The countryside is a cruel place.

Indeed, its very distinctive network of arable fields, the fewer given over to livestock and small copses and sometimes slightly larger woods, has been shaped by cruelty. 

Without cruelty, always of the self-interested variety, but sometimes of a more benign variation, the countryside around Hadleigh would be fairly continuous swathes of forests.

But through increasingly effective and ruthless methods of cultivation and animal husbandry, the - until recently - often blanket use of pesticides and the more targeted destruction of specific natural species, plus the social purges that periodically expunged the presence of the poor from the commons (think of the Enclosure movement that was just beginning as I was enflamed), we have been 'gifted' what we see around us.

I suspect in our fallen world, cruelty and civilisation are necessary cohabitees (less 'living in sin' as 'living with sin') and always will be somewhere and at sometime until the Second Coming.

So, to be honest with you, I've found the debates over the last few decades as to the merits and dismerits of hunting foxes with dogs to be rather tiresome and repetitive.

On the one hand, there are the usual arguments about the beastliness of foxes being hunted down, dug out and shredded by the 'just obeying orders' hounds.

On the other, there are the equally usual concerns that a traditional pursuit is being surpressed by an increasingly urbanised and indifferent elite of metrosexuals and baristas.

And interestingly, James 'Foxy' Buckle, master of the Essex and Suffolk Hunt, seems to think so as well.

Eschewing his usual Spotify list of favourite whinges about the current hunting legislation, Foxy swapped the party political broadcast mode for something more reflective during his speech at this week's Holbecks get-together.

In fact, he went all Revd Jo Delfgou (good Christmas Eve sermon by the way), placing the issues within the context of the especial cruelty of the Ukrainian conflict and called for - and received - a respectful one-minute silence.

All the while, one half of Hadleigh's newly ensconced red kite couple swooped and tacked above our heads, a reminder that given enough time and just a little consideration, no cruelty need last for ever.

The main reason I rather like the Boxing Day Meet is, knowingly or unknowingly, it reverses the prevailing social cruelty that, alas, also defines our society.

Much contemporary 'entertainment', as much indeed as during the supposedly more-benighted Tudor period, is the public mockery of the poor for the enjoyment of the rich and powerful. So much television and social media output is predicated on such cruelty. Think Big Brother. Think Benefits Street.

The Boxing Day Meet offers an important correction, as it allows the town's 'ordinary' citizenry to have a laugh at the expense of what remains of the local self-declared 'quality' or gentry and the very, very many wannabees desperate for 'respectability' and 'rootedness' after dealing in fungible tokens or derivatives or hired mercenary armies in London or New York or Billericay.

It certainly raises a wry smile along the ghostly visage of your correspondent, as these types and their baggage carriers ponce around in the most outrageous items available in their respective dressing up boxes. 

In the main, Foxy's mates exhibit a rather eclectic stylistic sensibility: from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, with a heavy weighting towards looking like flamboyant extras in one of John Buchan's less successful novels.

Conversing loudly - always loudly - in either a clipped and assured manner ( think Boris Johnson astride something that is not a woman) or as Alan Sugar's gruff voice doubles, with little in between, this sociological zoo also allows the rest of us to see them at feeding time. They always seem to be taking little nips of what I can only assume from its colour is either Tizer or Irn Bru.

But the most encouraging aspect of the Meet is that with so much wealth on display , inherited or bought at a price, I'm sure that an equal tithe would have been already donated to local good causes, including Angela Gregg's food bank and our many churches prior to Christmas Day. 

To neglect such a duty would, after all, be just another example of unnecessary cruelty.

Surely, Hadleigh's nobs and aspirant-nobs would wish to be thought better of than this?