Low life | 24 September 2011

Somewhat frayed around the edges after The Spectator’s ‘End of Summer Party’ I drove up to Norfolk to visit my country cousins. The corpses on the A143 told me I was getting deeper into the countryside. As well as the usual pea-brained pheasants, I saw a bloody badger, a broken fox and a magnificent, unmarked hare that was bigger than either of these. Normally, I would have stopped and taken the fox’s brush as a present for my grandson, but there was a car up my arse.

I stayed with my uncle and aunt on their smallholding and was given my usual bed in a spare room that doubles as an egg-packing station. Quite often I wake in the night not knowing where I am. I sit bolt upright in the darkness in an existential panic trying to figure it out. If I’ve been dreaming, I think I’m in a railway tunnel or a mineshaft or I’m looking out from a cave. The prosaic, less frightening truth, when I realise it, that I am in a bedroom, lying on a bed, comes as a huge relief. But when I wake at my uncle and aunt’s place, and look round in a panic, and all I can see are eggs, and the silhouettes of eggs, thousands of them, in trays, stacked around me, it takes a while to realise that here in Norfolk reality can be every bit as bizarre as a dream.

At my uncle and aunt’s place you are fully in the country. You eat the best bacon and eggs imaginable, the dogs are kept outside, the well-thumbed books on the shelf are about pig breeding and chicken breeds, the latest edition of Cage and Aviary Bird lies on the arm of the chair, and the talk is mostly of the predations, infections, contaminations and atrocities committed by vermin such as mice, rats, mink, sparrowhawks, crows, foxes, badgers.