To the outer edge of the M25 at the weekend to a local hunt's point-to-point race afternoon at the close of England’s now illegal hunting season.

It was a hard-core gathering: green knee-high boots on all sides, a purposeful flapping of Barbours and rustic accents galore (there’s nothing posh about most people who enjoy hunting, as the pro-hunt lobby likes to remind us). I’d done my best to blend in sartorially, by digging out a dingy Barbour from the back of a neglected cupboard. But when he saw the distinctly townie pink flowery short wellies on my feet my more appropriately shod husband only laughed unkindly and said “hmm, not from round these parts, then.”

Still, we did the full Monty in every other respect. We had a Glyndebourne-style picnic in the biting wind, with mulligatawny soup from a tureen, sherry from a silver hip flask and a game pie solid enough to hold down the flapping tablecloth. We checked out the horses in the paddock before every race, bet on the ones with the funniest names, and won enough on Stylish Dave in the 4.20 to pay back the parking fee. And we cheered defiantly, along with everyone else eating solid food out of the back of solid cars or getting stuck in the solid mud on the way to the loos, when the man’s voice blaring results over the tannoy said, “thank you all for coming. Whatever They try to do to us, we hope we’ll be carrying on for many years yet.”



They probably will, too. The first season after last year’s law banning fox-hunting has gone rather well for the neatly turned out riders in hunting pink, and rather badly for the Old Labour ideologues who pushed through the legislation. So full of loopholes is this illogical law that hunts have continued to go out through the winter, and despairing police, with no way of enforcing an unpoliceable law, have pretty much given up trying. Hunting foxes with dogs might now be illegal, but since hounds can still follow a scent and flush out a fox, and foxes can still be shot or killed by birds of prey after being tracked by just two hounds, and if the hounds get a bit carried away after scenting a fox and kill it their huntsmen can only be prosecuted if it can be proved that they intended this to happen, and what hunter in his right mind would admit that to a policeman?

A year after the law came in, in February, the League of Cruel Sports had sent the names of 33 hunts accused of repeatedly breaching the law to police chiefs. But Kate Hoey of the pro-hunt Countryside Alliance, said she wasn’t aware of a single case in which the Crown Prosecution Service had prosecuted anyone for ignoring the ban. The Alliance concluded triumphantly that flaws in the law let huntspeople keep their lifestyle intact, and called for it to be repealed on the grounds that it was "derided, discredited and damaged beyond repair".

Not only has the government made an ass of the law, but it’s turned the pink-faced country people the law was designed to annoy from the symbols of old-fashioned, bloodthirsty privilege they used to be in grumpy Labour voters’ minds to pitiful victims of oppression. The fashion these days in Islington human-rights circles is no longer to talk of the savagery of people who like to see foxes pulled to pieces by baying hounds. Instead they tut over the way country people’s rights to pursue their traditional minority pursuits have been forfeited by a government with scant respect for real democracy – a mark, if nothing else, of the fading popularity of Tony Blair.

Now comes the next step in the chattering classes’ change of heart: “The Chase,” a novel published by Headline Review this week, which begins on February 19, 2005, the day that hunting with hounds became illegal. In Wiltshire, a group of people are gathering at Eastleigh, the home of Sir Leo Domeyne and his wife Celia. The family, no longer in its heyday, seems to rise to the occasion.Wayward sisters come back from London; banker brothers put on country clothes: the weekend has every appearance of being a last hurrah in spite of the ban. But author Candida Clark expertly turns this elegantly-told story into an elegy for the hunt, drawing out every nuance of pain and wistfulness in the situation and turning characters whose poshness might easily have been played for laughs back into humans living through real loss.

“Hunting is a bit like literature,” Candida Clark says in the book’s blurb. “It’s a way of enacting a ritual about life and death – the mystery of it all – without which life is so much flatter and blander. It’s also a part of our landscape. To wipe it out is simply to be in denial about that far-off place from where, like it or not, we all come; islanders, living off the land and sea, hunter-gatherers.”

A conviction North Londoner, she nevertheless took up hunting on the day her book begins, February 19 2005, in what she describes as a political protest. It was a phone call from a hunting friend that persuaded her. “You believe in democracy, don’t you?” the voice at the other end said. “If you do, come out with the hunt.”

I’m finding it all strangely convincing, I must say. Loving the book. Enjoying the point-to-point. Already sympathetic to the idea of protesting against the Blair government’s silly law. I decided on the way back into London last weekend that I’d at least buy proper green wellies before trying another point-to-point. But at this rate I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself on horseback in a red coat too by the time the next hunting season begins.