Regular readers might recall the pictures of the Blaser R93 Luxus I posted the other day & if I can let you into a little secret here & please promise not to tell, in all reality, I wasn’t at all tempted by it. Firstly it was in .30-06 which for UK sporting purposes is more cartridge than you need – there is no UK game that requires a 200-grain bullet. Yes, I fully accept that wild boar are likely to be more widely shot in the near future but some .308 Partitions through my current Remington 700 should suffice for that that job. I completely accept that you can use lighter loads but there is no point in telling me that you can push an 85-gain soft nose to marginally sub light speed through one – prudence dictates that a man who has difficulty in remembering what day of the week it is should keep well away from trying to handload his own ammunition. It really is for the best.

Secondly, whilst this year I have become an ardent fan of the Blaser platform, the Luxus version of the R93 simply doesn’t appeal to my admittedly untutored eye. The metal section around the action looks too much like a shotgun. In exactly the same way that in my overly simplified world, blokes should be blokes & not metrosexual pooftahs, rifles should look like rifles & not their smoothbore brethren. So it was just never going to happen.

However, just as I put away the calculator & stop working out if there is an chance of raising the credit limit on my maxed out credit cards along comes another one...