The English summer in a nutshell - hound puppy shows

Smart spectators, gentlemen in slacks, blazers and panamas, ladies in summer dresses and pretty hats, rules relaxed for children, though I have seen some this year dressed in their best, throng the rings. The judges are sombre in dark suits and hats, Hunt staff tense in their kennel coats and bowlers, unless we watch them in number at big venues such as Ardingly or Peterborough, and then we see the huntsmen in scarlet. Always the same: always fine. What a pleasure it is still to get the invitations.

Hounds have not changed. Judges still look for strong well-padded feet, correct line and angulation of limbs and back and neck, and it takes a good man to show his hounds as well as he hunts them, but the good men are there. Doghounds should look strong but not burly: bitchhounds should be feminine but not snipey. Strength and grace, power and speed and symmetry, all wrapped in a mottled coat and balanced on springs.

They fill the eye, and later in the season, the new entry will fill the heart as well, with their drive and cry, as they warm to their tasks and learn from their elders. They do not know their tasks yet, having grown from soft round puppies to adolescence in one year. Like any adolescent group, there are the early and late maturing hounds, the ugly ducklings, the precociousness, the lingering puppiness here and there. After a season's hunting they will look as one, except to those who really know them, and after two seasons, their mettle will have been well and truly tested.

Some days we have to cover our finery with waterproofs, English summers being as capricious as they are, and the rule seems to be: the smarter the individual, the more worn and tattered the rainproofs. Today, dark clouds threaten (maybe we can blame the volcano?) but do not deliver, and the lively colours in the flower baskets and troughs catch the rays of sun that filter around the clouds.

The finalists spill out on to the greensward, the better for the judges to see them move, and they flow and skim over the grass like lapwings, apart from the chancer who has dematerialised and reappeared in the tea tent. A flapping of tea towels and some military language sees that one out again, and shoo-ed back to the others. The judges consult, and mark their pages.

Judging finished, prizes awarded to a spattering of handclapping, the obligatory speech and joke from each judge, and the marquee beckons. There is, as always, a sumptuous tea awaiting. Sometimes I stay: mostly I don't, not for any lack of enjoying tea but more for work waiting at home, or on the way to it. Today I am about to leave but am delightfully waylaid by a series of friends, and the swallows are skimming for gnats in the evening cool before I make my way back to the vehicle at last. What a wonderful way to spend a summer afternoon.