On my recent trip to London, I was surprised one night by the sight of a fox near St. Paul's Cathedral. I was trying to get a cab and I saw an animal slip across the road then through some railings into the churchyard. At first I thought it was a cat, but the shape, tail, and gait were all so distinctive. In all the late nights I've spent out in London I've never once encountered a fox and so I thought it a rare sighting.
I've since learned (as is often the way with seemingly unique experiences) that foxes are not at all unusual in London.
This image from a guy who seems to have a bit of a thing about foxes (http://www.permuted.org.uk/).First my friend Graham Rice told me that he had seen a fox a few years ago in the Chelsea Flower Show early one morning during set up, before there were many people about. It was apparently trotting through a display of desert succulents.
Then, while reading the highly enjoyable second edition of Alan Bennett's autobiography, Untold Stories (faber and faber, 2005), I came across the following, written after the author has been down to the Mall to see the extraordinary scenes following the death of Princess Diana:
"The evening is redeemed by an extraordinary sight. Despite the hundreds and hundreds of people trooping past, here, on the grass by the corner of Stable House Street, is a fox. It is just out of the light, slinking by with its head turned towards the parade of people passing, none of whom notice it. It's quite small, as much fawn as red, and is, I imagine, a vixen. It lopes unhurriedly along hte verge before diving under the hedge into St. James's Palace grounds. Besides us only one woman notices it, but that's probably just as well: such is the hysteria and general silliness it might have been hailed as the reincarnation of Princess Diana, another beautiful vixen, with whom lots of parallels suggest themselves."
And then, finally, I rent a movie called Breaking and Entering, which has a promising cast--Jude Law, Juliette Binoche, and Robin Wright Penn--and is set in London. It turns out to be one of those movies that doesn't quite pull it all together but guess what features in several scenes? Right, a fox. This time not slinking much, but screaming quite a bit in the most ominous and intrusive manner.
Not a real fox, but movie magic.It turns out that one can buy the model who served as the fox from a company that sells movie memorabilia (
http://www.premiereprops.com/). And, as quoted in a review on Salon.com the fox is "The one wild thing in your life, and it makes you crazy."
