May 1st used to be one of the magical dates in the hunting calendar, it being the beginning of the hunting year – the date when all mastership and staff changes actually happened. This year the date that we are all waiting for is May 5th. I think that some football chappy said something about how some people considered Foot ball to be a matter of life and death, but, he said, that is nonsense – it is much more important than that. I suspect that there are many people who feel the same about hunting. Hunting is the drip feed that keeps them alive and all the vital organs functioning properly – take that drip away from them and their souls will shrivel and die. I wonder what sort of state we shall be in by the time that you read this. At the time of writing hunting is not dead, but it is in intensive care – your vote is vital.

May 1st was when the bicycles came out from the shed at the kennels. There they had lain since they were chucked there at the end of the bicycle exercise season last year. Little has appeared in literature concerning the Kennel Bicycle. The KB has come down in the world. Once it was spanking new and shining the love of someone’s life. Since that happy time it has slid down the social scale; has suffered ill usage and abuse; hasn’t had a sniff of an oil can or benefit of spanner, these many years. It has been shut up in cobwebby sheds and is dragged out into the daylight, rusty and creaking, flat of tyre and slack of chain. In the circumstances it can hardly be blamed for having ‘attitude’. This is a being into whose soul the iron has well and truly entered. It is hardly surprising that it regards all humans and, most especially its rider, with a slow fire of hatred. Its calloused seat will play pop with the more delicate areas of the human body that it may come into contact with. It will drop you out the front door, by getting your thong thoroughly enmeshed in its chain. It will then gore you with its twisted handle bars. Halfway across the main road, it will shed its chain altogether, leaving you pedalling furiously and fruitlessly whilst a quarry lorry bears down on you from the North and a cauliflower lorry from Epagne sur Lorn is closing in from the south. Hopkins always said that I was the worst man on a bike that he had ever seen. He used to ‘beer out’ at the Nag & Dog on highly coloured accounts of my mishaps. Like the time that my front wheel suddenly turned square and dropped me in the ditch. Hounds thought this a great game and all piled in on top of me. I reckon that 20 couple of hounds weigh a ton and if they don’t, it damn well feels like it. When I extracted myself at last, I found Hopkins doubled up and rendered incapable with laughter. It was time to assert my magisterial authority. So I picked up his bike and trundled home with hounds, leaving him with a square wheeled bike and 5 miles of a hack home. That wiped the greasy grin off his face.

Later in the summer we would move onto horses. In the good old, bad old days, many hunts would have ponies, or cobs, especially for hound exercise and Autumn Hunting. This was a good way of saving on the mileage of the ‘main stream’ hunters. The theory was that the cobs could then be sold at a profit as ‘The Blankshire Cub Hunters’ ( that was before ‘Autumn Hunting’ had been invented) and could be bought with an easy mind, by the halt, the lame, the old and the nervous, as a patent safety and comfortable transport of delight. Like everything to do with horses, the emptor should jolly well caveat. At least with the wretched kennel bicycle you could throw it in the ditch, whilst you removed the thorn from old ‘Statesman’s’ pad and not look up to see your conveyance flying down the road towards the stables, reins and stirrups flying and with the entire ‘Young Entry’ in delirious and vocal pursuit.

Hound exercise was a necessary and important part of kennel routine, but the timing had to be right. I can still remember, with a shudder, summers when the harvest was delayed. You may know something more mentally debilitating than escorting a Hunting fit pack of hounds through acres of sodden standing corn. It palled a bit. I remember sitting next to a very senior MFH, who was extolling the joys of hound exercise – the song of the blackbird, the dew laden grass, the snail on the thorn, etc, etc: