deserves a mention) of deer, game birds, game animals looping exultantly round the shop. We used to get our venison and our pheasants from Fellers. Our younger son, when he went Up, was agreeably surprised by the cheapness of the pheasants ... cheaper, he explained, than convenience food!
Perhaps the modern undergraduate does not arrive here trained by Mummy to phuck a pleasant. (Many of them have probably never even heard of Dr Spooner). Instead, we have that drooling fool Sunak with his horrid wyccamical vowels (and I bet he's PPE) and plans to force everybody to suffer mathematics until eighteen years old! No girl or boy etc.etc..
Rumour has it that much of the game shot at Blenheim nowadays is burned or buried: which I think is horrible to the point of sacrilege.
What a world ...
9 comments:
You win your bet, Father. Mr Sunak read PPE at Lincoln.
Sad to hear! That butcher shops in Oxford still offer game meats is a luxury we wouldn't even think of in this stue blate. But, I did have venzon steak with my eggs for breakfast, harvested last fall and stored in the tub freezer in the cellar. Even up north here, trans-Kingston, the long arm of the law extends, so when the swimming woodchucks with the tide wails build a dam across the creek, we go out with the fusil and fusilize em. Because it's not against the law to shoot woodchucks. The wail tags the dog in these here parts...
Game is wholesome and cheap eating indeed but it is true that many large commercial shoots do just bury or burn the birds. They should give them to food banks
A connection of my family owns a fair-sized tract of woodland which is let to a commercial shoot patronised by the rich and tasteless. The sole object of this activity is to kill as many pheasants as possible in the time allotted - a "sport" analogous to the amassing of goals in football or runs in cricket. I am told that the food on which the birds are reared contains growth hormones and other ingredients rendering them unpalatable if not actually poisonous, and that (as at Blenheim) their corpses are buried or burned. What I can't understand is why our government has outlawed the decent, humane and traditional pursuit of fox, stag and hare, but continues to allow this wholesale slaughter of specially reared birds. In fact I can understand it, because unlike hunting this kind of shooting is Big Business, and the people who take part in it are Big Shots (if not always good shots).
A lady of my acquaintance, who grew up in North Carolina, was taught to shoot as a girl, which came in handy during her teenage years - on one occasion she shot a deer, with which she fed her whole family, who were hungry and far from wealthy. (One wonders at the relative cheapness of guns 'n' ammo compared to food in the US of A...)
Matthew: Yes!
As someone who used to shoot (hunt in American) I am shocked that pheasants are just thrown away after a game shoot. Our proudest boast as hunters is that we eat what we shoot!
I still get presents of game from time to time, and it is part of the ethic not to throw it away.
You are right about fox hunting, too. And the rest of what you said.
Messrs Wippel, Exeter and London, soon to close too.
Over a decade ago, I visited a friend of mine, a priest, in a small town in Bavaria near Augsburg. On the evening of my arrival, he said that he had to attend a parish meeting of some sort (the women's Bible study, perhaps), but that there was sausage in the refrigerator for dinner. At the dinner hour, I searched that fridge from top to bottom three times, totally unable to find any sausages to cook - but of course, I was looking for English-style sausages. Finally I realized that he had meant what to my eyes was Italian salami, and which turned out to be very good indeed: Father explained later that it was the gift of a parishioner, who had hunted a wild boar and then turned it into sausage.
At least part of the problem, reverend Father, is that many game dealers now refuse to take lead-shot birds, but many who shoot are reluctant to try steel shot in their older guns which are not proofed for it - hence the birds are un-saleable. The drive towards non-lead shot being driven entirely by EU dogma not science..............
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