Beautiful Game

Today being the third Thursday in the month, we went shopping at the Farmers' Market; and one of our regular stops is at Rushyford Game. I am not a nice person, but I can't resist quoting from their leaflet:

Allan Ellis & Paul Craddock, are striving to make Game into a more appealing, healthy option, to the family menu. By taking the more Traditional Game & Venison cuts & making them a little easier to use.

With an array of Sizzling Sausages, Beautiful Burgers, Mouth Watering Steaks, Stir Fries & Oven Ready Products, the boys at Rushyford Game, try to cater for everyone, Public & Trade alike. We aim to do whatever we can to keep Game where it should be.

The effect is not the same without the pretty font face, which makes the most of every curly ampersand, but I am still charmed by the lavish use of commas and the eighteenth century capitalisation. The Wood Pigeon & Damson Burgers are pretty damn fine, too.

So we were talking to Allan (I think it was Allan), who was up at four yesterday morning to go shooting the deer who were getting into DEFRA's hardwood plantations: the young bucks were destroying the trees by rubbing their antlers against them to remove the velvet, which irritates them. They eat the blackthorn. "I won't be here next month,", he told us, "I'm off to Arkansas to visit my dad, and buy some guns." And he explained that importing guns is not a problem, you just turn up at the airport with them properly crated. Which is just as well, as he does a lot of work training people in shooting meat for the kitchen, and the proper way of removing the meat from the carcase - "gralloch", he said, he actually used the word "gralloch".

He was very insistent about the importance of the lymph nodes, too, and would cheerfully have told me more than I wanted to know about lymph nodes.