My son produced a girlfriend the other day who was, rather improbably, called Sizzle. There was much speculation about how she had acquired such a name and what it could be short for (I think Cecilia was the best bet) but in the end it turned out she had been born Sizzle, although I find it hard to believe. I disgraced myself by chanting the children's bath-time ditty:
"Three little sausages sitting in a pan, sizzle, sizzle and one went bang," which is the culinary equivalent of Three Craws or Ten Green Bottles.
Anyway, Sizzle danced reels like a demon in a new rather fetching pale-grey frock from Miss Selfrid
ge, could flatten a rabbit at 40 yards with a .22 and drop a decoyed pigeon at 30 with a Westley Richards 12 bore. Mind, I only discovered all this later.
I had rather thought the poor girl was being dragged out morning, noon and night to provide an audience for the boys, one whom they could show off to. But not a bit of it.
For Sizzle was up at 5am and out with the rifle for a roe deer, back for breakfast and a kip, out again for pigeons and back in the afternoon for a salmon and off again for a roe at night, if they weren't going dancing.
Greater love hath no girl than to sit in a prickly bush with her man and wait for a pigeon. If Sizzle didn't like it she concealed it very well.
On top of all this sporting prowess she was taking a correspondence course to qualify as a chartered surveyor. It struck me that if the idle sod of a son played his cards right he'd never have to do another day's work in his life.
Between surveying Queen Anne mansions in Datchet she could be filling the freezer with game while he thumbed through Trout and Salmon and Sporting Rifle.
And another thing, she took the best film on a camera phone I have ever seen of someone catching a salmon. You know how most camera phone footage is completely hopeless, all at wonky angles, blurred, frequently blank on account of being pointed straight at the sun or a bright light or into a dark corner?
Well, Sizzle had the eye of David Lean: panoramic sweeps of the river taking in splashing fish, bending rod and screaming line. There was a moment when everything went upside down, but only, it turned out, to get a better take on Harvey the gillie wielding the net.
The fish was a 14 pounder and the final shots, which had sound, were only marred from a conservation viewpoint by the voice of Alf, our frequent partner in sporting exploits, heaving into view clutching a priest and loudly declaring for the microphone "Cor, we'll definitely have to knock this one on the head."
Harvey declined, and so the fish went back, which was a pity but probably quite right. But it was followed by a 4lb grilse, which was deemed keepable. And all this sport and excitement was deftly filmed by Sizzle.
She was even in on the kill of a roebuck, which had responded to one of those squeakers that sounds like a fawn in distress. Three squeaks and it came out of the undergrowth head up, looking straight at the rifle. It is now two haunches, two fillets and a huge quantity of sausages and burgers. Sizzle skipped the butchery. A girl can put up with so much.
