Something quite thrilling happened here in Nottingham when I went out for my pre-bedtime 'comfort walk' with Gail on Wednesday night.
Right in front of us, bold as brass, a HUGE badger strolled across the road, only disappearing behind the hedge when I alerted Gail to his presence. (She claims she saw him before I did, but really, I don't want that story put around...)
Oh if only I had not been attached to my walking string, I would so have followed him into the bushes. As it was I had to content myself with vocal expressions of my delight. Who knew that life in the leafy outer suburbs of Nottingham could be so exciting?
Gail tells me that she likes badgers too - although she thinks that loud and prolonged barking is not the right way to show it. One of her favourite childhood reads was 'Wind in the Willows' and she remembers the scene where Badger provides Mole and Ratty with refuge from a snowstorm in the scary Wild Wood:
'The Badger, who wore a long dressing gown, and whose slippers were indeed very down-at-heel, carried a flat candlestick in his paw and had probably been on his way to bed when their summons sounded. He looked down at them and patted both their heads. "This is not the sort of night for small animals to be out,' he said paternally. "I'm afraid you've been up to some of your pranks again Ratty. But come along; come into the kitchen. There's a first-rate fire there, and supper and everything."
Who could not love Mister Badger?
Well I have to report that neither of my Human Grandparents are quite so keen on these nocturnal creatures in real life.
HGD spent several largely unsuccessful decades trying to deter the badgers from entering his garden at night and digging up his lovingly tended back lawn. Rumour has it there is even some buried barbed wire under the hedge. HGY knows that badgers are blamed for spreading tuberculosis amongst cattle, and as she had an older sister, Audrey, who died aged two from TB caught from drinking unpasteurised milk on a Yorkshire Farm, she too thinks badgers are a BAD THING.
Readers in the UK will be aware that a badger cull has just recently been initiated in some parts of Southwest England, where bovine tuberculosis is rampant. The scientists are divided on its likely efficacy, as many suspect that infected badgers will simply be driven away from the areas where they are being shot, only to multiply elsewhere and later return.
Which makes one wonder if Kenneth Grahame, writing in the early nineteen hundreds, knew something that Owen Patterson* does not, when he put these words into the mouth of kind, wise old Mr Badger:
"We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be."
*The government Environment Secretary, who approved the cull.
PS HGD update: he is finally home from hospital, hooray! I am on VERY best behaviour as we try to settle him back into his familiar routines.
