Are wolves stalking us on the school run?

The other morning, my wife Carla was driving home after the school run in her battered old Renault Trafic people-carrier when through the fog she saw what looked like a wolf. It was ambling across the fields, which were covered in white ice.

The wolf was only about 50 metres away, so she pulled over and took a picture, which she texted to the local dog rescue centre. She then followed the animal as it continued on its way, parallel to the road, in the direction of our house. Eventually it vanished in the fog about half a mile from our front door.

‘Yes, it’s a young wolf,’ said the man from the rescue centre when my wife spoke to him on the phone. ‘You can tell it’s a wolf from its tail,’ he explained. Apparently, wolves have tails that are convex and curve down; dogs have concave tails that curve up.

We have got some interesting fauna on the Italian coast. There are badgers, porcupines, green toads, whip snakes, marsh harriers, bee-eaters, nightingales,various types of bat, and owls I call screech owls because of their horror-movie nocturnal cries. But wolves?

When Carla told me that’s what she’d seen, I must admit I was a little sceptical. She can get a bit carried away. For example, she is convinced (and has convinced our six children) that our house is full of poisonous ragni violini — violin spiders — which are so called because they have a pattern on their backs that looks like a violin. In our house, blood-curdling cries of ‘Violino! Violino! Quick! Squash it!’ are common during the autumn spider season. But I do not believe they are violin spiders, mainly because the violin spider is also known as the brown recluse spider which implies something solitary and secretive, whereas our ‘violin spiders’ are all over the place and far from being reclusive.