The fox

I lived in a tiny, stone-built cottage in the heart of rural England for two years – a wonderful place surrounded by trees and wildlife - though very few humans. Deer would come at dawn to eat the fallen apples in our garden and tear the gooseberries from the bushes, owls shrieked throughout the night and once an otter strolled nonchalantly up our lane, stopped for a long look at my youngest daughter and myself, then continued on its journey. Apart from the cottage, I’ve lived in semi-rural Lancashire for twenty years and, before that, deepest Suffolk, Cornwall and Devon, right on the edge of Dartmoor. Yet I never saw a fox.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to London to join the hurly-burly for a weekend of concrete, pollution and noise. Unable to sleep, I got up at dawn and went for a wander around the leafy suburb in which our hotel proudly stood. I hadn’t taken ten steps from the hotel door and there it was. A fox, sitting and staring calmly from the middle of the road like it had been waiting for me for all my fifty-five years.

My one and only glimpse of a fox. And it took the great, roaring, chaotic city to give it to me.