Let’s get one thing straight: I am no animal lover. In fact, that’s an understatement. The truth is that I have a singular hatred of all things nonhuman, be they prickly, feathery, furry or scaly.
I am disgusted by the way animals don’t use the toilet. I am terrified by the fact that, in San Francisco, dogs outnumber children. Most of all, though, I am horrified by the irrational affection that animals inspire in human beings.
That term itself, ‘animal lover’, is abhorrent to me. Please don’t tell me they’re ‘better friends than people’, that ‘animals never start wars’, or that your cat ‘loves you back’. He doesn’t. If you supplied me with a warm house and free food I’d purr contentedly and let you stroke me too, but I’d still think you were an idiot.
You see, when I was growing up we couldn’t afford a television, so we had to make our own entertainment. My dad discovered that he and I could amuse ourselves for hours by taking long drives around the winding country roads of the Scottish borders. We weren’t there for the scenery; we were there for the sheer joy of running over as many jaywalking pheasants as we possibly could.
Nowadays I’m deprived of the satisfying squelch of bird head beneath Astra wheel, but whenever I purchase cosmetics, I take great care to ensure they have been tested on animals. So, whenever I wash my face, I think of a thousand pairs of little monkey eyes, bloodshot and burning in the name of my personal hygiene. Perhaps I’m exaggerating. Perhaps I’m not. Perhaps I really am a complete monster.
The central point, however, remains: I was never going to be one to give A Prickly Affair, a book by a man obsessed with hedgehogs, an easy ride. In truth, I wanted to hate it. I had a burning desire to rip out its still-beating little hedgehog heart, chew it up, then spit it back out, spewing tasty vitriol all over this very page.
Sadly, though, I can’t. As much as it pains me to say it, this book is, well, rather decent. It succeeds almost in spite of itself, its author and publisher.
It’s billed as a cutesy tale about how lovely hedgehogs are, sold with the assumption that the whole world finds the spiky little blighters completely adorable, but really A Prickly Affair isn’t anything as awful as that. This is because its emotional heart lies not in that oh-so droll title, but in the subtitle, ‘My Life with Hedgehogs’.
That ‘with’ is important, because the hedgehogs of A Prickly Affair really are the book’s secondary concern. The real story here is that of a classic English eccentric with a bizarre passion that he pursues with relish and vigour and without ego or self-possession.
Unfortunately for Hugh, probably, it barely matters that the book is about hedgehogs. For much of the book Warwick could just as well be writing about his love of turnips, crabs, or vintage cars. Much like those ‘personality’ TV documentaries, which are not about hills, but about how Gryff Rhys Jones loves hills, not about breast milk but about how much Kate Garraway loves breast milk, Warwick himself is the star of his book.
He does not mean to be; he is utterly unselfconscious – and all the more engaging for it. He tries to keep his hedgehogs to the front and centre of the reader’s consciousness at all times, but in doing so only heightens a sense of just how powerful and all-consuming his passion is.
I will never understand or share Hugh Warwick’s fascination with these animals, but his near-obsessive dedication, and the eloquence and humour with which he explains it are endlessly admirable.
