I had a nice couple of hours down at A1 today - my brother and I pretty well had the place to ourselves. While I was waiting for my brother to arrive, Claudio very kindly took some time to have a chat and talked me through how OT is meant to work, and I'll be going back to give it a go sometime soon. Since he seemed happy to chat, I asked him about the rumour of their closing down, and while it was by no means a conversation that he has asked me to broadcast generally, he was keen to make it clear that they have no immediate plans to close down the shooting ground. The cemetery plans are there largely as a planB. They lost a court case against some of their neighbours a while ago because of the excessive noise made by the shooting (apparently some of the complaints came from the other side of the A1... just how clay shooting creates more noise than the A1 is beyond me!) and so they are under constant threat of being closed down if someone takes a noise measurement over a certain level and reports them. The planning permission for a cemetery is "for when that happens". In the meantime, shooting continues as normal.
I do think some areas of the ground could be tidied up a bit, but going round the dozen or so stands today, we had no no-birds from 200+ clays, which made a change from some other times when I have gone round and have given up on stands because they just couldn't send out a clay.
