I used to know a man, now long gone, who lived in our village, a farm worker all his days. He was tall and thin, which is understating both attributes, because he was very tall and very thin.

He must have been self conscious about his height because he walked with a pronounced stoop which made his already skinny chest appear to be concave.

He had a very peculiar style of walking, lifting each knee very high in the air, and, for the merest fraction of a second, his foot would seem to hang, as if he was giving serious consideration to where he would place it next, almost like a heron going through the shallows looking for sticklebacks.

People said he once bent over looking at the ground as a child and found a six penny piece and he had spent the rest of his life looking for another.

He had a long hooked nose at the end of which was always to be found a sort of dewdrop. As a child I had watched this dewdrop fascinated and wondering if, in very cold weather, it would grow into an icicle, but it never had the chance because at regular intervals, like some insect-eating creature in a David Attenborough film, a long tongue would come out to remove it.

People often told stories about him (still do, come to think about it) central to which, for reasons they never fully explained, was the fact that he always carried on his person laxative powders.

Looking back, at his stature and his demeanour, I suspect they were for his own use, but they were laxative powders designed for animals.

I sometimes see adverts for laxatives on television. The adverts are all flowery and the key word used to describe them is "gentle".

His laxatives were violent. Perhaps it was because of the laxatives that his nickname was Crippen. Dr Crippen was an infamous poisoner – if you think about it, you'd have a job to find a better name for a poisoner. The name has just the right sinister ring to it. You could almost imagine the vicar pronouncing his name at the baptism and adding "with a name like that, he will surely be a poisoner".

Anyway, back during the war (I'll pause for a moment while you cast your minds back, some people take longer than others), our local Home Guard hosted an afternoon of competitions for all the Home Guards in the vicinity. The most important competition, the one that carried the most prestige, was the tug of war.

Tug of war used to be very big around here, even up to 10 years ago. I can remember a Sunday afternoon competition in the field behind the pub in which 14 teams entered and 500 people paid to watch.

Anyway, our local Home Guard won their way to the final of this competition and after the semi finals there was an interval to allow both teams to fully recover for the final. Crippen wasn't a puller, his physique being more akin to that of the rope, but he was part of the entourage.

In charge of our team's proceedings was my wife's grandfather, on whose farm the competition was held. Most of the men involved, including Crippen, worked for him.

He sent one of the men back to the farm for two buckets of cider for refreshment and when he returned he suggested that they take one bucket to the team they were to oppose in the final as a gesture of goodwill.

"Give them a powder, Crippen", was his instruction, and the packet of laxative powder was duly mixed with the cider.

Tug of war competitions are decided on a "best of three pulls" basis. The home side won the first pull easily, at the end of which the opposition dropped the rope and scattered in all directions. They failed to return and the home side were duly declared the winners.

One fine autumnal day my wife's grandfather gathered a car-load of men and drove them some 20 miles to where he had a hill farm, they were to do some harvesting but at a higher level it was damp and misty and they needed to wait for the sun to break through and dry things up. The obvious place to wait was in the pub.

The pub was kept by a very well known master of foxhounds, an important and self-important man, and he busied himself serving his early customers while he also busied himself to go hunting at an early meet – it was probably what they call early season cubbing.

The harvesters sat drinking quietly and the master of the hounds went back and fore completing his tasks for the day.

My wife's grandfather innocently inquired of the host if he would join them in a drink before he went hunting. The host was delighted at this courtesy and pulled himself a pint which he left on the bar while he went to fetch his red coat.

"Give him a powder, Crippen."

I knew most of the men in the group and I can clearly imagine their studied nonchalance as they sipped away at their beer and watched the master of the fox hounds, now fully resplendent in his hunting gear, as he drank his, no doubt dominating the conversation, whether it be on the subject of harvesting, the price of lambs or even hunting, on all of which subjects he considered himself an expert.

It is not for me to take the rest of this story down some lavatorial path while describing what happened during the rest of the day. But the majority of us reading this article will be human and will quite readily understand the practicalities of the situation the master of hounds found himself in.

Working or even walking long days in the countryside away from habitation can present similar problems and if needs become urgent, well, you just have to take advantage of whatever privacy nature provides.

If you are a master of hounds you are the focal person of the days' hunting. All eyes are on you, all day. There is no chance to tie your horse to a fence while you slip behind a hedge, not even once, let alone several times.

I need to move on here and spare you the detail, let me just say that when our hero the huntsman returned home he got changed in an outbuilding and had to burn all his clothes and it took them over an hour with a hosepipe to clean the horse.