This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
The text message was from a number I didn’t recognise. “Got your name from John,” it read. “He said you could supply us with venison.” I read it twice and was none the wiser. I couldn’t remember meeting anybody called John or telling any such person that I was a meat man.
I sat on it for a couple of days and then replied. “Sure I could get you a beast. Butchered and delivered … £65?”
I don’t know why I hit on 65 quid, and anybody I’ve mentioned it to since, who knows about these things, tells me that’s really far too cheap — but I’d committed blindly and I had every intention of delivering.
The plan was that over the Christmas period, I’d get out with my rifle a couple of times at dawn, and there was a very high chance I’d bump into a little sapling-munching ungulate. A week passed and another message dropped. “Hi Patrick, assuming you get someone to do the butchery for you?”
What the lady seemed to be assuming was that for all I might be good at shooting things, I’m perhaps not an experienced butcher. The more I thought about it, the more concerned I became that I didn’t actually have any of the necessary documentation to be selling meat.
I took to the internet to do a bit of Googling. “And what sort of business is this?” the nice and surprisingly efficient man at North Norfolk Council asked when I called.
The whole thing, he confirmed, in a flourish of festive jollity sounded “low risk” — just as long as the meat was butchered by someone certified — but they would scrutinise my application in greater detail.
Just a few days later, the letter landed. “PG Venison & Game Supplies” could open for business. It was much like that scene when Billy Elliot gets into ballet school.
The butcher, when I rang, told me I was “completely nuts”. I wanted them to cut a carcass as a sort of favour when they had “a queue for turkeys and hams running the whole way down the street?” But, he confirmed that if I called after Christmas, they would see about getting it done (nobody in Norfolk ever actually just says “yes”).
A Chinese water deer that I shot at dawn on a Norfolk water meadow, beside one of the county’s chalk streams, was duly delivered to them on the 27th, and I returned in a few days, whereupon they handed back a beautifully cut up beast for a relatively modest fee.
It left the shop vac-packed as steaks, as fillets, and as a great deal of lean mince. Feeling in a promotional sort of mood, I plucked a brace of partridge, vac-packed those, boxed the whole thing up and went out on my first delivery round.
By New Year, I’d pulled off the same trick again and had started supplying the local artisan pizza maker, Smoke & Stone. Totting up the figures and factoring in my purchase of an ink stamp that I’d had made with the “P&G Venison & Game Supplies” logo, I worked out that I had earned some £30 and the whole thing had taken me about two days. I was making about the same daily wage as a small town solicitor in the 1950s.
There is a serious point here. There are more deer in Britain than there have ever been, and almost everybody agrees that we should be eating more of them. Dear George Monbiot has even shot one himself, and Chris Packham occasionally makes the case for venison in the tabloids (how daring, eh?).
The devil, however, is in the detail. People do want the stuff, but getting it to them in a way that makes financial sense is almost impossible. “This business,” a young game dealer from the Norfolk firm, Bambridges, told me when I bumped into him on his rounds recently, “only works on a large scale.”
The other issue is regularity of supply — the deer aren’t just there in a barn waiting to go, and supermarkets demand consistent delivery and consistency of size and flavour.
My order book since that first text message landed has filled up rapidly. Young Londoners are particularly keen, and I am fast becoming a supplier to the city’s writers and poets. To be fair, those poor bastards’ accounts are probably about as healthy as mine at PG Venison & Game.
