PHOTO: HEDGEHOG

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.’