Seven Great Things About Badgers

Seven Great Things About Badgers

I came up with this list during my research for my frequently quite badgery ninth book, 21st-Century Yokel, which was published in 2017. It would not be an overstatement to say that my life was very badger-themed at the time. I fed peanuts and cat biscuits to the adolescent ones in the meadow next to my house. Their elder relatives often slunk over the grass beneath my bedroom window at dusk, ignored by my nonchalant cats. I was startled awake by their disagreements: grunting foulmouthed territorial disputes waged deep inside my garden’s thick copper beech hedge. It seemed that suddenly, everywhere I went, people wanted 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 one, another spoke of a friend who was bitten on the bum by one in the garden of a house party in Exeter. Perhaps the most vivid tale of all came from Leslie of the Dorset For Badger And Bovine Welfare Group, who I met at the annual Scythe Fair on the Somerset Levels: she said she regularly fed her local badgers peanut butter sandwiches 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.”

21st-Century Yokel can be purchased here from Blackwells with free worldwide delivery. You can read a little more about it here.