Now I know that I keep on harping on about shooting gun-up but when you are of a certain shape the bayonette mount can be quite stretching but what was to happen next was not really the best plan, but I may decide to take up fitasc!

Christmas Eve I was officially diagnosed with breast cancer and by the 13th of January 2021 I was the perfect shape for mounting gun-down.  It all might seem a bit drastic but you do have to try to find the positives in these things lol.

The rollercoaster of the single mastectomy, becoming an official uniboober was in no way pleasant, but despite everything, all I wanted to do was go shooting to see my friends and get out and about in the fresh air.

Once the scars were healing and I felt a bit better about life, we did our due diligence and asked the doctors whether the shooting was likely to do any harm.

After a bit of dicussion it was decided that the position of the gun in my shoulder was high enough that it wouldn't interfere with any healing and if I could cope then all was good.

With that in mind and the weakness I was likely to experience when the chemo started Pete in his wisdom decided that I should start using the small Nikko skeet gun gun lol.

When lockdown finally lifted, my chemo started and that's exactly what I did, though I was in no way strong enough to shoot 25 straight just yet.

All our shooting friends were so supportive and I can't say enough how their positivity lifted me out of the doldrums, its amazing how close people become after such a short period of time.

I have managed to shoot several times now though it is still very exhausting, after about 15 shots my arms feel like lead and I have to have a tea break lol .... only one more chemo to go and hopefully my energy levels will start to improve.

There was Pete outside his factory minding his own business drinking his coffee early one morning when out of the corner of his eye he spotted something strange.

There in the Middle of a Haywards Heath industrial estate car park, hopping around between the cars was a Partridge!  When I say hopping he was actually only using one leg and looked a bit dazed and unwell.

Pete approached it and saw that it was in trouble and very definitely not in the right location and was not attempting to fly away!

With his desperatley sore hip he tried to catch up with the little fella to see if he was ok. After a while he decided to enroll several other guys working in the same location to join in, and they managed to catch him and put him in a box.  He seemed very calm and it was decided that he must have escaped being roadkill and travelled by bumper to this unfortunate location and was in some sort of shock.

We called him Dan because it was originally thought he was a quail until further research clearly identified him as a red legged partridge.

I know some of you are probably thinking, considering the site you are reading, that we should have thrown him up in the air and shot him but I'm afraid we both have a soft spot for birds and nursing him back to health would always be our aim lol.

For the next few weeks he lived in our conservatory eating mealworms and grain... and making a mess everywhere.  He became quite accepting of us, chattering in response to us and eventually started walking on both legs, limping a bit, but using the bad leg at least.  He then one day decided to take flight around the conservatory ... we decided it was time for him to leave and go back to his own kind, confident that he was fit enough to make an escape from a preditor should he need to.

We took him up to the track that leads to Southdown Gun Club on the South Downs, waved our goodbyes and he immediately started pecking the ground and walked away - Our 2021 good deed done, we went home and cleaned up the mess lol.