Some are born with great hand-eye co-ordination – for example the nicely-named Tin Tin Ho, the number one British Women’s Table Tennis player - while others are not so blessed. I fall into the latter category.

I mention this because I was asked shooting last month. I tend to be invited after the urban financiers have decimated the hedgerows and the few birds that remain alive are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The reason for these kind invitations is because my hosts know that my gun will not trouble those wretched, winged beasts. The worst that can happen is that my banging will give them a migraine. 

However, it was not always thus. Once, when Yuppies strode the earth and I sported a double-breasted Prince of Wales check suit and patronised the Groucho Club, I was a member of a shooting syndicate. Armed with an elderly BSA side-by-side gun, with barrels so short I could have robbed a post office, I spent many a crisp winter day swinging at high pheasants. In those days I could hit a fat game bird and once even downed a pigeon – a feat so fantastic that I still remember the number on the metal band ringing its right foot. Anyway for reasons that in hindsight seem quite contrary, I mothballed my gun when I moved to the country.

A decade later when a local shoot was a gun short, I was strong-armed into bringing out the BSA. And it was then that I realised I was no Tin Tin Ho. I fired my gun with vigour and hit nothing - absolutely nothing. Annoyingly my host and the other guns found my lack of skill highly amusing. So much so that I have occasionally been summoned to one or two late season shoots as a figure of fun, a sort of geeky ex-London loon in breeks.

And so it was that a few weeks ago, a shooting invitation came from my friend Peter. It was a fine day and the guns were wearing one thermal too many as they set off for the first drive in which I peppered a low pheasant (this was subsequently disputed by the blokes with dogs as nobody could find the damned thing). The second drive was less of a success but on the third drive, I was back in my Yuppie years. The first covey of birds came out of the woods like a squadron of Spitfires. Bang went the BSA and a red-legged fowl caught a packet. The next group passed safely over my head, except for a very high bird lurking behind the main body. I swung, fired and it too dropped dead - a shot that was the equal of that which had taken out that pigeon a quarter of a century ago. 

Shortly afterwards I strolled past the game cart with its pairs of game birds hanging from their baling twine nooses and noticed a feathered creature dangling alone; a black spotted fledgling with a long tail with a whitish edge. "It’s a Mistle Thrush", said a fellow gun. "Somebody probably thought it was a high partridge and so it’s best to say nothing." But my chum Philip, who had been on a neighbouring peg, did not agree. In full J’accuse pomp he bellowed, "it was Edwards that shot the Missile Thrush".

I had never heard of a Mistle Thrush. (One reason for my ignorance is that there are, according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, only 170,000 breeding pairs in the UK - a number unfortunately now reduced to 169,999.) 

The next day someone had mischievously joined me to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The following Saturday I was sitting in my local bar sipping a pint and awaiting a ham and cheese sandwich, when instead of the expected toastie, Peter and Philip emerged from the kitchen and presented me with a garnished, gutted and plucked Mistle Thrush. It came with a menu that claimed it was the `plat du jour’, that it was served with a large slice of humble pie and that it was priceless. Readers might be interested to know that once cooked it was no bigger than a Ping Pong ball and it tasted of celluloid.

It will, I have decided, be another decade before the BSA once again swings across a clear blue winter sky.