Status Updates From On Hunting

'The community I discovered is one of love and affirmation; it is part of the old world, but only because the old world was like that. It is threatened by the new world, but only because we are ceasing to live for each other, ceasing to be answerable for our actions, ceasing, in short, to care.'

'The House of Commons was packed for the [Hunting] Bill's second reading, while only eleven members turned up in the afternoon to consider educational provision for the disabled. Hunting is high up the activist agenda: higher than global warming, higher than crime, higher than Rwanda or Saddam Hussein. For this is how the suicide of nations begins, when sentimentality prevails over sense.'

'Existing in a kind of moral and aesthetic limbo... without neighbourliness [in] that world of metalled roads, Astro-turf and 'Executive homes' from the builder's catalogue - New Man will live out his days in tinsel-spattered isolation, knowing the outside world only through the windscreen of his motor car, and adding with each unnecessary journey to the cloud of gas which will one day stifle us all.'

'In the hedge-seamed tapestry of the English pasture, you can read the history of the land and those who have lived in it. This landscape was made for a human use, and without its use it will lose its beauty.'

'Thousand-page accounts of [the lives of] minor politicians are the greatest offence against literature - especially when written by the politicians themselves.'

'One thing I know for sure about being a [football] fan is that it is not a vicarious pleasure... and those who say so are missing the point. When there is some kind of triumph, the pleasure does not radiate from the players outwards until it reaches the likes of us at the back of the terraces in a pale and diminished way... the joy we feel is not a celebration of other's good fortunes but our own.'