I would like to thank all of you who wrote to the Daily Telegraph on my behalf. I fear it was all to no avail. It seems that I have got right up the New Editor’s nose.. I feel that what we have here is a ‘Culture Clash’. I was brought up in a certain culture and when I started working for the DT in 1987, it was a paper that broadly agreed with that culture. Part of that culture is ‘Good Manners’. The dismissal made me bitter and angry. I fear that in my commentary on the dismissal, I let my bitterness and anger show through. This was bad manners on my part and I apologise. I allowed my cultural standards to slip. This was wrong. I was discussing the matter with my friendly Doctor the other day and he told me that I was exhibiting all the classic signs of bereavement. I had gone from disbelief, to denial, then anger. The final phase is acceptance – the dumping of the past and moving on to a new life. This is the stage that I have now reached. However, I shall never forget the happy times that I had with that column and all the readers who made it happy by supporting me so loyally. I shall not forget you. Especially I shall remember the letter I received from a Guardsman whose legs were badly injured in the Narvik landing. He loved the English countryside and walking in it. Over the years he had become progressively crippled and became confined to a wheel chair. It was the last line of his letter that is carved in my memory:

“And you, sir, have now become my legs.”

Now I must move on and try to find a new billet. It is not proving easy. None of the editors that I have written to, so far, have even bothered to acknowledge my letters. This strikes me as PPC (Piss Poor Courtesy) but it does seem that ‘Good Manners’ and ‘Common Courtesy’ are baggage that the Politically Correct have decided to jettison – can’t have old fashioned junk like that cluttering up the place.

A little snippet for you - I met an Old Fettesian (I hope that is correct) the other day, a man who had known Blair at that august seat of learning. He told me what Blair’s nickname had been at school – it was ‘Emily.’

“Why Emily?” I asked

“Why do you think?” said he. So I thought and you do not have to think very hard to come up with the right answer – you only have to study the man’s body language and take a good look at his Best Mates. The other things you should study are Blair’s eyes. In animal terms, he has a ‘bad eye’ and if he were a horse, you would be a fool to buy him. In short he is the complete fruit and nut case. Not only that but I suspect that he is a sick man. No man of his age should be that colour. As my Grandmother used to say:

“Greenery, yallery, grey in the gallery – foot in the grave, young man.”

March has certainly been a pot-pourri of weather – signs of spring interspersed with nasty great dollops of winter. It certainly came ‘in like a lion’, but shows no inclination of going out ‘like a lamb’. Still and all, spring is frowned on in Northumberland as some soft southron thing – like drinking lager and going shopping with the wife. At one time I lived on Dartmoor, where the weather can also be very kittle. There is a little rhyme about it:

“Vust er rained, then er blawed

Then er hailed, then er snawed

Then er comed a shower of rain

Then er vruz and blawed again.

That seems to sum up March ’04 in the Cheviots very well. To all those itching to (they are always with us) write and tell me that I have left the apostrophes off ‘er and is it not sexist to make the weather feminine? I have an answer. The little rhyme is written in dialect. The Devon dialect is derived from the Saxon and ‘er’ is the Saxon word for ‘it’ – so there.

The end of March brings the end of our hunting season. This can bring mixed feelings of sadness and relief. All those who hunt love hunting, but to fit two or three days every week into a work schedule can mean cramming a lot of work into a smaller space. This can mean missing days and, by sod’s law, the ones you miss are always the good ones. Another season slipping by also means that you are one year older and one year nearer collecting life’s P45. Not that death worries me, just as long as it is quick and clean. I remember standing with a lady at the bottom of a hillside down which hounds were coursing a hunted fox. The rolled him over right in front of us. The lady turned to me and said:

“I only hope that when I die, I die as quickly as that fox.” A few years later, she did. She was sitting on her bed and suddenly fell back on the bed – dead. She was a wonderful person and all her many friends still miss her greatly, but what a wonderful way to die. The thing that I dread is living on in this world as a vegetable – “sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything.” (Shakespeare).

Relief at the end of the hunting season comes because how ever much you love hunting it does become a bit stale after 7/8 months. Nature also sends messages – foxes become hard to find and harder to hunt when you do find them. There are many heavy vixens about and the ewes are also getting heavy as lambing time approaches. All in all it is time to stop. At one time I used to go straight from hunting to lambing, which used to take care of the withdrawal symptoms through sheer exhaustion. I no longer have a lambing to worry about and I do not miss it.

Someone wrote to me and accused me of being a Racist. I pondered this, as it is one of the greatest insults in the PC ammo pouch, but I concluded that, like so much that is PC, it is meaningless gobbledegook. I never judge a person by their race, their creed or their colour – they are totally irrelevant. It is what is inside a person that counts. I have only one test for people – are they reliable or not? If they are not then I spit them out like a gob of phlegm, because that is all they are worth. What is a ‘Racist’? I will lay good odds that no one can define it. I understand that the word was coined by Leon Trotsky. Like so much communist dialectic, it is just a bit of meaningless cant, but makes a useful slogan for mindless morons to chant. It is unfortunate that it is the mindless morons who now run this country. This country is now run on slogans. I do admit that it is easier than actually thinking – that would be quite unthinkable.

Never mind - spring is springing and let us all hope for a decent time and a new beginning.