THE NEW SOBRIETY

Each time I’ve been invited to go shooting in England, I’ve always struggled with my response. On the one hand I recognise that it is a sincere gesture of friendship and an important part of aristocratic British social life. And, yes, I want to wear the funny trousers. On the other hand, I don’t like guns. I don’t want to shoot anything. And I have in particular zero desire to blast a living creature out of existence. Even the thought of it fills me with a prevailing sense of guilt and grief. I mean, seriously, what the fuck did that woodcock ever do to me that I need to hasten its departure to the next cycle of karmic reincarnation?

There is, however, one exception to this. One creature so offensive to me in every way that I am sometimes driven to near homicidal or, in this case, fowlicidal fantasies of blasting it and all its ilk out of existence: the male peacock. Where was it that our ill-fated paths first crossed? In Copenhagen. More specifically, the Tivoli