“Phew! Just come back from an action packed, non-stop week at the New Forest Show. The weather was superb and it felt like all of the 60 million residents of the UK had come to the show - it was packed. As always, the dogs were their usual fantastic selves and they loved the dawn to dusk attention that was lavished on them by visitors to our stand.

Grumpy Howard

We only had to do two half hour demonstrations each day, and I know it makes me sound grumpy but, by the end of the three days, we all felt that if one more person asked us how to teach Rover to walk to heel that a week in therapy would be required.

An evening with Jose

One consolation was that H&C’s celebrity chef Jose L Souto was giving game cookery demonstrations at the show and we were delighted to be invited over to spend the evening around the campfire with Jose, his wife Charlotte and their family. Jose is so talented, he produced the most fantastic food for a dozen people with nothing more than a portable wok and some fantastic game meat. It reminded me of the days when I used to go to Bible Class and learned the biblical story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Having watched Jose’s game cooking demonstrations, he has inspired an interest in game cooking and I shall follow his blogs with interest.

New series of videos

We launched the second in our series of dog training DVDs titled Get On to an industry guest list at the Hawk Conservancy and to be quite honest the run up to the launch day was all consuming. Life continues to throw new experiences at me and the prospect of the launch was a little unnerving. Besides ensuring that everything ran like clockwork, I had to deliver a short speech and then prepare to deliver a gundog demonstration while the guests watched a promo of the new DVD. Organising the day and giving a gundog demo was a walk in the park. The speech and waiting for the critic’s opinion of the DVD can only be described as terrifying.  

Rapidly approaching season

The shooting season is rapidly approaching and getting dogs trained and fit takes lots of my time, in fact there doesn’t really seem to be enough, although time is precious there continues to be huge amounts of personal satisfaction in seeing young dogs learn the job and gradually come up to the mark. A young cocker called Monty has got my eye at he moment, he has been a little slow at putting it all together but having worked him this afternoon, I think he is going to be really useful and competitive little dog.

If your going out shooting with your dog this year make sure you spend some time in the training field with him, ensure he is steady and that he is keen to respond to your whistle. There’s still plenty of time for you to put some real polish on both you and the dogs performance. Keep training!”