Back to lockdown

In the face of an abruptly curtailed season – at least for the foreseeable future – Catherine Austen ponders alternative options and the likelihood of morphing into Isabell Werth

- Catherine Austen

THAT’S it then. Back to lockdown. I hope you made the most of autumn hunting, and we need to be grateful that we got that. It should have helped put a little back in the badly depleted hunt coffers – and on that note, I seriously hope you have paid your subscriptions. Obviously hounds and horses need to continue to be fed and looked after, and staff need paying to do so, and any regular hunting person who shirks paying their dues right now should be ashamed of themselves.

I’ve managed 20 days’ hunting in the past two months and while I very much hope we get more in due course, I am so glad I made the effort. For me, the whole point of having a horse is to go hunting. Yes, I am hunting editor of this magazine and so the boundaries between work and personal life are blurred (or don’t exist), but those autumn and winter days with hounds are why I work flat out on virtually every day of the year that I am not hunting, and often in the evenings of those days, too.