Reynard the Fox

What Ho Proles!

Back from my morning stroll, I looked out of the study window this afternoon and saw a damn fox running across the lawn. Normally, such a sight would have me reaching for our old friend, Double Barreled Bessie, but Billie Oddie has been in the neighborhood this week, filming one of his rotten wildlife documentaries about the Throttled Greeb or some such nonsense. As a prospective Tory candidate looking for a little love from TV license payers everywhere, the last thing I want is to be seen on the next Autumnwatch blasting a fox into the next county. With the cockeyed ways things are in this country, I’d be fare much better being caught pelleting Bill Oddie himself; foxes outranking Goodies in the current scheme of things.

With hindsight, I believe the fox was an omen of trickery, warning me to consider the day a done deal and go back to bed. As it was, jam had barely been laid upon the afternoon scone when my old friend Siegfried Randolph-Kelly arrived looking a little worse for wear. Reynard the Fox was clearly working his pesky magic.

Siggy is one of those rosy-cheeked country types that rarely smell of anything more alluring than freshly spread manure. I met him at Uni where he was a bright spark in the Philosophy department, writing fanatically long papers on the Nietzschean undercurrents at work in the Blue Peter garden. Since then, he’s returned to his roots and now combines his admiration for the nasal hedge of a German madman with the philosophy of the hedgerow. He once stood as an independent candidate in a Shropshire by-election, and, being a farmer, a man born and brought up in the countryside, and with a deep affinity for nature based on a life-long working relationship with his environment, he stood on the single issue of whether he had the God-given right to pound a badger over the head with a spade. And by an astonishing quirk of nature, which amazed us all and changed the political landscape for a generation, he lost by a landslide. It positively turned Siggy against his fellow men and I rarely see him these days. He tends to keep to himself up there on his Shropshire farm, reading his beloved Nietzsche and polishing his spade for the day when all humane laws are repealed and the season reopens on badgers.

There’s not much to tell about his visit, except to say, he had come for some of the Honourable J.P.’s sagely advice regarding an ongoing argument about land. Some devilish property developer has wangled a compulsory purchase order for his lower field and it was my task to advise Siggy that the law does not look favourably on property developers being bashed over the head with a spade.

To calm him, I promised go visit a chap in London with whom Siggy has arranged payments of certain funds to, and here I must quote, ‘help get the bloody problem sorted out, once and for all’. It’s all very hush hush, you understand, but a wad of cash has been deposited with YT and I’m to deliver it on Tuesday, in person, to a character named ‘Johno’, who is to be found well off the beaten track in one of those parts of London town that tourist maps prefer to colour red.

Oaths bound by blood and manure stop me from explaining more until the dastardly deed is done.

So, cryptically, until anon.