‘What’s going on? Who’s in the cells? Everyone seems very up in arms,’ I say, deliberately not directing my question at Biddy, so Colin Watts answers me.

‘Police came at sparrow’s fart,’ he explains, ‘and arrested Pike, that’s what. Took him all the way into Dorchester, loike.’ At this point Colin Watts pauses for effect. To him, a trip to Dorchester (18 miles away) is never an expedition to be undertaken lightly, and the great distance to the destination underlined the high seriousness of the charges. ‘For questioning.’ He suddenly makes a circling, whirling movement with his right arm, and I realize – he’s practising his bowling. He is a keen cricketer. In fact, I think he opens the bowling for the village side, and is quite a useful bat, too.

Mrs Hitchens has a tremendous glint in her eye. There’s nothing she likes more than a crisis. Biddy looks as if she might explode, it’s all so exciting.

Even Mr Hitchens, who never likes being parted from his hairy courgettes for long, has left his kitchen garden to join the throng by the growbags in the little cobbled yard just outside the shop.

So after about twenty minutes’ gabbling, we gather that Henry Pike, the Master of Foxhounds of ten distinguished years’ standing, husband of Biddy, pillar of the community, father of two constantly referenced border terriers, Jiggy and Frisky, otherwise known as the ‘borderline terrorists’, and two children, Flavia and Harry (rarely mentioned), and last but not least, a member of the Independent Working Group on Snares and Traps – in other words, on paper at any rate, no more upstanding citizen in the whole of Dorset – was woken at 6 a.m. and arrested. Handcuffed, he was read his rights and taken to Dorchester Police Station to be interviewed by Dorset CID.

Separately, his whipper-in, Martin Thomas, was also interviewed, and the two were placed in locked cells for three hours, before being released on bail.

‘As the law stands,’ Biddy finishes, sweeping the whole audience with a steely gaze, ‘a fox has more legal rights than my own law-abiding, tax-paying husband.’

There follows a general murmur of contempt for the administration that has spent seven hundred hours debating hunting with hounds while farmers went to the wall… taken us to war with Iraq… put speed cameras on all our roads… banned smoking in pubs… taxed flying… allowed the supermarkets to fleece English producers… failed to abolish inheritance tax… allowed foreign workers to take our jobs and immigrants our houses… and generally set this once great nation on the fast track to Hell in a handcart.

‘But I still don’t understand! What’ve they been arrested for? Mimi asks, revealing her almost fathomless ignorance of country ways and concerns.

‘Breaches of the Hunting Act,’ Colin replies, shortly.

‘Ooh, don’t say “breaches” like that,’ says Clive Maddocks, the Court Place butler, who is openly gay, and everyone groans.

‘It’s Section One, innit?’ Colin carries on, trying not to sound intelligent, in case he is teased, a legacy from having attended Honeyborne First School and the chavvy secondary in Larmouth and not Acland’s, which is seemingly reserved for nice middle-class children like Ceci and Mirabel and Cas and Posy. ‘A person commits an offence if he hunts a wild mammal with a dog.’