Real life | 6 October 2016

After a year dealing with estate agents I can only say: a plague on all their houses, except the one of mine they’re trying to sell.

I do hate being obvious and lashing out at oft maligned groups because it really is too clichéd. I belong to several of these hated groups myself, after all. Journalists, they get it in the neck all the time. And hunters. See Rod Liddle last week or Liz Jones the weekend before that for some classic examples of how the left rip me to shreds whenever I dare to suggest that I would like to keep the countryside a nice place in which to live.

Liddle moans that he is sick of hearing about my ‘bloody horse ’, and wonders why I don’t like the skies being full of artificially boosted numbers of marauding red kites when my surname suggests I am one.

Rod, my dear man, as you well know, I am not a red kite, I am a blue kite, and blue kites are not birds of prey. I am a tough old bird, however. I have to be, to put up with the sort of grief I get in this lunatic world, where anyone with any kind of experience of rural reality gets told they are evil for wanting man to remain at the top of the food chain, with a place in the ecosystem, and yes, boss of the foxes and the packs of wolves and the wild bloody Eurasian lynxes. There, I’ve sworn too now. He’s dragged me down to his level. This is the danger. At some point, the civilised descend into the anarchic primordial soup to do battle with the loons and everyone starts scrabbling about in the swamp, chucking muck at each other and screaming like harpies about whether or not we should be eaten by wolves, wild cats and, in all likelihood, if they get any bigger, foxes.

That we are actually having a debate about rereleasing packs of wolves in Britain, because Rod Liddle would really like to see some, you know, locally, rather than having to travel at great expense to Poland, tells you everything you need to know.