Real life | 6 October 2016

After a year dealing with estate agents I can only say: a plague on all their houses, except the one of mine they’re trying to sell.

I do hate being obvious and lashing out at oft maligned groups because it really is too clichéd. I belong to several of these hated groups myself, after all. Journalists, they get it in the neck all the time. And hunters. See Rod Liddle last week or Liz Jones the weekend before that for some classic examples of how the left rip me to shreds whenever I dare to suggest that I would like to keep the countryside a nice place in which to live.

Liddle moans that he is sick of hearing about my ‘bloody horse ’, and wonders why I don’t like the skies being full of artificially boosted numbers of marauding red kites when my surname suggests I am one.

Rod, my dear man, as you well know, I am not a red kite, I am a blue kite, and blue kites are not birds of prey.