'Non-hunting' Season and the Indomitable Spirit of the Brits

We're a funny old people in the UK. Give us any kind of rules and we bend them to distraction with a cheeky grin, and break them when nobody is looking. Irrepressible. Watch the motorways, where they aren't completely traffic-bound, and you'll see people slow to precisely the 70mph speed limit where they know there is a speed camera, or where a police car is in sight (indeed Douglas Adams and John Lloyd coined a term - a Grimbister - for the body of vehicles around a police car, travelling at the speed limit in their book The Deeper Meaning of Liff). The rest of the time drivers will proceed at a speed they are more comfortable with, generally around 80-90mph. The 'lock-in' is a quaint pub tradition where as long as the curtains are closed and the doors are shut, a pub will continue to serve alcohol long past official last orders time to their friends and regular customers inside. I have no doubt that there are smoking landlords and ladies who get out the ashtrays once the doors are shut too. The police generally turn a blind eye because frankly, we all have a sense of proportion and some laws are more important than others. It's all part of the innate liberal mindset we're born and brought up with, or that's how I see it - "it's harming nobody, leave them to it".

Today is the start of the third annual foxhunting season since the ban on the sport. I love this piece in the Independent. It tells it how it is. We Brits carry on doing whatever it is we want to, staying mostly just within the limits of the law. I love this country. I love the two-fingers-to-the-establishment attitude of people and encourage it. If your moral compass is sound, and you know you're not going to harm anyone by doing what you want to do, then go for it. I guess that faith in humanity is what makes me someone who could never be a member of either of the other two main parties in British politics. Daddy state does not know best. The police don't have time to chase people around for such petty misdemeanours as hanging around in groups of more than three on a street corner, smoking a joint in their living rooms because vile unpleasant alcohol isn't their drug of choice, or maybe (possibly, accidentally) coming across a fox when they're on a drag hunt. I'd like to tear down some of the illiberal laws that have been created over the last ten years, but some days it's enough to know that people all over the country are ridiculing them anyway. Tally ho!