AT THE RISK of sounding like a deranged conspiracy theorist, I’ve a growing suspicion that one reason that governments, whether of right or left, appear to dislike fieldsports, and seem to lose no sleep over interfering with them or banning them, is that ‘they’ have no way of knowing what ‘we’ are up to when we are ‘out there’, doing our jolly thing. Even better for the regulators, spoil our sporting fun and, with time now hanging heavy on our hands, we’ll instead be driven into our cars, where they can monitor us on their multiple CCTVs, and into the shops, where they can analyse us as we use our cards.
If this is what government secretly yearns for, then it appears to be working. When I do, rarely, venture into town at the weekend, the whole world – less us lot, and sundry gardeners, golfers and suchlike – seems to be out shopping. Little wonder that ‘they’ doubtlessup in his prophetic novel . Prophetic? Yes, because at times it seems as if it is already here.
