Diary – 24 September 2004

The imminent ban on fox-hunting saddens me mainly for reasons of nostalgia. I am far too much of a sissy ever to have hunted: I would fall off my horse as soon as it moved, and cry if the poor little fox got caught. But I am romantic enough to love the Olde Englishness of the hunt: the Surteesian image of pink-coated squires racing across a pastoral landscape. Although I am a total townie, hunting is part of my family mythology. My grandmother grew up on a Gloucestershire farm amid rabid blood-sports enthusiasts. Her father — a terrifying, hawk-nosed domestic tyrant who once bit his son on the leg for forgetting to light the Aga — only allowed one book in the house: Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. The whole family loved hunting, but in a typically perverse country way they also loved foxes. In my grandmother’s photo album there is a picture of a fox sitting on their lawn, nose-to-nose with the family labrador.