Heading home in a taxi the other night, the driver had to touch his breaks as a quite enormous foxes sprinted, in the same way that Simon Cawkwell might sprint, across the road. This fox was not the sort of beast I remember from my youth in the boonies.
Back then country fox had to live by his wits. Food was either wild game which had to be stalked or our chickens where entry to their housing required some ingenuity and cunning. And so the creatures we encountered were vicious, nervous of humans as we hated the vile killers with a passion and thin. They were lean mean killing machines.
City fox of 2013 is rather different. For a start, all the townies who think that chickens come from Tesco and that foxy woxy is a cuddly endangered species, would not think of harming this “national treasure.” Mr Fox is wily and knows that. City fox has no fear. His country cousin of old would know that if he ran out in a road a driver would swerve in order to hit him. City fox knows that drivers would swerve straight into the Avon Gorge rather than damage cuddly wuddly little Renard.
But it gets even better for City fox. Food is quite simply on tap. There is no need to chase anything at all. In Bristol, under strict diktats from the Stasi at City Hall, we obediently put all our food waste into little brown boxes while other waste goes wither into big green bins or different sorts of green boxes. I am still not quite sure what goes where and so maybe am not saving the planet/stopping global warming quite as much as my neighbours. But I do know to put all food waste into the brown container and Mr Fox knows that he can get breakfast, lunch, supper and a midnight snack every day of the week from the brown boxes we put out to save the planet.
Not surprisingly without the need to chase or flee anything or anyone and with high calorie processed junk food available everywhere in unlimited supplies, Mr City fox is now getting quite large. One might even say fat.
How long, I wonder, before our uber meddling City council and/or red trousered buffoon of a Mayor George Ferguson feel the need to piss away more cash and start a campaign to reduce the incidence of obesity and diabetes in the “Bristol fox community”? It is, one fears, only a matter of a time.