We piled into Burt’s Land Rover and went to the farm. I had thought of enlarging a disused sett, but I wasn’t confident of persuading the police that I wasn’t badger digging, and I didn’t like the idea of inhaling, along with the good earth of mid-Wales, a huge dose of TB bacilli. Burt’s JCB couldn’t give us a tunnel, just a deep trench scored into the hill, but it worked very well. We covered the roof with branches and bracken, and sealed it with earth. Burt chugged off down the valley for fishcakes and left us to it. We wriggled inside and tried to be a bit more authentic. We shaped the sett with our paws and a child’s beach spade. We tried to scuffle out the earth with our hind legs, but couldn’t, because the ceiling was authentically low. Tom could pull the bracken bedding in backwards, like a proper badger, but it was too much for me.

And we sneezed: constantly, mightily and unbadgerishly. Badgers seem to have some sort of muscular sphincter just before the entrance to the nostrils that they can close when they’re digging to stop the earth getting in. But we haven’t, and in that dry July, it was terrible. When they’re hunting, nose to the ground, badgers can’t use that merciful sphincter: they need to catch the scent, so they blast out the dust in heavy snorts. That, between sneezes, is what we did as we excavated. Tom was filling tissues with silica and blood for a week.

We used head torches. Badgers have more photoreceptive rods in their retinas than we do and a reflective layer in their eyes, called a tapetum, which makes them shine in car headlights; they squeeze more light from their world than we do. The near dark of our midday tunnel would have been dazzling to them.

We crawled down to the river, lapped from a pool where leeches waved at our lips, and crawled back to our chamber, where we fell asleep, side by side and head to toe, as all good badgers do. But Tom always moved in the night. “Feet in the face aren’t friendly,” he said.

We awoke to the rattling of a jay and the growling of an engine. It was Burt, with fish pie. “Bogus, I know, but I won’t tell anyone.” In fact, it wasn’t bogus at all. Badgers are the ultimate opportunistic omnivores. No badger would turn up its nose at fish pie. “I’ll tell you what, though,” he went on. “To compensate, I’ll come down later and set the dogs on you. And then we’ll go up to the road and I’ll try to run you over.”

We stumbled up the bank and hollowed out a nest in the bracken. Lying up outside the sett during the day isn’t unbadgerish, although it’s far from the rule. Badgers sometimes, just like we did, crawl into dense vegetation and lie there until dusk comes. We don’t know why; perhaps there’s tension at home and they can’t bear the thought of a day close to wretched, cantankerous, odious X. And sometimes, no doubt, they’ve been caught short a long way from home and don’t want to run the gauntlet of early-morning dog walkers.

Tom needed to sleep, so he did, curled foetally on bracken, his paws, earth-brown from digging, clasped under his chin. I, too, needed to sleep, so I didn’t. We had to change our rhythm to that of the badgers, which meant sleeping in the day, but, at least at first, I found the sett a threatening place. Was this an old fear of burial? A worm fell into my mouth. I gagged quietly and went back to sleep.

Those first few days taught me a lot. They taught me that, despite my shaggy, anarchic pretensions, I was dismally suburban: I preferred a whitewashed wall to the endless fascination of a real earth one. I preferred my ideas of badgers and the wild to real badgers and real wilderness. They were more obedient and less complex. And they didn’t broadcast my inadequacies so deafeningly.

But I learned to like that burrow.

    -EXCERPT: ‘A worm fell into my mouth. I gagged’: my life as a badger (Charles Foster, from Being a Beast)