“Catapulting us from the depths of despair last week, my son has made an amazing recovery from his quad bike accident. Midway through a gundog demonstration at Bowood Game and Country Fair, my mobile phone started to ring; every bone in my body wanted to answer it but at that point in the recovery process, every phone call was answered with fear - ever nervous of bad news from the hospital.

A message from the ex

The answer phone took the message, I finished the demo and immediately went to the answer machine and the message was from my ex-wife who was at the hospital with Charlie. “Charlie’s back, we’ve got our boy back,” were the two sentences that will sit with me for the rest of my life. The rush of relief that shot through my body can only be described as something that I’ve never felt in my life and the only words that I can think of and spell correctly is overwhelmingly, euphoric!

A massive thank you to every single person whose support and goodwill was invaluable.

As a family, we have been incredibly lucky to get out of this one so lightly, I realise that for people every where that life does not always deal such a kind hand so do not wish to appear to sound flippant, but, MY BOY IS BACK, wow!

Diamond geezers

My favourite diamond geezers, Brian and Tracey Chesser, continue to go from strength to strength winning just about every gundog event that they enter. The gundog addiction has now taken hold and the Chessers are now a two gundog family. We helped them with a dummy delivery problem through the H&C website and the use of video, and it is fantastic to see such enthusiastic and hardworking people having so much fun and achieving so much with their dogs. I asked Brian for a picture of himself and all his winnings and you can see that they are quite a force to be reckoned with.

The grouse shooting season is now well under way and the annual build up of excitement and last minute preparation of dogs and guns is upon us. I will be reluctant to see the long warm days of this summer drift away, but as you all know the shooting season means that we will soon now get to put into practice all those months of training and preparation with our dogs; get on!”