Dawn Inspiration

It wasn't the first time I've walked into the kitchen of a morning to the sight of a fox on the lawn outside, but today's encounter was a little special. This particular fox is a regular visitor to our garden (Ant took this picture in January last year), easily identified by his unfortunately shabby coat, which is largely absent from about half way down its back. Frusrated at not being able to tend to this poor creature's malady, I have tried before to approach him with catfood and milk, but clearly of a nervous disposition, he always runs away. Even Marcel, the most timid cat in the world, appears unphased by his presence, happily trotting past him this morning as he sat curled up right in the middle of the grass. The Ted Hughes poem Roe Deer sprung to mind as he rasied a sleepy head and held my gaze for what seemed like several minutes, until with a stretch and a skip, he was off back over the fence. In Hughes's (far superior) words "the curtain had blown aside" between our separate worlds, suspending us in a magical moment, before returning him to whatever it is foxes do in the day (hang out in their dens, presumably), and me to the usual morning routine of tea-making and cat-feeding - "Revising its dawn inspiration...Back to the ordinary".