Fantastic? It’s time children learnt all about the evil Mr Fox

The film studio that produced Wallace and Gromit, Aardman, doesn’t shy away from the dark side – think The Curse of the Were-rabbit. So who better to take on the tricky subject of Reynard the Fox? You might think that a series of medieval stories about a really evil fox would be fair game for an animation studio, but back in 1937 the Disney stable took one look at them and balked.

Now, 80 years on, Aardman has decided to tackle Reynard in four films. Anne Louise Avery, the author of an associated children’s book, promises that the updated version will convey “the darkness and the horror” of the original stories. The material dates back nearly 1,000 years, much of it Flemish and French, with some going right back to Aesop; the best known English version is William Caxton’s, from 1481.

The crucial thing about Reynard – when you strip away the medieval humour – is that he is not just a spoof antihero, but one with genuine fox characteristics. He’s an unredeemed carnivore who can’t pass a capon without wanting to bite its head off, and a wily so-and-so who leads his tormentors into lethal traps.

In other words, the authors were perfectly familiar with the actual character of real foxes, which weren’t seen as adorable but as diabolically clever predators. Pretty well the way my friend Gertie regards them: the other day, a couple of them killed her chickens, the ones whose eggs she sells. She can’t wait for the local hunt to kill the culprits.

But the notion that fantasy animals should have the character of real animals is a world away from contemporary animation. Compare and contrast with, say, Zootopia, that vegan buddy movie about the friendship between Judy, a rabbit girl-cop, and a fox criminal – which ends up with them collaborating in the fight against crime. Any proper fox would have taken one look at Judy and eaten her.

If this new venture means that children’s cartoons finally embrace the reality that lions don’t lie down with lambs, nor foxes with hens, and that animals are carnivores as well as vegans, roll on Reynard the movie.

So when is vanilla ice cream not vanilla ice cream? When it contains neither vanilla, cream nor milk? No. It turns out quite a lot of ice cream has none of these things, especially the soft-scoop stuff. In 2015, even the minimal food information requirements for a dairy component were dropped, so vegan fake ice cream can masquerade as the real thing.

The easy way of telling whether your ice cream has actual vanilla and dairy is price. But do you honestly mind if your delicious 99 cone from the van has whey protein rather than milk? It doesn’t bother me, but then I’m under no illusions that it’s what you’d get in an Italian gelateria. It’s like a mars bar versus proper chocolate with lots of cocoa: they’re different categories confused by a common name.

Lady Amelia Windsor, a minor but pretty royal, swears by seaswimming every day. “I am convinced,” she told the Tatler, that “it’s the key to happiness”. She’s so right. I swim every morning when I’m in Ireland, round the year, and believe me, the Irish Sea is always unimaginably cold for the first minute. But it wakes you up like nothing else. I swim with a group of friends in their sixties and seventies; they swear by it. If I could do it every day, I’d be a nicer person.