Country life
Birthday bites
Leanda de Lisle
Peter has just celebrated his 40th birth- day. We didn't have a party, preferring to save our pennies towards the costs of his being a Master of Fox Hounds. But he had plenty of very 'country life' presents. I gave him horse blankets which he complained about because they bear the maker's logo as well as his initials. His parents gave him a white whip, which they complained about because it wasn't the one they wanted to give him.
Masters of Foxhounds have very long white leather whips rather than the usual brown, and my in-laws hoped to get Peter one with some history. To their great delight they saw that a whip which had 'You've got high-ho-high-ho-high-ho blood pressure.' belonged to the former owner of their house was in a local sale. They left a bid and my mother-in-law told the auctioneer in no uncertain terms that they wanted it. She is not a woman to be thwarted. But to her horror someone outbid her.
Unluckily for the new owner of the whip, he then met my mother-in-law at a party. It is clear from what she told me that he was on the receiving end of a bit of verbal flag- ellation. I told her the chap wasn't to know how badly she wanted the whip, or even that she wanted it at all. I didn't dare add that, in any case, we didn't exactly have a right to it. Peter passing the 40 milestone appears to have had an adverse affect on the temper of mother as well as son.
Happily Peter's presents from the chil- dren were a complete success. My eldest son had made his father a tie that resem- bles those florid numbers favoured by Peter Snow on Channel 4's 7 o'clock news. His brothers had got two ties from Hermes, with a little financial help from me. Peter is suddenly very keen on Hermes ties, which sounds very City, but these had brown labradors on the one and foxes on the other.
The ties came with the most extraordi- nary descriptions. Of their brown labrador Hermes wrote, 'We may wonder what pre- vails in him; his earthly desires, his heaven- ly hopes, or his impression of hesitating between the two?'. Hmm, if our brown labrador is hesitating between anything at the moment it is whether to have sex with dogs or bitches. Pepsi has recently cast aside his affections for Blondie, the golden labrador bitch who lives in our stable block, in favour of the Major, a neighbour's alsa- tion.
The dogs chase each other around and then Major turns on Pepsi. The first time Pepsi looked surprised and not a little con- fused, but as he keeps going off to visit the Major I suppose he's not averse to a little gay activity.
Of the second tie we discovered from the Hermes blurb that a white thing in the fox's mouth was a cheese that had been dropped by a bird, 'Moral: when deals succeed, plat- ters are garnished and larynxes exercised.' Perhaps it will mean more to the earth stoppers, puppy walkers and members of the calf and lamb society that Peter now spends his evenings with, than it does to me.
Although the hunting season is far away, being an MFH is a year-round job. Peter even has his first injury. His new hunter, Ben, was so annoyed when Peter stopped patting him in the field that he bit Peter savagely in the neck. Peter now has a great black crust where the teeth went in, a cou- ple of inches from his jugular. I hope this vampire horse will prove better tempered when he is being ridden. Meanwhile, I told everybody at the Spectator party that it was a love nibble from me. I don't see my boss- es often and it's as well to keep them a lit- tle afraid.
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