Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?

"Who will bid me £5 for a brace of partridge?" cried out the auctioneer at last night's Hunt Pledges dinner, waving a couple of rather beautiful dead birds aloft.

What a contrast to my previous evening's entertainment, a talk given by 88 yr old environmental activist, Satish Kumar, called "Making Peace with Nature"!

The night before that it was "The House of Bernarda Alba" - a Spanish play about five sexually repressed sisters,  which had followed an evening of honky-tonk piano karaoke with 100 enebriated Totnesians  belting out Queen, Oasis, and Simon & Garfunkel.

I am happy to drive 45 minutes each way through the driving rain on a pitch black night, avoiding the shadowy ponies, sheep and cows dotting bleakest Dartmoor's tiniest lanes, to the opening of a paper bag.

Perhaps the rural dweller is by necessity more open-minded than those in the city who can stick to their preferred genre?

Probably the most fun event of the four was the hunt's auction night. I came home, after half a bottle of Suavignon and a vast portion of Rocky Road, with a fluffy LeMieux headcollar, bought for £20, hoping to get £50 for it later, on eBay.

Whereas the most thought-provoking evening might have been the one spent with Mr Kumar. In  1962 he set off on a two and a half year 'peace walk' of  8,000 miles, with 'no pennies in his pocket', relying on others to house and feed him (vegetarian only), taking in New Delhi, Moscow, Paris, London, and Washington DC, meeting people like Martin Luther King. 

What annoys me about his kind of jaunt, is that it's hard-working, busy people like me who have to look after these visionaries, having worked our butts off for years to ensure we have food on the table and a roof over our (and their) heads, and then we get accused of not being 'at one with nature'.

The first question after the talk was a bit of a surprise. "But don't statistics prove that we are richer, happier and healthier than at any previous time in history?" This from a tall, well groomed man without a beard (probably the only one in the room) who I suddenly realised was a chap I'd met before on a couple of occasions, via on-line dating.

"Those statistics are biased!" shot back Satish.

"But aren't you just preaching to the converted?" was the next questions. Yes - almost certainly, judging by the number of ladies present, who hadn't bothered to dye or style their long grey locks, and were wearing ill-fitting earth-coloured clothes and those ghastly, extraordinarily expensive handmade Conker cornish pasty shoes - not a man-made fibre in sight.  

'Not me', I thought. My theory is that the main difference between the Daily Mail and Guardian reader is that the former doesn't believe everything her paper says. No proper man would ever actually pay for the Daily Mail. Nevertheless, it rules the world, because the power- behind-the-throne wives do.

Kumar seems to think that we should all have a pet cow that we milk by hand in our back garden.  He genuinely actually said that! Well I suppose he is getting on a bit.

I spoke to the pianist after the karaoke, who was probaby in his late twenties, sported a beard and a few piercings, and who was grinning from ear to ear.  "Don't you mind hearing all your most favourite beautiful songs being completely wrecked by us all?" I queried, rather smug that his playlist was very similar to my own after-dinner singalong gatherings around my Yamaha upright, with the exception of "Oo-oo-oo I wanna be like you-oo-oo" which appeared to be absent from his repertoire. "Not at all", he replied. It seemed that he gets a complete high from the sheer joy of it all.

I was planning to grab some Zs during Dartington's obscure high-brow play which has no men in it (presumably it was chosen because there were no volunteer male actors available). 'Studio 1' was bound to be considerably warmer and more comfortable than my draughty old house which, unlike Dartington, is 900 feet above sea-level. But during the pre-play wine-drinking throng, I was thrilled to bump into my children's old prep school vice-head, and subsequently found myself enthralled by the actual play itself.  I thought it had another hour to go and it suddenly ended.

If I ever manage to move to somewhere more 'happening' than my horrid little hamlet, (preferably Brockenhurst), I wonder which genre will draw me in.  While I like the sound of "RockChoir", I'll only go to a session if it doesn't clash with the New Forest Hunt's pledges evening.