Eating hedgehog...

I’m sure that the countryside used to be so full of hedgehogs that you couldn’t walk across the green at night without kicking one by mistake, sending it rolling and tumbling into the bushes. I seem to remember that there always seemed to be a dead one by the side of the road every hundred yards or so, and every single house on our estate had its own family of spiky creatures which they dutifully fed each evening with white-sliced soaked in milk.

I don’t know where they've all gone. These days they seem pretty scarce, so scarce that I almost couldn’t remember when I last saw one.

Hedge pigs my Gran used to call them, what with her being of Romany blood and everything. She used to claim that they tasted delicious, a cross between pork and chicken, but I doubt she every really eat one. Mind you, she did know how to cook one – gut it, wrap it in clay, cook in the embers of a fire, then pull off the clay taking the spines with it. I don’t know, maybe she made that up to.

At one time they were eaten by country people in France – stewed with shallots and garlic. But then the French also eat horses, snails, and the odd song bird or two.

I found this one creeping across the cottage drive in Wales on his way to steal the mealy worms from the bird feeder no doubt. It was a real treat to see him, like I said I almost couldn’t remember the last time I saw one. Isn’t it odd how some creatures seem so common and then seem to become so uncommon? I see dead badgers everywhere and I thought them unusual as a child and as for foxes – well there’s hardly a street in the area where I live where they don’t raid the bins at night.

I wonder where all the hedgehogs are. It can’t have been the gypsies can it?