If anyone had wanted to discover what a typical weekend day in the English countryside is like they could have come with me yesterday. The high winds had become medium winds, the rain had stopped but the mud seemed to have become more muddy. Mud is what we live with for the entire winter and often quite a bit of the rest of the year too.

As I drove the seven miles through windy lanes to the market town I passed a lot of 4-wheel drives of various sorts, mainly Land Rovers, all pretty old, all mud-bespattered. This is the sort of place where the Chelsea tractor has a real purpose. They were full of men who all looked the same - ancient flap caps and old, torn waved jackets, weatherbeaten faces. I knew what would be in the back behind grills. Dogs.

I wound on through the mud and did the shopping, stopped for the coffee in one of my newly favoured haunts which I am keeping a secret, then home. Half way back I passed the Stud. Not quite time for foals yet but a lot of the mares were out in the mud, wearing their own version of the muddy waxed jacket and looking quite chunky. Half a mile on, I had to slow to a crawl. Ahead of me was half of the hunt and over the hedge, I could see the rest. More land rovers and men in flat caps all over the place, parking anyhow on the verges and leaping out with binoculars. Plenty of women, too, but their hats are different - they are sort of squashed wolly beige jobs and not especially flattering.  Men in velvet crash hats, men in black jackets, men in velvet jackets, men in pink, women in velvet hats ... the horses get smaller along with the riders, as the field straggles out, and the young ones all wear hacking jackets and sensible chin straps. Catch any Master in a chin strap !

Past the hunt eventually and a mile away, more four-wheelers parked up. By now the first lot I had passed on the way out were in the fields, guns ready, dogs to heel. This is proper shooting, rough shooting, shooting for the ordinary countryman and usually local - not your posh driven-pheasant rich-man`s stuff with visitors ferried in by helicopter.

It was a typical winter weekend scene and almost everyone I saw probably lived within a five mile radius. This is country life. These are country sports. This is what people have done for centuries and will go on doing for centuries more. It hasn`t changed much, nonsensical hunt-laws notwithstanding.