Exploring Vole Country With Bill Oddie

Bill Oddie owns one of humanity’s better souls. There’s no less flattering way of putting it. Nestled in that body of his beats a heart so pure that it’s thought to be in time with nature’s own clock. There was a moment today when I realised that just to be in the man’s presence is an honour. His breath smells of wild nettles and he has small barbs on the backs of his hands were wild creatures can grip as they sup the heady nectar oozing from his sweat glands. I can honestly say that the exciting days and long drawn out nights I’m spending with Bill are making me more aware of his special qualities. Hell. I've even seen him suckle a weasel. Is there anything more honest and true than that?

We’d spent our morning tickling trout on the stretch of Scottish river that Bill maintains up here on behalf of the wildlife. It’s a lush paradise for all types of fauna, including the grit toad, the gasping adder, and the rare Highland vole (about which, more later). Yet as much as I love Bill and would have happily bore him children if we'd met in my childbearing days, I did feel that the morning was less than advertised.

I’d travelled all this way to Scotland expecting to finger some fish only for Bill to insist, at the very last moment, that I could only tickle his trout if I wore woollen mittens to protect the oils that cover their delicate scales. Water heavy mittens and temperatures below freezing were not what I was expecting when I agreed to this caper. By eleven o’clock, I was so disenchanted that I made only half-hearted attempts at inducing laughter in the trout, who, it turns out, are the most selfish of creatures. Once they realised they were getting nothing from me, they’d slip from my numb, cold fingers and go seek their pleasures between Bill’s waders. I’ve seen similar behaviour at recordings of the Paul O’Grady show, so I recognised the signs that a performer should retire while he still can. Only some, like O’Grady, keep going and put honest men and women out of business. Ruin them. Force them to wretched satellite channels, only a dozen or so channels up from the porn. What kind of life is that for a man with great ideas and a wife with a novel to plug?

However, I digress.

Around lunchtime, I managed to persuade Bill that we’d tickled enough trout for one morning and I suggested lunch.

‘I have some pickled onions and quorn sandwiches in my binoculars case,’ he said with an enthusiasm you couldn’t smash with a mallet. ‘I’ll share them with you, Dick. Nothing like pickled onions and a bit of quorn to warm you up for an afternoon wading among the trout.’

‘Much as I appreciate the offer, Bill,’ I answered, ‘I doubt if your binoculars case could hold quantities of neither pickled onions nor quorn to satisfy my appetite. Let’s call the ticking off for the day and go look for a local tavern and perhaps sample its honey meads.’

‘Taverns? Honey meads?’ scoffed Bill. ‘There aren’t any taverns around here.’

‘Then let us embark on a quest to find a country pub,’ I replied. ‘Isn’t it often said that you can’t walk five minutes in Scotland without smelling some freshly brewed hops?’

‘That’s true but not in this part of Scotland. This is Presbyterian country. Most pleasures are outlawed around here. Do you know I even needed a license before we could tickle the trout? And before they gave me that I had to promise that we wouldn’t go touching any nipples.’

I felt a slightly guilty flush develop around my cheeks. Nobody had mentioned that the nipples were out of bounds.

I thought it best to hurry matters on. ‘This is disturbing news, Bill,’ I said. ‘Where am I to get a pint?’

He laughed. ‘Nowhere! There isn’t a pub within fifty miles of us.’

I could hardly see a reason for humour and with barely a wave to the trout, I set off in search of lodgings and something alcoholic and warm.

Walking in Scotland with Bill Oddie was such a rare experience. It was past noon and the cold of the morning had been turned a touch more pleasant by the breaking of sunlight through the clouds. We’d been walking some time, me leading the way as Bill went bounding over the fields and occasionally returning to the road to hand me some fresh owl droppings that he’d found. Yet it was about five miles down the road when the incident happened.

There was a vole lying at the side of the road. We’d been walking along when Bill stumbled across him. Well, actually, Bill didn’t stumble. It was more like me nearly falling on Bill after I'd slipped on the poor creature’s innards that had been spread across the carriageway.

‘Oh, the poor little mite,’ said Bill, kneeling down to close the vole’s lifeless eyes.

‘Looks like a car got him,’ I said. ‘Dunlop. I recognise the tread pattern across his back, all four bloody feet of it.’

Bill wiped a tear from his eye as he stood up. He’d left his jacket across the remains of the poor dead vole.

‘We should buy him,’ he said.

‘Bury him?’

‘You can’t leave him here. Not like this. It’s undignified.’

I looked up the road, imagining a hot toddy waiting for me in some warm snug with access to repeats of the Richard&Judy show on Watch. ‘Oh, it will be alright,’ I said. ‘A cat will come along at any moment and lap that up. Isn’t that the way with nature? He’ll be food for some passing crow within the hour. I promise you, Bill.’

Only Oddie wouldn’t listen to reason. He spent the next ten minutes digging a small hole by the side of the road and then transporting the dead vole into that makeshift grave.

‘I’m surprised you don’t need a license to do this,’ I muttered as Bill stood over the grave and bowed his head.

‘Do you think we should say something?’ he asked.

‘I could say a fair few things,’ I replied in a threatening tone. Only, one look at Bill and I realised how terribly cruel I was being. ‘Of course I could say something, Bill. In fact, I’d be delighted.’

As you probably know if you’ve read ‘Fathers & Sons’ (reasonably priced at Amazon and getting even more reasonable by the day), I’m blessed with a mastery of words. However, nothing could have prepared me for that moment when I had to compose a valediction for a mole lost by the side of a Scottish road. I wish I could recover the words I’d said there but they have been lost on that lonely stretch of tarmacadam and vole juice. All I do know is that by the end, Bill was sodden with tears; his beard a single strand of bedraggled hair, matted together and smelling like damp straw. As I stood and watched him play the Last Post on his favourite duck call, it was then that I realised that Bill really is a very special person. He’s a one off; the champion of owls, defender of the hedgehog, and a friend to animals everywhere. And as soon as I’d scraped the last of the vole from my shoe and kicked it into the grave, I was only too happy to start filling in the hole on behalf of my good friend who could only stand there, blubbering out his vows to fight even harder to have vole tunnels installed under every road in this country of ours.

When I was finished heeling in the earth, Bill looked up at me, his face hardened into a look of solid ardour.

‘Never again,’ he said, gripping my arm. ‘Never again.’

‘Never again, Bill,’ I agreed with compassion. ‘Now let’s go get a drink and help me rinse this taste of vole out of my mouth.’

In Katie Derham's Shoes

Before I begin, I want to make it clear that I’ll not hear a bad word said against Katie Derham. Like many this day and age, she may lack a certain professionalism but she completely wins me over by her beauty. Had I not already found my soul mate in Judy, then Katie would be the woman for me. Or that, pretty much, was the conclusion I reached when chatting to Bill Oddie when he came over yesterday.

I was on my way back from a lazy Saturday morning jog around the neighbourhood when I met Bill at the bottom of the drive. He was wearing his favourite RSPB deerstalker and carrying a large inflatable carrot.

‘Good news,’ he said, ‘there’s a major crisis at the Beeb.’

‘An invasion of large PVC rabbits?’ I suggested with a nod towards his carrot.

‘Oh, this?’ he waved the orange inflatable in the air. ‘This is for Judy.’

‘Ah,’ I said, as though it made complete sense that Judy would want a large inflatable carrot.

‘I mentioned that I had one and she asked if could have it when I was finished with it.’

‘Stop right there, Bill,’ I said, wiping the sweat from my brow. ‘I don’t need to know any more. Tell me instead about this crisis at the BBC. Am I right to assume that they’ve discovered that the large red button on the National Lottery draw isn’t actually connected to the Random Ball Juggling machines?’

‘Not at all,’ said Bill looking a touch bewildered. ‘The natural history team have been called in for an emergency meeting. Poor old Katie Derham was due to take delivery of the star of a new reality TV show for next autumn’s schedule. Unfortunately, she’s had to drop out because she never mentioned that her house is in the middle of London and lacks a lake-sized pond.’

‘An odd thing to forget to mention,’ I replied. ‘The fact that this house has a lake-sized pond is usually the first thing out of my mouth whenever I walk into a production meeting. But tell me, Bill. Does this have anything to do with me?’

‘Only that I’ve put a good work in for you and your pond.’

‘You mean they want me for a show?’

‘Couldn’t do without you,’ he smiled. ‘Though, to be honest, Dick, you were the only port and this a pretty ferocious storm. The whole series had been thrown into doubt. Production schedules were being rewritten and if it hadn’t been for my last minute suggestion, they were going to defrost David Attenborough from his cryogenic chamber. They’ve been saving him for the day when the icecaps head south.’

All fascinating details, I’m sure you’ll agree, but to cut a short story even shorter: it turns out that Bill had been so impressed with the natural organic taste of my right areola that he had suggested that I might be the ideal man to fill Katie’s shoes. Not that I normally go in for wearing women’s shoes, you understand, but on this occasion I could and would.

After arrangements had been made, agents contacts, contracts signed, Bill and I sat down for lunch and waited for the men from the BBC arrived with the crate. It arrived shortly after one o’clock and contained not women’s shoes but my co-star.

'A beaver!' said Judy when I told her the good news.

I corrected her. 'A reality TV beaver. They've trained him to avoid looking at the cameras. We'll be keeping him in the lake, so you don't have to worry about him coming up to the house.'

In actual fact, the lake sits at the furthest corner of our enormous plot of land. It is fed by a fresh water river that flows in from the Corbett estate and drains off into our neighbour’s land. An hour after the crate arrived, I was standing on the banks of the lake as I watched Bill and Stephen Fry wade through the grey waters. Stephen had responded to my plea for help with his usual display of selfless loyalty. They had been working tirelessly to remove the large map of the UK I’d scuttled there back in the nineties.

‘I’m not sure this is a good idea,’ said Judy after a few moment's thought. She was standing at my elbow and wrapped for winter. Her pessimistic view of the whole beaver situation was, I think, a result of being reminded about the map. It never puts her in the best frame of mind. There has always been a touch of guilt about the way we left Fred up in Liverpool when we came to make out fortune beside the Thames. Judy had thought it particularly cruel of me to sink our weatherman’s favourite prop but I thought it was the kindest thing to do in the circumstances. A man like Fred Talbot would never have escaped that map and at some point he’d have done something foolish, like try to sail it around the coast. Scuttling had been an act of great kindness.

‘You’re only being negative because it’s not your career that you’re thinking about,’ I told her. ‘Come Autumn, you’ll be penning your best-selling novels. But what about me? I need to be seen on TV. This beaver could be the break I’ve been talking about. I could become the new face of BBC wildlife. Can you imagine Alan Titchmarsh with a beaver?’

‘Unfortunately I can,’ said Judy, not without menace.

‘Look here,’ I said, kicking the crate. ‘This beaver won’t bother us. I’ll come down here and feed him in the morning, say my bit to camera, and then come back and make us breakfast. You won’t even know he’s here.’

‘So you promise me that I won’t become part of this?’

‘I wouldn’t want you to,’ I said. ‘This is my beaver. Not yours.’

She crossed her arms and turned back for the house. ‘I’m going to put the kettle on. Ask Stephen and Bill if they want a drink. It must be freezing in that water.’

I shuffled down to the edge of the lake and watched a muddied Stephen Fry drag a chunk of East Anglia from the water.

‘My, my,’ he said as he dumped it on the bank. ‘What on earth are we going to do with a one tenth scale model of Lincoln Cathedral?’

‘If you don’t know, Stephen, I’m sure I don’t have the answer,’ I said. ‘Where’s Bill?’

Stephen didn’t need to reply. Bill surfaced from beneath the weeds. A waterlogged piece of knitting trailed behind him like a net as he made for the shore.

‘Isn’t that one of Fred the Weather’s old jumpers?’ asked Stephen.

‘It might be,’ I said, somewhat surprised to see it. ‘I wonder what it was doing down there…’

‘There’s so much rubbish,’ said Bill, sitting down on the bank and wringing the moisture from his beard. ‘The map’s hollow and there’s plenty of space inside. I managed to dive quite a way down and I’m sure I spotted an old gas cooker and a sleeping bag.’

Stephen pulled off one of his yellow marigolds in order to scratch his head. ‘Think back, Richard. When you dumped this map in the lake, did you check it to make sure that Fred wasn’t living in it at the time?’

‘I can’t say that I did,’ I confessed. ‘It’s not something you look for: minor celebrities living inside large floating maps. I do remember than it took a while for it to sink. I recollect saying to Judy that it was like it had a life of its own, the way it kept making muffled hammering sounds as I pushed it under with a stick.’

Stephen winced. ‘You don’t think those muffled hammering noises could have been Fred?’

‘I thought it mere buoyancy.’

Bill sucked his teeth and shook his head. ‘You should probably get on to his agent. See if anybody has seen him in the last ten years.’

That I would certainly do. Only, at that moment, there was a squeal from the crate.

‘You beaver’s hungry,’ said Bill.

‘Bless him,’ said Fry. ‘Were I a man with a large freshwater lake in my rear yard, I too might indulge myself with the purchase of the castor canadensis or North American beaver.’

‘These are European beavers,’ said Bill.

‘Ah,’ said Fry. ‘Then it is castor fiber.’

‘What’s the difference between a European and American beaver?’ I asked.

‘One is hairier,’ said Bill with an inexplicable smirk.

‘Oh dear,’ said Fry, pulling on his rubber glove. ‘Come on Bill. Let us return to our aquatic toils lest Richard asks us any more questions and you are tempted to more vulgarity.’

It was an odd note on which to end a conversation and, somewhat confused, I wandered back up to the house, thinking it best to leave them to their private jokes.

A couple of hours later, Judy woke me. She was standing at the living room door.

‘Stephen says that they’ve finished,’ she said.

‘Ah,’ I replied, sitting up in my recliner and setting aside the newspaper beneath which I had been so solidly snoozing. ‘Tell him I’ll be there in a minute.’

When I got back to the lake, I discovered that Bill had stripped out of his wet clothes and was wearing a dry one-piece undergarment in a faded colour of ruby. He resembled an old gold prospector while Stephen resembled the old prospector’s offended mule. He was looking at Bill with a disgust it is hard to describe as mild.

‘So are we ready to release the beaver?’ I asked.

‘You are a few minutes too late for that,’ said Stephen, giving Bill another funny look. ‘I have already bore witness to its hairiness. Most certainly European.’

‘Oh, ignore him,’ said Bill. ‘We’ve done no such thing. Your beaver is still in his cage.’

‘Well, there’s no time like the present,’ I said as I went over to the crate and unlatched the hatch. The beaver was bigger than I expect and he needed no encouragement. He came lumbering out like an obese rat and hit the water with barely a splash. He swam out to the middle of the lake where he turned and looked back at us.

‘The good thing about your garden is that you’ve got plenty of trees,’ said Bill, wiping a tear from his cheek.

‘Oh, Judy takes great pride in our woodland,’ I said, myself distracted by a slightly moisture about my own eyes. The beaver looked so happy as it splashed in the water. ‘No doubt our little friend will enjoy rummaging around them looking for nuts and berries.’

‘Nuts and berries?’ repeated Bill. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was looking shifty.

‘Have you thought of giving him a name?’ asked Stephen. ‘I find it preferable to name an animal to whom one is expected to grow attached.’

‘Of course I’m going to give him a name,’ I said. ‘And being a bit of a literary man, I thought I’d name him after my favourite literary beaver. Tarka. I used to love that book when I was a child. Bill doesn’t know this but it’s why I’ve been so quick to agree to make this documentary. I’m looking forward to our months together. I love to watch them lying on their backs as they float in the water…’

‘Richard,’ said Stephen, placing his arm around my shoulder, ‘I really hate to be the one to inform you of this but I believe that Tarka was a…’

‘A lovely little fellow!’ squealed Bill, rushing up to us and giving the two of us a squeeze. ‘That’s what Stephen was going to say. Tarka the Beaver was one of my favourite books too as a lad up there in Lancashire. Such a nice chap, Tarka the Beaver… Come on, Stephen. I think we better be going. Let’s leave Dick alone. He needs to get to know Tarka and Tarka the Beaver must get to know Dick...’

Stephen shrugged as Bill began to drag him towards the house. ‘I should think of another name if I were you,’ he shouted back as he went. ‘In fact, I’d ask advice from members of your blog. I don’t know…’ He wriggled free of Bill’s grip, stopped, and looked at me with a meaningful stare I couldn’t quite interpret. ‘Tarka the Beaver just doesn’t sound quite right to me…’

I waved him away and turned my attention to my newest friend, giving himself a good scrub in the middle of the lake. Beavers are clearly one of the few subjects about which Stephen knows little. I just knew that Tarka and I were going to be friends.

‘Isn’t that right, little fellow?’ I shouted to the lake.

As if in agreement, Tarka bobbed down in the water and I smiled with delight when he resurfaced, a shining piece of wood in his mouth. I turned my back on the lake and began the long walk back to the house. I would have to ask Judy about the tree that grows in our garden and produces branches that are so white that it almost resembled a thigh bone.