Jemima Lewis

It’s wrong, I know, but there’s something thrilling about a really humungous lie. It’s wrong, I know, but there’s something thrilling about a really humungous lie. Consider, for example, the sheer brass neck of Alan McIlwraith — or Captain Sir Alan McIlwraith KBE, DSO, MC, as he prefers to be known. This mysterious young war hero was pictured recently in the celebrity magazine No. 1 sipping champagne at a charity function. He was dressed in full military regalia, his breast clattering with medals, accompanied by a woman described as his wife, ‘Lady Shona’. Sir Alan’s decorations were, he claimed, won on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland and Kosovo.

My fiancé is engrossed in a book called Happiness by the economist Richard Layard, from which he reads aloud pertinent statistics. ‘People are happiest in the year they get married,’ he will lugubriously announce, ‘and after that it’s downhill all the way.’ Or: ‘Having children does make you happy, but only for two years.’ Or, plangently, as the evening light begins to fade: ‘Most people are happiest at the end of the day.’ His normal bedtime reading is The Lawn Expert by D.G. Hessayon which, it seems to me, has a rather more uplifting effect on his mood. But the study of happiness is very au courant, having recently been upgraded to a political science.

The imminent ban on fox-hunting saddens me mainly for reasons of nostalgia. I am far too much of a sissy ever to have hunted: I would fall off my horse as soon as it moved, and cry if the poor little fox got caught. But I am romantic enough to love the Olde Englishness of the hunt: the Surteesian image of pink-coated squires racing across a pastoral landscape. Although I am a total townie, hunting is part of my family mythology. My grandmother grew up on a Gloucestershire farm amid rabid blood-sports enthusiasts. Her father — a terrifying, hawk-nosed domestic tyrant who once bit his son on the leg for forgetting to light the Aga — only allowed one book in the house: Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.