My Best True Stories About Badgers And Hedgehogs
A few years ago I used to feed peanuts and dry cat food to the young badger in the above photograph, which lived in the field opposite my house alongside several of its pals. Around that time I remember a growing feeling that, everywhere I went, people were waiting to tell me excellent stories about badgers. At one of my spoken word events someone recalled being on their bike and getting chased down a dark alley by an angry badger, another spoke of a friend who was bitten on the bottom by a badger in the garden of a house party in Exeter. “Maybe I am going to the wrong parties?” I asked myself. Perhaps the most vivid tale of all came from Leslie of the Dorset For Badger And Bovine Welfare Group, who I met at a small festival in Somerset: she said she made peanut butter sandwiches for her local badgers and fed them to them every day at dusk. The badgers had come to count on these but one evening when they arrived in her garden at the regular time the terrible realisation struck Leslie that she was entirely out of peanut butter. She searched her fridge and freezer for a replacement meal but the only one she could find was an old frozen dish of ratatouille that, if she was honest, she wasn’t sure she’d ever get around to eating. “They absolutely loved it,” she told me. “But they ran off with the dish afterwards.”
One of the things that surprised me, when I briefly moved to the green fringe of the fine city of Norwich in 2019, was the way the place sounded. It was quiet in a different way to the very rural house I’d moved from, where agricultural machinery and speeding cars had cut sharply through a bigger emptiness. At night in these sleepy streets, under a mile from the city centre, the silence was thick, but a few sounds still sliced it up, all of them haunting and not typically urban. The honk of trains was a ghostly wail circling the house which seemed to come from no place where there was a track and continued far beyond the parameters of National Rail timetables. Meanwhile,in the woods up the hill, on the edge of something created by the night, muntjac deer gathered in groups and barked incantations into the early hours. It made the foliage behind my bungalow seem deeper than it was and the proximity of Aldi and Nails By Nonie and senior lettings negotiators and Halfords implausible. A hedgehog snuffled about outside the bedroom window for several nights, creating a noise twice the size of itself, then eventually – on hot evenings when I left the back door ajar – began letting itself in and helping itself to my cats’ food.
Hedgehogs had also been part of life the last time I’d lived in Norfolk, more than half a decade earlier. Having fed one in my garden, I made an effort to learn more about them. Much of what I discovered was unexpected: that it is illegal to drive them through the state of Pennsylvania, for example, and that they have been known to scale walls and turn up in people’s first floor bedrooms. I also visited a hedgehog hospital, whose curator told me an injured hedgehog had once arrived there alone in a taxi. “The driver said the fare was already covered,” she added. “It had come 40 miles, all the way from Watford.” But none of the hedgehogs I’d met back then had been quite as nonchalant as this new hedgehog, who I decided looked like a Joe. By a few weeks into our relationship, it would not have surprised me in the slightest to find Joe stretched out upside down on my bed, paws splayed, greeting me with a casual yawn as I rummaged for my pyjama bottoms. I arrived home from the pub one night with my friend Louise and, as I boiled the kettle, noticed Joe napping in the corner, beneath the cutlery drawer. Louise continued the anecdote she was telling me, without missing a beat, as, listening, I returned Joe to the patio. “Was I so drunk last night that I thought it was perfectly normal for you to gently pick a sleeping hedgehog up from your kitchen floor and take it outside?” Louise asked the next day. “Yes,” I answered. “You were.”
In case you missed it, there was a piece in The Guardian newspaper yesterday about the demise of my ex-publishers Unbound, who still owe me more than £15,000 of unpaid advances and royalties and, shockingly, are now refusing to refund the people who kindly supported my latest novel. More about which here, in case you missed it, plus info about how you can purchase signed books directly from me until I have a new publishing deal.
In case you are free tomorrow (Thursday 19th March) at 3pm British time, I’ll be chatting live about my work on ’s Substack.
A few more of my recent pieces, in case you missed them:
Cat Horoscopes
Aries This week you will see a ghost but nobody will notice when you look startled about it since you look like that a lot of the time already anyway. Later, a serendipitous series of events - mostly vole-related - will take you on a long journey (24 yards) but when you arrive at your destination you will do nothing except clean your rear end then wander…
Where I Am, Where I've Been And Where I Am Going (Plus Some Other Destinations)
I did wonder about making this a paid-only post, perhaps because it’s quite a personal one, but in the end I decided I wanted everyone to be able to read it. If you decide to upgrade to paid, though, you can read my full paywalled archive of well over 100 piec…
Brad Francis, Deputy Assistant Senior Head Negotiator Of Sales Experience
From the first time I heard his voice, I could tell Brad Francis was an oily character. It was the kind of voice that was always slipping out of your hand: one of those that, whatever their background, all estate agents seem eventually destined to end up with, a parody of well-spoken eloquence that was, in reality, entirely constructed from evasion and sickly sweet unguents and resin. If I’d had my way, I wouldn’t have had to put up with the displeasure of speaking to him at all. Unfortunately, I wanted the house he had been entrusted to sell, and I wanted it harder than anything I’d ever wanted in my short life.
Old Litkinov
I wrote this short story at the end of December. I have already posted it, buried at the end of a collection of mini fiction which was for paid subscribers only but I feel, with hindsight, it might deserve a page of its own. I’ve got some more short fiction coming for paid subscribers in a few days and - who knows - maybe this might tempt two or three p…
I lived on the South Coast of England just outside of Hastings in a place called Guestling Hall on the Rye Road. It was pretty much on the Downs. You could wander through fields to see Paul McCartney's home if you so desired, or make your way to a pub, no doubt long closed, with the smallest pool table in the world inside, and a couple of pool sticks that had been shortened considerably in able to play on the table edge which was a foot from a wall.
One time, one evening, I wandered lonely as a cloud towards where I thought a badger set was, well, er, set. I did not find the set so I wandered onwards with my torch/flashlight through dusk into evening, a place I often visit. I caught a glimpse of the rear end of a very large badger waddling away. Being young and somewhat simplistic I wanted to see more of the badger than it's bum, so followed it as it tumbled through the undergrowth. I was slowly getting closer and closer and saw that it had come to be caught, as it were, blocked by a fence that cornered away from us. I cannot say I got bitten on the bottom, because my deep subconscience told me that badgers are not too fond of being cornered. It showed me it's teeth, and I slowly and carefully, trying not to trip, backed away, not wanting to turn my back to the creature. I think his name was Reggie, or at least that's what it seemed to snarl at me through it's very sharp gnashers. I left it to find its way home as I did, thankful I had an evening without scars.
I do love badgers.
I have to be honest life is very difficult right now emotionally and I can’t describe the joy this gave me, I really needed that. Thank you!