Ten Lords a-Leaping

I grew up in a small town in rural Gloucestershire.   We had royalty all around - Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Michael of Kent - they all lived a few miles away.  Eat your heart out, Downton Abbey.

Prince Charles & Diana and the boys were very nearby and were frequently seen in the local shops; buying Special Brew, fags and porn mags.  Not really - that was Prince Philip.

Many of the shops had the three feathers badge, which is granted to anyone who supplies goods to the Prince of Wales for three years. My mum used to give frog spawn to the one of the security policeman so that he could pass it on to the Prince for stocking the dew ponds being restored on the Highgrove estate.  She could have qualified for the three feathers but it was all a bit too showy.

The frogs & toads in our pond had been gathered by my dad over several years.  Wandering back, half-cut, from the pub, late on a rainy evenings, he would sometime see toads or frogs in the street.  He'd pick them up, pop them in his pocket and then release them in the back garden. One evening, he forgot about a toad and screamed like a girl the next morning when he put his hand in his coat pocket and found a cold, clammy and rather grumpy toad.

Amphibian gathering in this way was out of the question for Prince Charles.  When he was hammered on cider, he'd just stumble into the Aston and hurtle back home.   Not really - that was Prince Harry.

As well as the royals, we had more than our fair share of aristocrats.  Some of these were proper old money - scruffy as tramps and giving every impression of not having a monogrammed pot to piss into.

After the aristos, we had the upper-upper middle class - farmers, racehorse trainers, polo-players and the like.

What bound them all was horse-riding - chasing foxes around, mostly.  Terrifying activity.  

Who  wants a massive lump of leather-clad meat between their legs? But enough of my S&M chat-up lines.  What is the appeal of horse riding?

Come to that, what is the appeal of fox hunting?  In the old days, maybe, when foxes were lean and fast and could run for miles.  Nowadays, foxes live off dropped takeaways and so are too fat and unfit to put up much of a run.  One might as well hunt Jeremy Kyle guests.  Expect to see that one being proposed by Ian Duncan Smith and a lucrative contract given to ATOS to identify unemployed people to be hunted down by dogs. 

I've never wanted to try fox hunting but I did try horse riding.  I now know what 'saddle sore' is - riding a horse is like having my bollocks used as a pair of hairy kettle-drums.   The horse didn't want me there and kept trying to throw me.  I was gripping so hard that my thighs were agony for three days afterwards and I was walking like I'd been hoovering naked and slipped backwards onto a partially-greased fire extinguisher.

What I needed to keep me on the saddle was a prehensile cock that could grip the saddle.  Or, failing that, *really* sticky bollocks that I could anchor myself with.  However, it's too late for that now - they're so middle-aged and saggy, I could fall of the horse, be dragged behind and yet still be anchored to the saddle.  As mentioned elsewhere, one of the 'benefits' of shaven bollocks is that they are really sticky -  saggy old ball bags make a very effective fly-paper substitute should you ever have the need - attractive (to flies) and lethally sticky.  But as saddles-grippers, they're useless.

I'll leave horse-riding to the leaping lords.  They wear jodphurs from an early age so as to keep their ball bag from stretching.  There can be no other possible reason for a man to wear them.