I’ll be completely honest with you and I don’t care if you call me sad; I’m really missing my shooting.

It’s not all bad. There is still more than enough sport about for me to get my fix, but I remain unfulfilled and have started to try, and am failing badly, to recreate the excitement of the past shooting season through whatever medium I can lay my hands on.

I have swapped walking between drives with walking my neighbour’s dog; aiming at high pheasants has been replaced by high green aliens down at the local video arcade; and I sometimes find myself contemplating whether or not to wade into the bush on the village green just to see if I can flush anything out.

You might say ‘get down the shooting ground’ or 'seek medical help' to combat this affliction (and I have already planned on doing the first one) but it's not just the pulling of the trigger that I miss, it’s the banter with guns, beaters and their four – legged companions.

I must have played every sport imaginable in my younger days, and nothing compares to the sense of community people in shooting enjoy up and down the country.

Maybe there is a support group for people like me, people who are marking the days until the shooting season starts again. If anyone knows of one, please let me know.

A glance at the office’s 2008 planner certainly makes for depressing reading - there are more than seven months until the season starts. That's a lot of pound coins at the pleasure park.

Until the Olympics come and go in August, it’s going to be a long, lonely summer; and when that's over, as Billie Joe Armstrong once sang, wake me up when September ends.

I’m rather pleased with myself. Last weekend, not only did I shoot two cocks and two hens during the beater’s day I attended (my best ever total on a shoot), but I also plucked, de-breasted and then cooked two of the birds all by myself!

Whilst I think it’s great that the likes of Waitrose are now selling more and more game (and long may it continue) it occurred to me as I was eating the birds (with a side of mustard mash, garden peas and squash) that this was possibly the most organic and environmentally friendly meal I had eaten in my entire life.

Barring the clentched fist of the picker-up, no one other than I had ever touched the birds before. They had been housed and fed like bird royalty from the moment they arrived at the shoot and were all dispatched humanly.

They had been hanging in my garage, so there was no need to recycle any containers. Add this to the fact that we walked between most drives on the day, my carbon footprint must have been about as deep as an inflatable fawn wearing a pair of padded Ugg boots…low in order words.

How many other sports can be this environmentally friendly I wonder?

Let's have it straight now, which of your Christmas gifts will soon to be gracing a charity shop window or subject to bidding on e-Bay?

My ‘no clothes without my expressed permission/ approval’ rule worked wonders and thus I didn’t have to worry about disposing of a reindeer jumper outside Oxfam in the dead of night. However, I was surprised to receive a bottle of ‘Josh’ aftershave from an unknown well-wisher. Dare I use it from now on as my signature cologne or use it to defrost my windscreen in the morning?

Alas, the floodgates quite literally opened on the issue of port. I had a large bottle from someone in work (we do Secret Santa every year) while several others awaited me on Christmas morning. Great you might think, that is until I fell ill on December 28 and proceeded to groan like Jacob Marley until well after New Year’s Eve and thus miss the opportunity to consume one of my few vices (behind shooting, football, clothes, Sherlock Holmes, J.D Salinger and cheese).

Like many people, today marks the start of my new diet. In the interests of advertising I won’t tell you which grail I have decided to follow, but fortunately, game is a food I can get stuck into as often as I would like. A (very, very, very) small glass of the aforementioned red stuff is allowed, although I have promised to keep it for toasting the end of a magazine at the end of each month.

Will I stick to it, or fall by the wayside like I did last year? I hope not, I’ll be 28 soon and the thought of not being able to bound up and down the stairs without wheezing (as was the case the Monday after our Christmas party) fills me to the core with dread.