The Glorious Twelfth is usually used to refer to 12 August, the start of the shooting season for Red Grouse (Lagopus lagopus scoticus) and to a lesser extent the Ptarmigan (Lagopus muta) in the United Kingdom. This is one of the busiest days in the shooting season, with large amounts of game being shot.
Men, brave men, armed only with shotguns from expensive armourers, take on vicious birds, descendants of raptors from many millenia ago; grouse, intent on destroying the very fabric of our society, visceral in their viciousness, brutal in their intensity to destroy Big Society….. but fear not…. England, this sceptred isle, breeds men with brains of oak still…who defend our shoes (and shores) from terror.
The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still
And I remember things I’d best forget.
For now we’ve marched to a green, trenchless land
Twelve miles with battering guns: along the grass
Brown lines of bracken are hives for snoring grouse;
Wide, radiant water sways the floating sky
Below dark, shivering trees. And living-clean
Comes back with thoughts of home and hours of sleep.
To-night I smell the battle; miles away
Gun-thunder leaps and thuds along the ridge;
The spouting shells dig pits in fields of death,
And wounded grouse, are moaning in the woods.
If any grouse be there whom I have loved,
God speed him safe to Waitrose with a fine jus, parsnips, roast potatoes, carrots and a hint of garlic and thyme
With sincere apologies to Siegfried Sassoon.
PS: The only good thing is that these people pay an average of £40 a bird – whereas we can buy them from Waitrose for a fiver. See what I mean about brains of oak?
sassoon rather liked his foxhunting didn’t he?
anyway, the glorious twelfth actually marks the season on shooting publicly funded lawyers.
SW – Indeed… but at least the fox had a chance before it became illegal… now Hunts employ snipers, I am told! 🙂
huntingdon have employed snipers to deal with publicly funded lawyers? i’m not surprised – long overdue.