Joking about vowels is a hate crime now

It took four days to actually see the pine marten in the flesh. We caught it on a trail cam on night two of our holiday as it scampered in an agreeably gamine manner for the food we’d left out. It ate better than us that week. By night three it had a choice of eggs (its favourite), peanut butter sandwiches and chopped-up frankfurters. All it needed was a nicely chilled Chablis. We sat in the dark for hours, waiting, until my wife said: ‘Fuck the malodorous little bastard, let’s watch TV.’ She is not much of one for wildlife really. And then it appeared, up on its hind legs crunching its way through the shell of an egg, tipping the yolk down its throat. Pale golden chest, long bushy tail, perky, impish face — we’d got our man.

The creatures have long since been exterminated from England by the idiot gamekeepers, but still hold out in the north and west of Scotland, where we were staying. There are plans to reintroduce them south of the border, perhaps in Northumberland or the North York moors, if the grouse lobby can be quietened. There is also a programme of reintroduction in Wales, but if I were a pine marten, I’d tell them to stuff it. They’d almost certainly be forced to learn Welsh and charged with a hate crime if they demurred; harassed and vilified by the various dimbo, chippy and gossamer-skinned mayors and mayoresses of Toytown who somehow have been allowed to run the place. People with ‘Ap’ in their names who you pay for through your taxes. Stay east of Offa’s Dyke, if you know what’s good for you, pine martens. Leave Wales to your less photogenic, foul-smelling cousins, the polecats.

I had a taste of what the pine martens might expect a week or so back.