Fox

I thought I liked foxes.

I spent childhood Saturdays at the Natural History Museum Club. One week someone came in with a pair of soft grey fox-cubs, rescued from their den after their mother had been killed. Their protector brought them back, week after week. They were bottle-fed at first, then weaned onto raw meat as their grey down gave way to red and their faces acquired an adult point. I think there was a plan to release them back into to the wild but I never heard the ending of the story.

Most of the animals I admire are predators. I love the swoop of falcons and eagles – growing up on the ninth floor of a towerblock, I sometimes watched the stoop of sparrowhawks from above in the expanse of sky above Richmond Park. I never feared the coil of a snake and would willingly handle boas and pythons when the animal-man brought them to school. I saw the young foxes grow strong on bloody meat and never doubted their violence.

Encounters with foxes were rarities. I remember deer, rabbits, and badgers in the park – we made special trips to watch them at dawn and dusk – but I think I was an adult when I first sighted a fox in the wild.

“The wild” is an inexact description. It was an urban fox – nervous at night – running across a road. It was hard to be sure it was a fox and not a cat. It was small and some way off. I was enchanted, even though the fox was probably on its way to raid a bin filled with remnants of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The encounter - like many later ones – fulfilled my affection for the untamed. I like the word “feral.”

In the past two months, I've seen several foxes, and begun to wonder if I still like them as much as I did. Urban foxes stroll the pavements of our quiet suburban street in daylight – they sometimes turn to glare. Usually I see just one at a time but there are more than one – a friend, giving me a lift home, caught sight of two outside the gates of different houses. I found one in the garden, two yards away. It lifted its head and looked at me without anxiety. I clapped my hands and shouted until finally it turned and slowly made its way through a gap in the hedge. The foxes seem larger than any I've previously seen in town.

There are stories in the local press about foxes attacking cats – we haven't yet had local stories about foxes attacking children but there have been some in the national papers. Something seems to have changed in the balance of species - I don't know if the new conditions have been created by the hard winter or infrequent bin collections or some other factor. I don't think it's related to the hunting ban – we're a very long way from the nearest hunt and no-one is going to suggest pursuing foxes through tarmac streets crowded with houses and people. Perhaps it's a side-effect of new building developments – could this be another reason to blame Tesco whose vast building site scars our town and whose placards promise an unwanted superstore?

I worry about my cat Joe, who arches his back and prepares to defend his territory when he sees a fox (or dog). I want to keep him in the house but he has his own streak of wildness and needs the outdoors. Like the fox, he's a hunter. He wears a collar with bell - I don't want him to attack – but not all the birds he brings home survive, though my son does his best to rescue and revive them.

Odd jobs

I hope the owner of this toolbox doesn't mind that I've borrowed the picture. It comes from a page of pictures of a garage workshop - and I love workshops like this. They remind me of my dad, who is not just intelligent but skilled at all kinds of craft. Even in the flat where I grew up, he assembled a range of tools, with small items like nuts and drillbits kept carefully in Golden Virginia tobacco tins.

I wish I had the practical skills of my parents - or that my school had taught me useful things like woodworking. But these were seen as boys' skills. The idea was that we girls would marry. We would sew and cook for husbands and children but husbands would do the repairs. The boys' school included woodwork and metalwork on the curriculum; my brother produced a poker and toasting fork, which were things of beauty but of little use in our centrally-heated flat.

When the cat-flap shattered in a fierce wind, I realised I had to do something about it. I may know that the first reference to a catflap comes in Chaucer (the Miller's Tale) but I had no idea how to fit one. At first I worried. Then I asked my son to choose a new one of about the same size. It arrived with incomprehensible illustrations that were suppsoed to indicate how to fit it. I gave up looking and began to piece the catflap parts together for myself. After a while it seemed clear. I went to the shed to look for the drill and discovered I no longer had one. Fortunately a neighbour lent me a drill, a crewdriver and a pair of pliers. It was a fine, hand-held drill - like the one my Dad has. I cracked, peeled and unscrewed the wreckage of the old catflap and my son and I went to work.

Together we marked the places where the new screws would go and took turns at the drilling. It wasn't easy - the holes had to be very close to the edge of the gap and it's hard to drill at the bottom of a door. I was glad that my son did most of the work but felt quite pleased that I was also playing a useful part. I've never fitted a catflap before.

Gradually we got it in place - not particularly skilfully as one of the screws is crooked. But fitting it at all seemed like an achievement - and a great improvement on the hole in the back door. Joe didn't approve, however. He had thought the hole much better than a catflap - easier to manage. He looked at the new contraption unconvincedly and tried to persuade us to open the door instead.

It's not a great catflap but it has three advantages: it's transparent, it has a magnet which stops it from flapping in the wind, and it can be sealed with a small plastic sheet that holds it shut. I'm not sure Joe sees these as advantages.

Odd jobs proliferate. The washing-line snapped under the weight of sodden sheets which I hung up just before a downpour. We need a new backdoor - and the garden is in a desperate state. Unfortunately work is busier than ever and after 11-hour days I find it hard to summon the energy for anything else, except fencing, which seems to have a brief energising effect. Yesterday my Chinese horoscope urged me to do sport or "relaxing activities like odd jobs." The odd jobs didn't seem particularly relaxing. I chose fencing. They didn't teach that at my school either.

The smell of gunpowder

I'd forgotten the date. I didn't stay up late for the U.S. election results but went to sleep with the radio on and accepted a friend's offer to ring me when the outcome was clear. It made for a restless night and tired day. There were tired people everywhere, many exuberant with delight at news of Obama's victory. I was relieved - the thought of President Palin terrified me - but the news was shadowed by memories of 1997, when the election of Tony Blair felt like the lifting of a nightmare.

I stumbled through the day, giving way to clumsy mistakes. I was unsurprised to find that the train home would be half an hour late. All the trains were delayed after a fire alarm at St Pancras. Half an hour didn't seem too bad. It even gave me an opportunity to catch my breath and do some work in the station cafe (the waiting room was full).

I continued to work on the train, then swept everything into my bag as I reached my stop. And as I walked out into the dark drizzle, the smell reached me - gunpowder. "The fifth of November," I recalled, and a rush of thoughts and memories hit me. I couldn't reconcile them.

As an adult, I can't ignore the Guy Fawkes story: torture, fear, violence, orchestrated hatred. The bonfires once recalled that as clearly as any Chamber of Horrors. But it's all mutated into something both cosier and more anarchic: family participation in firework displays and celebrations. Fireworks Day is also bound up with childhood memories: the bonfire in the field, cold, gloved hands clasping the thin wire of sparklers, the small rocket placed carefully in a milk bottle, gasps of delight as the tiny catherine wheel sparks into a multi-coloured blur.

I love firework displays. I love the sudden blazing chrysanthemums that bloom for seconds then fade against a velvet-dark sky. I love the frisson of fear at the scream of swooping rockets - even the range of pops and earth-shaking thuds that recall tales of mud and anguish on the western front. I wanted to go to a firework display or party. But I couldn't. I was going fencing - and I didn't want to leave the cat for long.

Fortunately Joe doesn't seem too worried by fireworks - or not when he's indoors. Sometimes he sits up, alert, in case he's called on the defend the house - and he's not as settled as usual. He didn't like the early lock-in either. But instead of worrying, he curled up in one of his favourite places - the bathroom wash-basin - and settled down to sleep.

Take your cat to work week

[first posted 25th April]

Like most cats, Joe has favourite places to sleep. There's the laundry basket, for instance. He jumps into it neatly, then tips it over and rolls it around the floor from inside. When he's found the right position, he curls up and sleeps.

He has a special blanket at the foot of my bed, but he likes sleeping on my pillow too. Sometimes he chooses my son's pillow or, since my son had his hair cut, my son's head. Perhaps he thinks my son's head needs to be kept warm.

But when he's not sleeping, Joe is a lively, inquisitive cat who sits at windows, watching the world. He likes to hunt too and has recently brought in a mouse and a bird. There's a bell on his collar which rattles against his name-tag, so I hope he's not too successful a predator. I think his favourite food is still Sainsbury's cat biscuits, closely followed by Whiskas.

Lately Joe has taken to following people who leave the house. He's fond of human company and the Spring fills him with enthusiasm for the outside. Today he bounded beside me as I set off for work and wouldn't go back. We were two streets from home when I scooped him under my arm and carried him back. He moulted ginger fluff all over my jumper, and squirmed with vigour. "It's take your cat to work week," he insisted him. There was birdsong in the air. As I tried to hold him firmly, Joe did his best to indicate that I should join him in climbing trees and hunting.

Perhaps he thinks, when I go to work, I'm hunting cat biscuits. After all, I sometimes bring them home.