Shotguns, trousers, Rugeley and weight gain.

Doing the charity shops in the nearby town of Rugeley yesterday - still after interview-wear - I stuck my head into the tiny, packed-to-the-roof-beams gun shop there and found that there were about a dozen big sheets of cardboard propped up on the floor, each with hundreds of little holes in them. 'I've put on weight', said Ray the owner - and I nodded as if I knew what he was talking about.

'Look - all these are up and left,' he went on, pointing at a sheet of cardboard and tapping in turn each of the quarters around the centre, '122, 76, 20, 53 - see? They're grouping up and to the left.'

'Ah,' I said - I still had no idea why he was talking about weight gain but the numbers on the cardboard at least were beginning to make some sort of sense to me, 'You're zeroing a shotgun?'

'Well...', clearly this idea didn't quite hit the mark, 'sort of...'.

Eventually, he managed to explain it to me. He'd noticed that his shooting had become less accurate in recent years and he'd struggled to understand why. Recently he'd thought that this might be because he'd put on some weight - the stock of the shotgun having to sit differently against his now somewhat chubbier cheek. He'd decided that this had shifted the angle of the gun in his grip and had an effect on the spread of pellets in and around the central target zone.

So he now had to alter his gun so that he was hitting the bulls-eye again. You don't do this with shotguns, I learned, the way you would do with an air rifle, by fiddling with little dials, you do it by altering the way that the gun sits against your shoulder and face. The cardboard sheets were the evidence of the shots he'd taken after making changes to the cheek-piece of his gun; tuning it, in effect, to try and bring the area of maximum pellet density back to the centre of the aimed-for area. He'd finally settled on one set of changes after he'd begun to consistently produce sheets with more balanced patterns.

It was very pleasant to go into a shop and be involved in a conversation like this; he was happy to tell me all about it and clearly chuffed that he'd hit on a way to make his shooting more accurate. I've been doing more shooting practice myself recently - trying to work on accuracy - and so it was great to come across another person involved with the same field of questions and challenges; helpful, in other words, to see that other people have some of the same preoccupations as you do yourself.