23 AUGUST 2003, Page 8

N aked ambition is harder to disguise in the country. Take

the duck race at a neighbouring village fete. A hundred yellow plastic ducks went whizzing along a turbulent stream. My grandson Phineas's duck was number 94, a prankster who liked to swim bottom up, head under water. We supporters cheered from the bank, lamenting as our duck tangled with a willow branch, rejoicing as he sped on a discovered current. A surprisingly gentle country pursuit, you might think, until I spotted number 94 had joined the leaders. 'Go for it, 94! Squeeze them out, 94! Bash them with your beak! Scuttle the wimps!' Now he was up to third, then second, one bridge to go, a foot or two of shallow and he could win! 'You're the champion!' Shaking with tension and triumph, I turned to my grandson's round, wondering eyes, to my house-guests' quizzical expressions. 'You realise,' said Trevor, he was in the second wave of arrivals, which makes him 16th.

Qn the walk home. I noticed Trevor's wife, Valerie, behaving rather oddly, scuttling into the undergrowth. It turned out she was extending her Clean Up North London Campaign. I was rather miffed to think Dorset needed her attentions, but, emerging with an insalubrious piece of plastic, she consoled me with the assurance that we have a very high class of litter which didn't even call for her rubber gloves or animated steel hand.

It does, of course, take time to simmer down after a summer in London. I have never quite understood why 50 per cent of awards, lectures, parties, conferences, launches and assorted events take place in June and July. Happily, this didn't depress attendance at the two family events I'm involved in: the Longford Trust annual lecture and the Catherine Pakenham Award. Last year Cherie Blair came and said the right things about the inefficiency and misery of prisons — she was dressed all in white and had a delightful angel-of-mercy look to her. This year we had the great Bishop Sentamu, who said just as many right things but applied them to the wider world, i.e., if you don't sort out the difference between justice and revenge at home, you'll never do it abroad. I know who I was thinking about — someone not so far from the Angel of Mercy.

My sister Catherine was killed in a car crash when she was 23 and at the start

of a journalistic career. Each year now she comes to life again at the awards in the person of a young woman of just her age, skirts a little longer or shorter over the years, but sharp hopefulness the same. I find myself becoming more, not less emotional as the years pass. Or is it sentimental? At last Sunday's Mass my husband interrupted his singing of a hymn by W. Chatterton Dix (1837-1898) to whisper, 'Whoever said the Victorians weren't emotional?' Nobody,' I hissed back. 'They're famously sentimental.' He gave me a withering look: 'You've never known the difference between emotion and sentiment.' Which I guess is true. Please enlighten me.

If you want to be taken seriously, it doesn't do to admit that you're taking too long a break from the big city. Not any more, that is. A past president of an Oxford college liked to announce that there were only three good things about the job: June, July and August. Tony, the present president of Magdalen, quoted this to me but only to bewail his own fate, which allowed him hardly more than a week or two off in August. I dread to think how he'll escape at all if the plans for a post-A-level entrance go through. We were attending a glorious Plush concert. For the non-cognoscenti, this is a series of chamber concerts organised by the cellist Adrian Brendel and held in a deconsecrated 18th-century church. The audience is a catholic mix of locals and Londoners, the latter recognisable by their forays on to hillocks where they pretend to look at the view while secretly checking if there's a signal on their mobiles. (There never i5.) The big news in our village is the case of the broody chicken. This white speckly hen (a Light Sussex) lives wild in the garden opposite ours, nesting at night high above the foxes in a tall bay tree. The garden's

owner noticed her sitting broodily on her unfertilised eggs and decided to give her a treat. He popped off to a neighbouring village, where he bought four eggs of superior species. Now there are four charming chickens in the garden: mother plus a Rhode Island Red, a Buff Orpington and a Speckled Sussex. Only one egg failed to hatch. Is there a challenge for the human geneticists in this?

During the spell of Graham Greene-type _L." heat — your skin touches another and sweat begins to drip — I had thought of sleeping out in our garden. But what with the wilfully noisy wood pigeons, the scavenging foxes, the humping badgers, the energetic moles, the hysterical squirrels, the scampering rabbits, the rose-eating deer, the parading pheasant (plus eight babies) and the designer chickens on a dawn visit, I could hardly expect a moment's silence. And that's to leave out the mice, the voles, the butterflies and the garden birds which have never been told about the peace of the countryside.

The unwelcome ubiquity of badgers in he

gardens has inspired a fashionable weekend entertainment called either Badger Patrol or Marking Your Territory. Participating males (never females) arc invited to urinate along designated boundaries, thus repelling the invading badgers. `North-east section secured, sir,' as a guest reported to our host during a jolly house-party in Cornwall. For obvious reasons, it is recommended that patrols take place after dark, preferably following a bibulous supper.

Isee this is turning into a nature notebook. If only I had a proper memory. I would respond to nature's gifts with poetry. Last weekend we were enjoying a pre-lunch glass of wine on deckchairs in the shade of an old apple tree. Above our heads fairytale red apples (Beauty of Bath) hung from the gnarled branches. 'Look up, Harold,' said my sister, Antonia. Seemingly without pause for recollection, my enviable brother-in-law was reciting in a resonant baritone:

What wondrous life is this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine....

For those interested, this comes from an Andrew Marvell poem called 'The Garden', which extols the joys of the countryside over the vain pursuits of the city.