POEM OF THE DAY

Pam Ayres is celebrated for her humorous light verse, but she is in more sombre mood in The Last Hedgehog, published to mark National Hedgehog Week (Picador, £6.99, with charming illustrations by Alice Tait). Her poem deals with their current plight and all the fates they meet with. “You are allowed to laugh at it,” she says, “but the message is serious.”

EXTRACTS FROM THE LAST HEDGEHOG Farewell, farewell, for what it’s worth from the final hedgehog left on earth

Cousin Henry, young and bright, Went up in flames on Bonfire Night

And poor old grandpa fast asleep, Was stabbed to death in a compost heap.

My uncle in one playful bound fell in a swimming pool and drowned,

My aunt was old, her eyes had dimmed,

But all the same she wound up strimmed.

If in your fence you’d made a space We could have moved from place to place,

Have found a gal, paid our respects, Had some cautious hedgehog sex,

And in a cosy pile of logs Produced a nest of little hogs.

From now on, as you pull the drapes You’ll see no round familiar shapes, Nevermore from dusk till dawn

Will we eat slugs on your lawn.

Drowned in rubbish, drowned in junk,

That’s why our population’s shrunk, You threw down stuff you couldn’t use,

The plastic rings from packs of booze,

Polluted, poisoned, burned and mowed,

And ran us over on the road. . .

Like the owl which hunts the mouse Like swifts returning to a house We fit like interlocking rings

Neatly in the scheme of things.

This is the truth, these are the facts, The whole of nature interacts. . .