Derring Dos & Don'ts
An instructive guide for the English adventurer

Part Nine: Sport

As the saying goes: 'Play up! play up! and play the game!' Well, I've been playing up for several decades now and the assumption in some quarters that I should 'play fair' chafes my tenders.

If we apply the Colonel's 1st Rule to this idea ('What's in it for me?'), it falls apart like a vampire without a sunshade. Or indeed like the very concept of vampires, which, like fair play, is a fiction for the enfeebled.

No. The purpose of sport is to teach young minds that: a) winning is everything; b) teamwork is of value only in so far as it furthers 'a'; and c) how you win is unimportant (though hospital visits for the opposition is a plus).

The British have always know this, for we have originated and exported some of the most brutal, sadistic and cruel games ever to pass as leisure time activities. Primary example:

Rugby

This originated when Rugby schoolboy William Ellis demonstrated his contempt for the plebeian football by hoofing it over the school roof, then cleverly claiming that he'd invented a new sport called 'Ellis'.

Teammates showed their support by forcing the spare ball up his rear, distorting it into the familiar shape we now know and love.

The purpose of the game, of course, is to use your boot studs to reduce opponents to a raw mince, or salmon spread. Occasionally, the ball should reach one or other end of the killing field to lend some legitimacy – being merely optional, this is known as a 'try'.

Wise players will ensure they only play weaker teams. As a young man, I always preferred playing the workhouse boys, but wrong-headed liberal intervention has led to them eating something other than gruel, and they are getting quite large. Some look like they've walked straight out of a Bolshevik recruitment poster: rolled sleeves, thrusting jaws and arms like bags of piglets.

So far, a dose of badger gas in their changing room has sufficed to uneven the odds, but the margin of victory is declining. Recently I had to resort to biting an ear off, just to collapse a scrum we were losing. Monty's still not talking to me.

Fox Hunting

When the proles get too resilient, turn to animals.

Now, you might think a chap with my inclinations and experience would be firmly in favour of fox hunting. But no! The thought of that fluffy little chestnut-haired tod being driven from their holt, chased willy-nilly across the old green-and-pleasant before being torn asunder by a pack of hounds, as a selection of society's finest mill around on horseback quaffing Pimms from pewter hip flasks, fills me with complete disgust. It's all over far too quickly.

After what they did to my Tri-county Champion Fighting Cock, I don't just want foxes dead, I want them to experience all seven pits of hell en route. Each fox should be executed in front of its offspring over the course of several days, in a manner involving partial drowning in a vat of pigs' excrement, hot irons, evisceration and crucifixion.

My Multiday Fox Murdering Method^TM (patent pending) produces more blood, more reliably. All the better for the traditional 'blooding', where the fox's viscera is smeared, still warm, across the face of a fat little child on their first, fat little pony.

I fondly remember one lad, a mass of golden curls breaking free from a riding helmet, tears mixing delightfully with the bloody snot on his screwed-up face as he went ever more crimson, resembling nothing more than a constipated Hapsburg. I got quite a bit of blood on myself before being dragged away. It seems the snivelling wretch couldn't breathe through the blood clots I'd rammed up each nostril and the fox tail that I was force-feeding him bloody end first.

Ah yes, on reflection fox hunting is clearly the true gentleman's sport, combining as it does lethal weapons and superior company.

After all, whether it's shotguns or surnames, I prefer them double-barrelled.

~ R.A.

Illo: S.C.