Over the last few months I haven't been getting out too much. That's not because I'm getting agoraphobic (or at least I hope not) but rather getting into a routine that precludes it. In fact, the irony is that my need to maintain a job search is requiring a daily browse on the internet and other such things which deters me from taking a day out and getting some fresh air and exercise.

That said, hot days are not the most comfortable to walk long distances in the countryside, and rainy weather is a miserable experience far from home without shelter. That doesn't leave me with many average days. British weather is like that.

Yesterday I felt the need for a stroll. I took a route round the bottom of West Swindon and back along the old railway path. Nothing extreme, nothing too remote, just some footpaths through open spaces. As it happens, british weather was threatening to get its own way. By the time I got home it was raining. Not heavily, just a very light drizzle, a sort of preparation for the sort of weather one ought to witness from indoors. Of course it came as no suprise. The television weather map had shown a thick band of blue due to cross the country that evening.

During the course of my outing I realised that this was now the summer. Walking along the canal path through town I was struck by how overgrown it was. Everything seemed buried in thick green foliage. Okay, it wasn't a manicured parkland, but all those recently constructed blocks of flats in what had been former back gardens now looked like they belonged there. In the space of a couple of years, nature has smoothed the joins.

The Nature Of Swindon

Passing a newsagent on the way home I spotted the billboard. There are now plans to turn the former Locarno nightclub, a burned out shell of a grey stone victorian edifice, into a hotel. More plans? I can't think of any other town that makes so many plans for the future. A television documentary about swindon aired in the seventies once suggested that Swindon was a town comfortable with its future, but not its past. These days it can't decide what its future is. Or do anything about it even if the planners all agree.

When Nature Is Less Than Smooth

To hear the news that two infants were attacked by an urban fox in their upstairs room is a shocking development. We all know that foxes are pests in towns and I can confirm their insidious habit of tearing open bin bags and squealing loudly in the wee small hours. By and large they remain shy and retiring from human attention. Maybe not always any more, it must be said, as I remember watching a stunned security guard walking past a mother fox and her playful cubs lounging in the sun on a grass verge of a company car park perhaps ten years ago. I hope the kids recover from their ordeal

But to stalk upstairs in the search of food? Thats unusual for a fox. I can believe they might sneak through an open window or whatever to make off with a morsel or two. There's a part of me that remains intensely suspicious about that. What I find incomprehensible is that a fox would try to eat human infants in this manner. Well, if the fox was guilty, it may well have paid the price already, as one was trapped at the premises afterward and destroyed.

All too often I've seen foxes both at large in the towns and countryside. Cubs playing in the sun, or following their mothers on their first hunting trips, learning how to be adult foxes. There's a continuity to it which is appealing. Besides which, they have such cute faces. Sometimes it's hard to imagine the havoc they can cause in chicken sheds.

Then again, animals vary in character. In the same way that a person might be anything between angel or devil, so too are all our mammalian neighbours. Plus, opportunity and hunger are great motivators, and what mammal prefers to do things the hard way all the time? Whether human or furry carnivore, the desire to sneak and snatch away is unfortunately a natural instinct.

After all, bears in America have pretty much lost their fear of Man and now treat his settlements as foraging bins. They are of course big enough to frighten off human beings and they know it. Yet they still prefer not to confront and compete for their treats. If it isn't nailed down, it's theirs. It seems our own urban foxes are learning the same lessons. Who am I trying to kid? They learned that lesson long ago. It seems now they've learned something else, and it is, I'm afraid, a very old lesson in nature.

There was a time in Britain when the howling of wolves meant to guard your homes. Somewhere in Wales is a memorial to a dog, laid to rest there in the dark ages, maybe fifteen hundred years ago. A man returned home to hear his dog in a savage mood, his children crying and screaming in fear. Understandably he was horrified. Drawing his sword he rushed inside and cut down his dog which until then had always been a trusted guardian. His dog had remained so, for the man then learned from his children that his faithful canine had fought a wolf that had crept inside their home looking for infants to carry off. The dead wolf was hidden from view behind the bed.

And this sort of thing is still going on, in Britain, in the twenty first century. Relax for a moment and nature is right back at work.