Country life
Capital myths
Leanda de Lisle
We had a rector blessing the hounds at the opening meet last week. He said a prayer he'd got from a priest from Tipper- ary. It asked God that the enjoyment of the hunt 'be for our good and your glory'. Then he showered the pack, the horses and their riders with copious amounts of holy water. Londoners might have found it a strange sight. But, then, they are not always very good at imagining how they look to out- siders.
Travelling to London from the country is like trying to visit a remote island. It is almost impossible to get to. If it's not the trains being cancelled, it's the roads being blocked. The capital will soon develop mythical status. Climb a glass mountain, answer six riddles, tap your magic shoes together and you'll be there! Unfortunate- ly, when you've finally arrived you then find it is almost equally difficult to pass from one borough to another. Taxis charge you £45 to go down the road so you end up instead on an underground system which deposits you at random destinations. I'm not at all sure Londoners have any idea how bizarre this is.
When I complained to an acquaintance about the cost of a cab I was told, 'Oh, we haven't used them for years,' as if I'd been talking about first class-travel on the Titan- ic's sister ships. Londoners should turn up for the People's Fuel Lobby shindig in Hyde Park on 14 November and demand a fair fare. If they don't they could find themselves trapped forever in a Kafkaesque underworld in which Circle line trains vanish for hours and voices announce: 'The Piccadilly line will not be stopping at King's Cross' seconds before you are due to disembark there.
However, I fear that, far from making common cause with the fuel protesters, Londoners will get all intelligent and ask, `Who runs the country?' and 'Where is our democracy?' Of course there is a point when legitimate protest becomes some- thing approaching terrorism, but I'd say dressing up in balaclavas, arming yourself with baseball bats and running trip wires about the place hits that mark, and you don't see many Guardian journalists or Labour politicians trying to pressurise the police into arresting these criminal hunt- saboteurs. In London, the small business- man is regarded as uniquely dangerous. But never mind.
If we all leave our fridge doors open and insist on maintaining big hairstyles the metropolitan elite will end up living at the bottom of the Thames. I say 'living' because some of them seem to have devel- oped gills already. A friend took me to the St Martin's hotel and, I tell you, I haven't seen anything like the clientele since the bar scene in the first Star Wars movie. I wanted to prod their glassy-eyed faces to see how much was latex and how much the flesh of some extra-terrestrial life form. But I didn't. I sat down on these gold bum- shaped seats and marvelled. I know what Johnson meant about not being able to tire of London. It is amazing, as well as amaz- ingly hard to get to.
To be fair, on Midland Main Line and Virgin Trains, as someone recently pointed out, the leaves on the line still had trees attached to them. The winds blew over sev- eral of ours the day before the opening meet. But the air grew still and the sun shone for horse and hound. It seemed to us that we had God's blessing, as well as that of the rector. Outsiders may see it differently.
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