The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag Read Online Free

or a general foreman. He was a fox farmer.
I never even knew that fox farms existed before he told me about them.
Apparently, without fox farms the entire British economy would have ground to a
halt a long time before it actually did in the year 2002, with the fall of the
British book publishing industry and pretty much everything else. But during
the 1980s and 1990s, fox farming at secret government establishments kept it
buoyant. You see, there weren’t enough foxes to hunt and so fox farms had to
breed even more.
    Allow
me to explain.
    As most
folk will know, blood sports have, in recent times, become something of an
issue and one which has deepened the divide between the rural and the urban
communities.
    There
has always been a divide, but this is to be expected. Country folk have long
considered themselves to be a cut above the simple townie. Country folk feel
themselves to be closer to nature, more in tune with its natural rhythms and
custodians of the land for generations yet to come. Townies, in their opinion,
are a bunch of glue-sniffing football hooligans, packed like lab rats into
high-rise blocks, stunted both mentally and physically by a diet of McDonald’s
burgers and traffic fumes. Gross, perverted and not nice to know.
    Townies,
however, lean to a different opinion. They consider themselves a cut above the
simple bumpkin. Townies feel themselves to be better educated and more
sophisticated, having greater access to the arts and information technology.
They look upon country folk as a bunch of ignorant, inbred sheep-shaggers who
get off on cruelty and blood-letting. Gross, perverted and not nice to know.
    Both
sides are, of course, way off the mark, although it could be argued that
sheep-shagging is an almost exclusively rural recreation.
    So it
comes as little surprise to find that the countryman and the townie disagree
over the matter of blood sports.
    In the
summer of 1997 almost half a million concerned country folk marched peacefully
upon London to heighten the awareness of the public at large regarding the
threat to rural England posed by a proposed Bill to abolish the blood sport of
fox-hunting.
    What
the dim-witted townie failed to understand, the country folk patiently
explained, was that without foxhunting there would be no English countryside.
Consider, they said, all those people whose livelihoods depend directly upon
foxhunting. The saddlers, the grooms, the ostlers, the stable lads and lasses.
The riding instructors, the vets, the manufacturers of horse pills and tackle
and donkey nuts and stirrup cups. The blacksmiths and the blacksmiths’
apprentices, the horse-breeders, the makers of horse boxes and those who worked
in the factories that produce those stickers you see in the rear windows of
Range Rovers that say ‘I ♥ greys’.
    And
that was only the horses. What about the dogs? What about those packs of
beautiful cuddly foxhounds? They’d all have to be destroyed. Destroyed! Dogs
destroyed! A national shame! And with their destruction would go the
livelihoods of the Masters of Foxhounds, their apprentices and assistants, the
whippers-in, the manufacturers of dog collars and dog biscuits and dog food,
more vets and so on and so forth.
    Thousands
upon thousands upon thousands of hard-working honest country folk would be
doomed to lives of dole-queue misery only previously reserved for
town-dwellers.
    Catastrophe!
    And
worse, far worse, what about the land itself? England depended upon its
farmland. Its farmland and its produce. The land! Dear Lord, the land!
    To put
it plainly, there would be no more land. Without the efforts of the gallant
foxhunters to keep the evil vermin that was the fox at bay, the English
countryside would be no more. The fox, that hellish chimera of wolf, jackal,
tiger and ghoul/demon! werewolf, would multiply, growing in unstoppable
numbers, forming mighty packs and wreaking havoc across the land. Snatching
infants from their cots, devouring entire herds of sheep