It’s like a jungle sometimes

Despite being the son of a vet who grew up “down the country”, I don’t recall ever seeing a real, live fox until I came to live in London. My first close encounter of the vulpine kind was on the platform of a train station. In Streatham. Assuming the drink was responsible, I rubbed my eyes in disbelief, but a fellow passenger assured me that it was indeed a fox and that London had a burgeoning population of same. Since then, a family of at least three of the little rascals have set up home in a derelict shack type thing about 15 feet from my back-door.

Every time I encounter one of them scuttling out for a nocturnal forage, I always wonder the same thing: “What the fuck are you doing living in this shithole, when you could be lording it up in the countryside where the air is fresh, the grass is green and there’s sod all noise and traffic.” Then it occurs to me that I could say the same thing about the foxes.

Although they’re awful hoors for going through the bins and having big loud orgasmic fox sex, our neighbours seem fairly harmless. It being Sarf London, the local cats are far too middle-class to prowl the streets at night, while the only chickens to be stolen are already dead, southern fried and discarded in the bins outside KFC. Indeed, my only concern is that I’ll wake up some day to be greeted by the sight of a couple of hundred yapping hounds and a clatter of bugle-blowing hooray Henrys galloping down Balham Hill in hot pursuit of one of my four-legged neighbours.

And while I’m fairly ambivalent when it comes to bloodsports, I’d really prefer not to have those kind of people milling around my back gate. After all, hunts tend to attract animal rights activists and, whatever about wild animals and posh folk, you certainly don’t want those crusties hanging around your neighbourhood stinking the place up.

One man who isn’t so ambivalent when it comes to the conservation of wildlife is Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, who continues to amaze with his magnificent television programmes. The sight of a man genuinely happy in his work is an all too rare one these days, so when you see this amiable Australian setting about his assorted tasks with such unbridled relish and enthusiasm you can’t help but warm to him. Especially when these tasks consist largely of travelling around the world upsetting things with very long teeth and very short fuses.

During the course of a 50-minute documentary I saw recently, Irwin narrowly avoided getting his nose bitten off by an Alligator-Snapping Turtle that looked like Bob Geldof in bad form (“You naughty little turtle!”), had a chunk bitten out of his arm by an alligator he’d wrestled into submission in a Florida bayou (“Off you go you little ripper! You go off and tell your friends you got to bite Steve!”) and then went for a dip in a crystal clear lagoon that was quite clearly teeming with alligators (“Never go swimming with alligators, they’re far too dangerous!”). He is without question, the mad bastard other mad bastards call Crazy Horse.

And while Irwin’s job description is Crocodile Hunter, nothing could be further from the truth – his entire life has been devoted to the conservation of these dangerous fuckers. Despite this grand gesture, the decidedly cranky objects of his affection don’t seem to appreciate his help and because of this ingratitude, Irwin has been forced to learn a highly technical way of placating these toothy beasts that involves jumping on top of them when they least expect it and holding their mouths closed as they thrash about underneath him trying to figure out what the fuck just happened.

And while it makes for riveting and occasionally terrifying television, you can’t help but feel that Irwin’s trademark lunge could be better employed elsewhere. For example, I would hazard a conservative guess that I have seen Victoria Beckham interviewed on television at least 100 times since she rolled off the celebrity assembly line, yet I cannot think of a single one of those exchanges that would not have been greatly enhanced by the sight of a grinning man dressed in a khaki safari suit sneaking up behind her, wrestling her to the ground, sitting astride her back and holding her mouth closed before she gets a word out.

Ireland’s Eurovision representative, the artist formerly known as Mickey Joe Harte could obviously do with that kind of treatment too. According to a newspaper, his long list of backstage demands at a gig in Drumshanbo (population 623) included 72 cans of beer, a box of tissues, accommodation for 10 people, a native Irish sapling and a shovel for planting of same.

According to the paper “organisers of the an Tostal festival in Drumshanbo said Mickey Joe did not use most of the things on the 27-item list and he did not plant the sapling.”

Like anyone cares about the sapling. If he was accommodating 10 people, I think we should be told what he needed a box of tissues for.