Hunting Horn Sounds for Death of Old Britain

The Scotsman ^ | February 21, 2005 | Katie Grant

[quidnunc]

It is four years since my mother died; as I stood at her grave on Thursday, it struck me that were she to come back now, while the little churchyard folded into Lancashire’s Trough of Bowland may look the same, the country we live in has changed entirely.

My mother died on 13 February 2001, just before news of the foot and mouth outbreak was made public and Britain was filled with the stench of burning carcasses. A couple of hounds, as well as her family, witnessed her coffin lowered into the vault as one of the joint masters of the hunt blew Gone Away across the valley.

My mother lived in a pre-9/11 world. When she died, Big Brother was still a novelty, war with Iraq unthinkable, immigration well down the list of political priorities and the idea of Prince Charles marrying Camilla Parker Bowles something whispered only behind palace curtains. My mother had never heard of Osama bin Laden or used the word "tsunami". If she came back now, a great deal would need explaining.

But it would not only be events or new words. She would notice at once how different the country feels. Some of this difference is the inevitable result of the increased risk of terrorism perpetrated by suicide bombers. However, the new emphasis on security does not fully account for the changed atmosphere. There is something deeper going on in Britain, and, difficult though it is to put a finger on it, the easiest way to describe it is to say that during the second term of the Blair project, something else, apart from my mother, has died.

-snip-

As traditional hunting dies, so, too, dies this valuing of experience and observation, and a mortal blow is dealt to the natural British sense that tradition and history are not just for theme parks. The hunting ban is the final act in a flurry of destruction by the gleeful institution wreckers, constitutional vandals, tradition-haters and petty, jeering class-warriors who constitute the cutting edge of Blairism.

Killing hunting marks an important victory for them, not because it will save any foxes (it won’t) but because it signals to Old Britons that they are finally finished.

Recent elegies about the end of hunting are not "panegyrics preached over an empty coffin", as Waugh famously described Brideshead Revisited, his own elegy to a certain British way of life. This time the coffin is full.

-snip-

[mercy]

Not just 'Old' England.

[lowbridge]

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[NaughtiusMaximus]

From the American West: I am sad for you and honor your mother's memory. I am old enough to remember and mourn for a better, more decent world filled with wiser, more noble people and with beautiful, honorable things and activities which should have lasted forever but perished before our eyes.