Happy New Year to you and yours. I’ve given up crisps for 2018. What’s your New Year resolution?
Now I don’t want you to think we’re getting soft and tree huggerish, but there have already this year been some strange developments at home.
I hadn’t really thought so much of this particular story until I went to get a newspaper from the shop in the next door village last weekend. “I hear your wife did a very brave thing the other day” Mike the store keeper ( who used to play for Spurs incidentally ) said to me. I was a bit slow on the uptake, but fortunately he elaborated. “Taking on the gypsies. Next time tell her to ring me and I’ll help” he added, feigning boxing punches. Ah. With ya.
Regardless of whether or not it was appropriate for Mike to use that word to describe the men who, two days earlier, had been careering over fields in a battered blue Volvo estate ( almost certainly stolen ) in hot pursuit of two dogs and a hare it was indeed the case that Sophie had interrupted her walk to ring the police and report them for trespass and illegal coursing. The Newmarket constabulary sprang into action with commendable speed. Sad to say, however, three police cars and a helicopter, not to mention Sophie’s directions and on the ground intelligence, proved inadequate and the men nonchalantly evaded capture and drove off at some speed, no doubt on their way back to Essex, directly past Sophie who was standing at the side of a field and still on the phone to HQ. The two gents in the back seat leaned out the window cursing at her roundly and promising dire reprisals. Sophie doesn’t seem unduly worried thank you very much. The irony of this story perhaps will not be lost on those of you who have read my emails over the years, but of course Bob was much younger than he is now and didn’t use a car. Most of the time he spent crossing the very fields these guys were damaging he wasn’t even wearing shoes!
The other thing to report is that although, what with Bob and the pikeys, our house and surrounding fields couldn’t generally be considered the safest places for local wildlife we’ve set up a hedgehog sanctuary. I know! What are we like?! It started when Bob and his girlfriend found a poor little baby one shivering under a car and in a very sorry state. We tracked down a lady living just a few miles away who has a fully fledged rescue centre for the creatures. She took the orphan under her care and named it Sophie. It was touch and go, but she finally managed to get Sophie to take some liquid at about 2.00am ( some people are amazing aren’t they ) and the hedgehog was on the road to recovery.
The centre is full to over-flowing however and so we decided we had better try to help. It happens we have a couple of old pigsties so we spent a morning clearing them out of the useless clutter that had accumulated there and threw in a few piles of straw. Hey presto…the perfect environment for a hibernating hedgehog. We now have eight males in one shed and seven females in the other and there they will stay until spring comes along. It involves a little more work than you might imagine though not that much really. Water and food and mucking out their den. That’s about it. Which is fine because it’s not like you can bond with a hedgehog particularly. They tuck themselves up, invisible under their bedding, and sleep all day. At night-time if you put your head torch on, tip toe across the gravel and open the top part of the door quickly enough you will see them scuttling back into the corners which is kind of sweet.
But hey….is there someone in your family who is the gullible one? Ours is Jimmy. Living in London at the moment she asked after the hedgehogs on the family WhatsApp chat earlier this week.
“Are they happy?” she wrote.
“Yup. Partying like crazy every night. Neighbours are complaining about the noise” one slightly impish group member replied.
And we all just knew she would fall for it.
“Really? (worried concerned face)” came her immediate response. “What is the noise like?”
Hook, line and sinker. Maybe I’m being unfair. If you too are unsure how noisy hedgehogs can be and have access to Youtube click on the link below, but be sure to have the volume turned down or you could seriously damage your hearing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sgw-achKVM
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