My wife Jean and I live in Bearsden, just to the north of Glasgow, and share our home with an extended furry family: Grunig and Mishka, our Newfoundland pups, and Maddison and Merlin, our American Ragdoll cats.

As a retired person constantly trying to fend off enervating ennui, I am fortunate to have been able to let shooting activities occupy a great deal of my time and even – via coaching work – supplement my pension to a small extent. (Some of those who know me would no doubt wish to refute the notion that I’m forever nobly fighting off boredom and instead promote the calumny that it’s really all to do with my having a limited attention span. Philistines!)

Be that as it may, I have been on a few team tours in the past, shooting having taken me round the world a number of times, and greatly enjoy all that being a member of a touring team entails – the camaraderie, the competition, the hospitality extended to us by our hosts and the addition to the sum of my experience as a whole represented by having to explain to hotel managements why certain team members playing the bagpipes in the corridors should not be sufficient reason for chucking the entire team out on to the streets at three in the morning.