Scream scream scream...

I know carnivores eat meat. I know that to eat meat, an animal has to be killed. I know this is perfectly natural and normal (except when it is on the scale at which which most meat-eating human beings eat meat - we are after all omnivores and can derive all our nutrition from non-meat sources without too much difficulty, as with my lunch of Finn Crisp and ripe Brie, yum, delish). Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I'm not one of those vegetarians who would try to force a dog to eat vegetarian food; I know that carnivory is part of nature.

I just wish it didn't have to take place under my bedroom window, over an unpleasantly protracted period, in the small hours of the morning.

I got up after about ten minutes of screaming. The predator, needless to say, was a fox. In the dim pre-dawn light, I couldn't even make out what it was that was being killed; it was small, probably a rat, but all I could see was a shadowy shape moving on the road surface. The fox was following it with a sort of skipping gait, snapping at it as it shifted; skip, snap, scream, skip, snap, scream... Finally the fox managed to get a good grip, and disappeared under next-door's parked car, from where the shrieking went on for a while longer, slightly muffled by the chassis above. I went back to bed, very wide awake, and managed to get back to sleep about 6.30.

Consequently I'm feeling tired and a little blotto today, despite the sunshine. When I went to get my lunch I told a colleague I was going to "look for some crisp bed and cheese". Now that's a Freudian slip and no mistaking.