Junior leaders

I should not have been surprised to discover that The Spectator has a profound influence on village life — a happy state of affairs which was illustrated last Friday evening immediately before the start of our junior fell races.

I should not have been surprised to discover that The Spectator has a profound influence on village life — a happy state of affairs which was illustrated last Friday evening immediately before the start of our junior fell races. As the young contestants were lining up, I was handed a box and a sealed envelope. The box contained a revolver and inside the envelope there was a note about how the weapon should be employed. George V once suggested that a similar gift be made to officers of the household division, whose pleasures he regarded as deviant. Happily, the letter which was addressed to me did not suggest that I go into the garden and blow my brains out. Instead, it asked me to accept the donation of a starting pistol and use it in place of the clay-pigeon launcher with which — as reported in this column a month ago — I have imperilled my fingers at the beginning of the last seven fell races.

The benefactors were Baker, Shepherd and Gillespie ‘ecological consultants’, who, in their own words, were the ‘offenders’ responsible for the ‘pyrotechnic display’ which, as described in the same issue of the paper, provoked angry correspondence in our parish magazine. They were making amends, and gratitude for their act of contrition prevents me from even mentioning the inconsistency of ‘celebrating ten years of successful ecological consultancy’ by polluting the atmosphere with fireworks. I simply admit that, after the lady who started the junior races had fired the pistol without doing herself an injury, I carried it around the playing field with the aggressive swagger of Jesse James.