Don’t get caught short

So much more than a mere convenience, the country house loo is an institution that should be celebrated; meanwhile, Neil and Serena Cross prepare for an enjoyable winter of sport ahead

NDC

One of the things I love most about this glorious magazine is the fact that its timelessness affords it an afterlife which other, lesser publications can only aspire to. Once the family has enjoyed it and it has spent a month or so on the coffee table/ottoman/ zebra-skin pouffe, it invariably processes in a stately manner towards the downstairs loo. Here it may stay for anything up to a century, and like Dorian Gray, it grows not old.

The country house loo, which doubles as rod room, stick repository, hat emporium and Field library, is so much more than a place to ‘freshen up’, and as an institution, it is to be celebrated and enjoyed the length and breadth of this land. The best ones are miniature museums, housing rare and eccentric treasures, often jumbled together with mementoes of sporting, military or romantic glory, and always worth lingering in. The best one I’ve ever visited lies off the entrance hall of a beautiful house in the north of England and looks out over a famous garden to the grouse moor beyond. It is a room with a view in every sense of the word. When visiting this house, I always wait until the lunch party is well down into its second case of rosé so that I won’t be missed when I go to admire the eclectic array of wonderful visual treats, from photographs of the owner with both Ronald Reagan and a recently expired Cape buffalo, through to the rudest Mark Huskinson cartoon I have ever seen. This is a haven of uncontrived style, individualism and elegance and the perfect place to thumb through a 1973 back copy of The Field.

Closer to home, another fine facility, known to the family as The Black Hole, boasts an arrow-slit window and a rather unique dispenser for the loo roll, which is delivered from the mouth of an effigy of Margaret Thatcher. This cavernous convenience also boasts an anteroom and a small library, adorned with sporting bronzes and a huge engraving of Henry VIII sitting on an elaborate throne at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. There may be a private lavatorial joke in there somewhere.

Now that the season proper is under way, I look forward to our annual sporting tour and to all the fascinating people and places we encounter. This is the time of year to savour as January will be upon us in a flash and we wouldn’t wish to get caught short.

SFC

In the afterglow of one of the hottest summers on record, where even the grouse hid under the heather on the Twelfth, we now have an unseasonably early autumn. Ever since August, the golds and browns usually reserved for November have been seeping into our hedgerows and woodlands. However, one of the benefits of such a long, hot summer has been the early breeding success of our gamebirds. The pheasants have never had it so good and, as a consequence, they are much further ahead of where they would normally be, with full tails and immaculate plumage. Perceived wisdom traditionally had it that pheasants were seldom shot before November, but this year, they are fit, strong and flying like Christmas birds, which allows us to bridge some of the gap left by the absent partridges.

The reassuring rhythm of our seasons might be experiencing some anomalies these days, but that first morning on the peg will still yield its sensory pleasures, and I love the long minutes of waiting before the first drive of the season begins, with its accompanying scent of newly turned leaves and enough warmth left in the sun to clear the morning mist from the hollows. The sun still throws sufficient golden light to illuminate the russet tones of the first cock pheasant to breach the gunline. He

invariably receives a double salute to speed him on his way to safety, and he often chooses me as his reference point and comes straight at me, five minutes before anything else happens. If things go right, the early-season bird with a summer of fine dining behind it comes to earth with quite a thump and there is no injury quite so chinless as the one delivered by a falling gamebird while the recipient is distracted by Instagram.

Social media aside, I do carry an oldfashioned paper diary with me, and I always buy one with moon phases in the margin. This is particularly important in November, as I am eagerly awaiting the full moon (which falls rather early this year, on 8 November). This is often considered to be the woodcock moon and marks the return of my favourite visitors of the season. This year, they may well come later, and by then I hope that all the boggy bottoms will have been replenished after the drought to allow good feeding on fat worms in soft ground. Here’s to a vintage season.