Shoot 'em up

I spent yesterday in the company of 180 bankers, all loaded up with guns and rally driving around an extremely muddy Highclere Estate. There are some for whom walking into a room full of tweedy testosterone is life at its most perfect. They were all carted round the five different drives to compete in the City Shooting Championships, sipping soup and scoffing flapjacks in between, before sitting down to a game pie and potatoes lunch. They're were all jolly good fun. Not a scrap of denim or slick dance move between them, I expect, but plenty of woollen socks and outrageous stories. My favourite, told by a peer of the realm, involved a Swiss restaurant up a mountain, a challenge to split a cork in two with an axe, all his clothes coming off and 50 gobsmacked French people watching ("my children didn't talk to me for two days!" he roared).