I might have excelled myself with the tangential nature of this post – in that there is no direct reference to hedgehogs – BUT …

Yesterday I was sat in my shed trying to concentrate on beavers (the new book is getting closer to completion, and the chapter on beavers is rather fun … I was impressed that they do the things in real life that they do in cartoons … in fact I will deviate even further from my plan to bring you an illustration:

They chop down trees, they make dams – all in all, they are wonderful. I was with Paul Ramsay who has introduced them to his estate in Perthshire and the night I had out watching them – I saw eight – was as exhilarating as any I have had in East Africa … I have become distracted, again)

So I was trying to concentrate on writing about them when my wife Zoe asked if I would like to meet Eddie Izzard … of course I said, not knowing that there was to be hard work involved.

He was on a tour of the UK – drumming up support for the YES campaign in the AV referendum. His plan was to cycle around the streets of Oxford offering his words of wisdom as to why we should be voting for a change … and my job was to cycle our tandem and allow Zoe to film him as we went. I will drop in a link to the film in a moment, but here is the vague hedgehog-link … as we were cycling along I asked whether he could weave the subject of hedgehogs into his spontaneous and divertingly surreal monologue … and I think I made this man of grand and improbable connections pause – and he had to admit that I had flummoxed him. Which is a great shame, as I think he would have been able to do it quite well …. as it is, he did manage to liken the Tories to the Dementors from Harry Potter – might not be a hedgehog joke, but was well-made all the same. And here is the resulting film:

http://vimeo.com/23226768

I hope you enjoy it – I will be back with some hedgehogs soon … as long as I can clear this backlog of beavers … must keep beavering along … chop chop now … damn this is nearly funny!