(Have I told you before that I'm banned from even the slightest acquaintance with cider? My picture is pinned up behind bars all over the West Country after an unfortunate incident at the Royal Gloucestershire Show in 1989. I blame the dodgy pasty I'd eaten earlier for the sudden need to remove my trousers and wave Little Barry at the Queen Mother, God bless Her. At least she had the grace to smile. Or laugh.)

But while I wouldn't go hunting myself, I would defend the right of others to do it. It's a matter of personal freedom. The Nanny State already tells us what we can eat, drink, say or smoke. (Dope is OK, apparently.) Why should we then let them control what we do in our leisure time?

It's a small step from banning hunting, to banning shooting, to banning fishing, to banning boxing, to banning motor-cycling, to banning mountain climbing, to banning horse-racing, to banning the consumption of bacon sandwiches, to banning a night at the dogs, all of which pursuits are capable of causing harm to man or beast.

But back to the spat with Mrs B. We have the great fortune to live in hunting country. Rolling hills, ancient hedgerows, glorious valleys and enchanting woodland. In which my man Whittaker is still living, naked apart from a bandana and a loin cloth fashioned from pieces of string and some old copies of Look and Learn. But no matter. We all have our cross to bear.

Now I endeavour to fit in to the village. I cough up for the school raffle, I do my stint on Neighbourhood Watch (armed with a 12-bore just in case there are any Pikeys about), and I make a point of buying £20 worth of stamps every week at the post office, whether I need them or not.

Mrs B. is somewhat less yielding. Her time on the picket line in the Rhondda Valley appears to have removed any semblance of compromise from her attitude to life. And so it was that last Monday morning, Mrs B. and the local Hunt arrived in the same narrow country lane at the same time. I am told that it wasn't a pleasant sight.

The local "nobs", who include plumbers, builders and postmen, as well as the odd Lord (and the odd very odd Lord), were suddenly faced with this mad woman who whipped out a Balaclava from her glove box, turned up "Meat Is Murder" by The Smiths to full volume on her CD player, and started blowing a hunting horn retrieved from the detritus of her over-stuffed handbag.

Small children on Shetland ponies bolted through hedgerows, the hounds took the opportunity to run riot through a nearby cattery and the Master dropped his hip flask and spilt vintage port all down his jodhpurs. It was a clear victory for bunny-huggers nationwide.

The aftermath has taken some dealing with, but I managed to smooth things over. The local primary school now has a new roundabout in its playground (limited to 3mph in accord with European legislation) and Mrs B. has a new hand-made, floor-to-ceiling shoe cupboard, with an increased capacity of 70 pairs. I have also agreed to carefully consider her plans for a fox sanctuary at Beelzebub Mansions. (Yeah, right.)

Other than that, I still can't show my face in the locality until after dark, but hey, that's what freedom of speech is all about. Isn't it Toni?

Speaking of neighbours, I feel honour bound to spring to the defence of Prince Charles, who copped for a real drubbing after a memo he had written about an employee surfaced at an industrial tribunal last week.

Dear old Charlie had the temerity to suggest that a person at the shallow end of the typing pool might not be best equipped for promotion to a higher position without first doing the hard work and gaining the necessary experience to make that promotion an ability-based reality, rather than mere wishful thinking.

Now I know that that sounds a bit rich coming from a man whose position is based entirely upon birth, rather than merit, but was he really that wrong?

Ask any teenager today what they want to be when they grow up and they'll tell you pop singer, model, film star or footballer.

No mention of train driver. Or plumber. Or builder. Or electrician. It's Posh and Becks or nothing.

What nonsense. We have bred a generation of children for whom so-called achievement comes easily, courtesy of Mickey Mouse A-levels and a university place for every drooling moron. It is predictable that these feckless, gum-chewing fools (our kids) should now expect all of life's riches to come their way with only a minimum of effort.

I have had occasion recently to employ - or try to employ - a series of "tradesmen". They have been, without exception, unreliable, careless, lazy, stupid, hugely expensive and mostly inept. The simplest job seems to start at £1,000; the fact that it never gets finished, or not to any standard approaching acceptable, doesn't seem to matter.

There is a huge gap in the market out there. But our children have to realise that some of them are born to brain surgery and some of them are born to unblocking drains. There is no shame in fulfilling your potential.

The youngsters who currently see shagging under a duvet on a reality TV programme as their life's ambition just need to understand what their true potential really is.

And it's not always a starring role on the X-Factor. Sometimes it has to be elbow-deep in muck with DynoRod.

As one who can remember the original Band Aid single and Live Aid extravaganza, I have to say that the new version leaves me a little cold.

For a start, I could only recognise three of the people on the photograph, and one of them was Bob Gandalf.

There is something obscene about multi-millionaire pop stars berating the rest of us poor sods to cough up money for starving children in Africa. (We send them our worn-out jumpers. What more do they want?)

A chappy named Bono, a member of a popular beat combo called U2, claims that £20,000 would feed an entire village in the Sudan for a whole year. Well in that case, why don't you just send them £20,000, you tight-fisted Tinker?

And if every pop star who appeared on the record had done the same, they'd have eradicated famine in Central Africa for the next 12 months without having to pester the rest of us. Job done. Or am I missing something here?

Just A quicky on this Third World poverty thing. Whenever you see starving Vietnamese or Thais or Cambodians on the telly, they never have beards. Yet razor blades, as any man will tell you, are hideously expensive.

So why don't they just stop frittering away their money on Gillette Mach 32s and spend it on cakes and custard instead? Just a thought.