A SPORTING CHANCE
When does taking a pot shot at garden pests become unsporting?
Athunderous crack echoes round the room. It would shake the devil from his slumber. The naughty Norfolk and I sit bolt upright. The clock says just before 5.00am. I glance across the bed. Both husband and spaniel are missing. Well, you now know a guilty secret. A dog on the bed? Yes, sometimes – and it’s a very bad thing... Confession aside, the chief is on a new drive to get rid of rabbits and early morning is apparently the best time to deal with these pesky invaders. But it is not the greatest hour to wake a woman who needs at least eight hours. And who is on a short fuse if she does not get it. Breakfast is an understandably chilly affair. As far as dawn raids go, I am putting my foot down. Being bleary-eyed and grumpy, I am also vexed at the growing posse of pigeons that is trying to rule the bird-table roost. They come en masse and it is keeping the little birds away from the nuts and seeds. So, I ask the MacGregor, if he has to blast away, why can he not turn his attention to these roly-poly bully-boys? Because, he explains, it is one thing to shoot pigeons in the wild. It is quite another when they fly in as house guests. In short, to despatch them on a bird table would be highly unsporting. Although that does not always stop an armed clan chief. Rumour has it, his father once fired at a bothersome deer – it was eating the flowers – from a Perthshire drawing room window.
And it is not just Highland lairds that bend the rules a bit. Prince Albert is said to have designed the shooting landscape at Balmoral so he could creep up more easily on his prey. The Deeside gillies hated it. They called it unfair and ‘furrin (foreign) tricks’.
It just wasn’t cricket. Which, of course, would not go down well at Eton.
Alas, I could not get to t he Edinburgh launch of a new book about a famed master at the world’s most famous school, but the new volume is the talk of the town. And it has been written by a Scottish farming friend who was once a pupil.
I had never heard of Michael Kidson. And if you did not attend this privileged place of learning, you will almost certainly be in the same boat. Yet this Mr Chips of the upperclass world seems to have inspired the great and the good – among them the Archbishop of Canterbury, David Cameron, Sir Matthew Pinsent – and my husband.
I went to a comprehensive school but I was fascinated by this story of a privileged and highly ordered landscape; by a man who was a stickler for language and grammar, a man whose lessons were ‘pieces of theatre’.
Kidson was a critic and task master. But he was also kind and inspirational. ‘One in a million’, his skill was in helping the gifted and throwing a lifeline to the strugglers.
Jamie Blackett of Dumfries and Galloway has skilfully gathered together the threads of his old tutor’s life. ‘In death Michael has got me to work much harder than he managed in life…’
Kidson had a life-long love affair with Scotland, whether fishing a Highland stream, or sending a ball flying across Muirfield links. He always had a spaniel close at heel. Those two facts alone make me think he must have been a pretty decent sort of chap…
‘It is one thing to shoot pigeons in the wild. It is quite another when they fly in as house guests’