Ducks

I’ve been cooking up a little local Scottish business scheme over the past couple of years during my various comings and goings. I can’t go into details because the politics and vested interests of a small community are a minefield and I canna risk being gazumped or worse – skittled.

But to progress my plan, I have spoken to a couple of friends who have been keen to help, and introduce me to the local ‘movers and shakers’ and those who are ‘well connected’.

VJ thought it would be useful to meet Andrew, and so she invited me to drinks with him and his wife.

I was just donning my cocktail outfit, when the phone rang.

“Andrew is going skiffling,” she said (at least, I think that’s what she said, I have terrible difficulty understanding the folk around here). “So he can’t get here til about eight, so come for dinner instead.”

Skiffling, I thought, sounds like something you might do on the water.

I re-attired myself in a dinner outfit and two hours later, set out for VJ’s cottage. VJ raises pigs, rather an outré thing for a woman to do, but she doesn’t seem to think it incongruous, sitting by the fire elegantly dressed in her evening wear, discussing how the next lot goes to be slaughtered in a week.

“Do you bond with them?”

“I did with the first lot. We named them, too.” Then she took the little piggies off to market – or abattoir, to be PC – and realised potential bacon was best if it remained anonymous.

Andrew arrives. In plus fours! And long socks! I am enchanted. I thought people only dressed this way in Henry Raeburn paintings.

It turns out skiffling (or something that sounds like skiffling) is duck shooting. The way Andrew described it, he and several others went out into the woods in the pitch dark with their guns and waited for ducks to appear. I tried to get to the bottom of how they could shoot ducks in the dark, but to no avail.

“We’re having duck for dinner,” said VJ. “I’ve been confit-ing all day.” Alongside her other talent as a pig breeder, VJ is rather a gourmet cook. Her ‘scratch’ supper – which was what she promised us due to the last-minute invitation – bears closer resemblance to a Michelin menu than a leftovers fry-up.

“I’m glad I get to have some duck today,” said Andrew, tucking into shredded duck and spiced lentils, “because we certainly didna shoot any.”

Over dinner we have lengthy debate and discussion about my scheme and Andrew and his wife make several useful suggestions. There seem to be many competing interests to consider. I am shortly meeting with funding bureaucracy in Perth, so I try my best to mine this new intelligence.

Andrew, however, is keen to be involved in the project and we decide to all regroup over dinner at my cottage after my meeting to see whether my plan is deemed to have any legs and likely to get a grant to proceed.

I won’t be cooking duck. Ducks are in shorter supply this season, and I am grieving that one of the pair which daily visited me last year, seems to have abandoned his or her mate. These mornings when I look out of my window, although there is only one duck, I invariably see a large rabbit, a red squirrel and a hedgehog, all of whom frequently run around the lawn and down to the river’s edge.

I dare not name them, in case one or other comes to an untimely end, the victim of a local fox – or worse, an errant skiffler shooting haphazardly in the dark.