Nature, nurture and some hedgehogs ...

I am beginning to know where I came from - now to find out where I am going!

In between events at the Hay Literary Festival I went to visit my mother, who lives up near Birkenhead, across the Mersey from Liverpool. We went and got her some wheels!

By chance, Gaia (the massive globe, not the goddess, though, who knows!) was visiting. I have had the pleasure of her company in a church in Oxford, but Birkenhead Park was a very different setting.

Anne is my biological mother, we met for the first time (leaving aside the first 10 days) when I was 36. And this was a real moment of crystallisation for me - of nature vs nurture.

My parents were not particularly interested in nature - yet I was born with a love for it that was deep. Animals - mostly mammals, I never really got the bird bug - were my focus. I had a plan - having read all the books by James Herriot about his life as a vet - that I too should become a vet.

Unfortunately it turned out that being a vet requires a considerable capacity to be good at exams … which I am most certainly not. Next it was Jacques Cousteau who made me wonder about marine biology … and then I read In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall and was utterly transported.

I wanted to study nature, I wanted to study animals in such a way that I could tell stories about them. I had quite a crush on her to be honest (my third crush, after Maid Marion - from the Disney animation of Robin Hood … yes, my first crush was a cartoon fox -

and then, more reasonably, Kate Bush.)

Fortunately I was able to pursue my love of nature - in a roundabout sort of way.

Meeting Anne in 2002 was the moment that I began to see more clearly how I had become who I am - Anne is an animal lover, a gardener - and to top it all still carries the school nickname of ‘Badger’.

This spring she has been telling me the stories of the five fox cubs who are causing chaos in her carefully curated garden - the bird feeders cost her a fortune - and there have been hedgehogs, even when I was visiting!

I did not get to become the new Jane Goodall - in fact I have never even met her (she is on the list of great people I would love to meet though.) But I have found a way to keep involved - and that is through writing.

There was no plan to become an author - just a sequence of happy coincidences - but I am so pleased to have this as one part of my life. And Cull of the Wild is, I think, my most important book yet.

Two more books to finish this year, both short - for the Welsh publisher Graffeg - and then … well, another idea is brewing!! Behind the writing, there is always the work with hedgehogs - that is not stopping …

So who got you to where you are now? Who were the influencers who helped guide your life choices? How much do you think your nature drove you to a love of nature? Or was nurture key?