How to Be Asked Again ─ How to Be the Perfect Shooting Guest

A step by step guide to modern shooting etiquette stuffed full of amusing quotes and anecdotes, which will instruct the Gun on how to be the perfect guest out shooting - and hence, how to be asked again.

Inspired by the fact that so many more people are taking up shooting as adults and may have missed out on the vital apprenticeship in the field as a child, it encapsulates everything you need to know but no one will ever tell you out shooting as `you are just expected to know'.

The book covers in a logical way what happens, or should happen: from the moment you receive a shooting invitation, to arriving at the shoot, shooting safely and courteously, how to hold your own, how to mark your birds, what never to say and how to tip the keeper. Much of this information comes from almost a hundred interviews with beaters, keepers, flankers, pickers up, shoot organisers, shoot owners, and grouse moor owning earls and dukes. Hilarious cartoons by Oliver Preston make this a very entertaining book on shooting, the perfect gift for any shooting man or woman, either novice shot or experienced Gun.

The youngest daughter of shooting fanatic Sir Joseph Nickerson, who wrote A Shooting Man's Creed, Rosie has been steeped in the dos and don'ts of shooting since early childhood. She shot her first bird, a grouse, at the age of nine. After leaving Cambridge with a degree in modern languages, she worked in PR for four years. She started writing for Country Life and The Field in 1996, later joining Tatler as features associate. `I was the token "green wellie"'. A keen proponent of starting them young, she frequently takes her 5, 9 and 11 year olds with her to load, beat and pick up. Home is London where she lives with her husband, Shropshireborn Piers Whitaker, also a keen shot, and the family escapes to Lincolnshire and Shropshire whenever possible.
Oliver Preston, cartoonist for The Field magazine since 1995, has published seven popular books including Liquid Limericks, Hitting the Slopes, Modern Cautionary Verses and Shall we join the Men? Self taught, his drawings are witty, distinctive and beautifully drawn. As chairman of The Cartoon Art Trust since 2001, he founded Britain's first Cartoon Museum in 2006, and set up the Cartoon Art Trust Awards, now in their fifteenth year. Country Life says of Preston's work, `Each cartoon is prefectly observed with visual jokes lurking in every corner', and Jilly Cooper is also a fan: `Oliver Preston's cartoons bring a smile to my face no matter how often I look at them. The themes are as achingly funny as the drawings are exquisite.' Preston, 46, lives near Tetbury in the Cotswolds and shoots regularly with family and friends.