Phew, how quickly things change. Six months ago there was nothing much in the papers apart from foot & mouth and David Beckham’s latest haircut. Now it’s like foot & mouth never happened. The media caravan has moved on. These days there’s only one story padding out those column inches... oh, and David Beckham’s latest haircut, of course. But at least we can get out into the countryside again... if only to break in a pair of new walking boots and contemplate the end of civilisation as we know it.

We all have different strategies to deal with world events over which we have no control. Some people write letters to the newspapers. Others attend candle-lit vigils in Saint Bernard’s Square. There are timid souls who close their eyes, put their fingers in their ears and hum tunelessly to themselves... in the vain hope that if they ignore the unpleasantness it may just go away of its own accord.

My own preference, of course, is to get out and walk. Striding over the hills doesn’t actually make the world a safer place, but then nor does staying at home, bingeing on TV footage and continental chocolates. So I’ve been going stir crazy during the months that the hills and dales have been out of bounds. The walls of my bijou hovel closed in a little more with every day that passed.

Armed with an economy tin of dubbin, I vented my frustrations on my walking boots. They haven’t been this clean since the salesman took them out of the box and laced them up. They’ve been sitting in the hallway, like a pair of obedient dogs, waiting patiently for walkies. My cagoule is hung nearby, where I last left it. Finding a prawn salad sandwich in the breast pocket solved a problem that had perplexed the public health inspectors for months.

Better late than never, the right to roam is now on the statute books. Hooray! And let’s give thanks to those hardy pioneers who faced dangers of their own, more than half a century ago, in opening up these uplands to riff-raff like me. So I take my woolly hat off to those who took part in the Mass Trespass on Kinder, and other acts of civil disobedience. Without their stubborn resistence to rapacious landowners, my rambles might be limited to a few, over-used lowland paths - mostly between the bookies and the off-licence.

There are places I never knew I wanted to explore until someone told me I wasn’t allowed to. Especially when I’m denied access by some poncy landowner - Lord Saveloy, for example, the infamous sausage baron - who insists I’ll damage his land. So it’s woolly-hatted ramblers who upset the delicate ecological balance of a grouse moor, rather than those hunting parties of Japanese businessmen who pay huge sums to send small game-birds to meet their maker...

Landowners are happy to leap on the environmental bandwagon at every opportunity. But I’m not convinced about their commitment to wildlife. Take fox-hunting, which is now starting up again. The issue appears to have gone to the back of the parliamentery queue, now that a few well-heeled spokesmen have declare that the fabric of country life will unravel, like a badly-knitted sweater, unless people dress up in pink, blow trumpets and ride roughshod over hill and dale.

Even in a class-obsessed country like ours, it is surely an indefensible anachronism for a small, titled elite to own vast tracts of our countryside. It’s even worse when they try to keep country-lovers out. The British aristocracy should be grateful that we didn’t follow the sterling example of Madame Guillotine. Instead of dispatching these pampered aristos two hundred years ago, we let them live. And we’re happy to pay to visit their palaces and mansions, thereby keeping them in the luxury to which they’ve become accustomed.

Should we really entrust the countryside to a landed gentry whose main qualification for the job seems to be the ability to drink cream sherry and talk in loud, braying voices? Their arrogance is breathtaking. Whenever I hear a spokesman for country landowners brand me and my kind as "A handful of rampant ramblers", my hands clench into fists. So it was quite a surprise when the Landed Gentry Association issued the following press release, in the form of an open letter to every person living in this green and pleasant land.