I once took a friend from New York shooting. A small, traditional, driven family shoot in Gloucestershire set around a country house, not unlike another house of lore—P. G. Wodehouse's Blandings. Driven shooting is when the hunters (or guns) stand still and the beaters or servants do all the walking about, and the Chinese birds do the really energetic aerobic running, shouting, flapping, and then falling from a great height. This is different from hunting, which is the uneatable in pursuit of the unspeakable or the other way round, as Oscar—yes, that one—said constantly. Hunting involves a fox being chased by hounds being chased by horses being chased by merchant bankers, gay interior decorators, farmers, resting criminals, nymphomaniac girls with faces like farriers' anvils and asses like airbags, and Camilla Parker Bowles chased by psychopathic vegan animal liberationists chased by fat policemen chased by paparazzi chased by insurance-claim lawyers.

My friend turned up at breakfast ready to hike the Rockies. He was swagged and bonded like a Japanese sex toy. When he walked, his high-visibility neoprene sounded like a lizard orgy in a cornflakes box. His boots had three sorts of lace holes. The rest of us wore dung-colored tweed and bedroom slippers.

That evening he tipped up in the drawing room for pre-dinner drinks resplendent in a dinner jacket with wing collar and bow tie, patent shoes, and glittering studs; he looked like he was about to make an acceptance speech or burst into song. The rest of us were in old, stained, balding, saggy smoking jackets with open shirts, jeans, and those carpet slippers again. He took me aside and said, with just a hint of peeve, "This is a joke, right? You all put on collars and ties and wear cuff links to kill birds in muddy fields, but for the formal dinner with the butlers and the ladies in frocks you wear jeans and open shirts."

I shrugged apologetically. What could I say? It's shooting. It's the country. It's the English. I tried to explain that the thing with shooting is that it's almost all to do with kit: It's not about dressing up, it's about dressing down, and, frankly, it's absurd. That's the thing about an awful lot of traditional life. If we stopped to think about it for a quiet rational moment we'd blush scarlet, change our names, and never dream of doing anything that ludicrous again.