Foraging And Foul Play

The Midsomer Murderers are missing a few tricks, thinks Jonathan Young, with nature’s bounty offering potential both on and off the dinner table

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THE English are oddly addicted to murder, especially of the country-house order. Last week the neighbouring village trooped out in 1930s clobber for a Cluedo evening in aid of the church roof. Naturally, it was the vicar wot dunnit and as he’s our real-life rector there was little need for the dressing-up box.

Quite why we find homicide so homely is a mystery but even now I feel compelled to watch ancient episodes of Midsomer Murders, the imminent demise of every victim heralded by a vixen yowling in the darkness. Rationally, no one would live in a Cotswold idyll with a higher death rate than El Salvador on a Saturday night but then Latin America doesn’t have the warm beer and village fêtes that allow us to overlook a multitude of blunt-object bludgeonings and Hermès-scarf stranglings.

Such blatant methods of dealing the death have never perplexed Barnaby but given the choice of weapons lurking in our rural acres I’m surprised his criminals aren’t more inventive: a simple twist of the footpath sign leading the victim into a field of dairy bulls, perhaps; or an invitation to pat the rump of a horse sporting a red ribbon. These “accidents” would present the chief inspector with more of a poser but he’d probably finger the culprit in the end.