Stalling an Ambush and protecting more than the countryside

The Rutland Panther and the Blair government's abandoned plan to build an eco-town in the Harborough District both feature in a new novel, Stalling an Ambush. In a guest post, its author, Emma Lee, introduces the book.

My novel Stalling an Ambush is set in and around the village of Stoughton in Leicestershire, where, in 2009, an eco-town of at least 15,000 houses, called Pennbury, was proposed. 

Pennbury met with strong local opposition. It was on the wrong side of Leicester city for motorway access, would have put extra cars on already congested roads and wasn’t even on a bus route. Not only that, it was going to be built on farmland at a time of growing concerns about food security, and would have closed Leicester Aero Club as the site included the airport the club use. 

Perhaps then it seems a minor thing to also raise concerns about the so-called Rutland Panther, a large black cat whose territory stretches from the Harborough District in Leicestershire to Rutland. There’s no definitive evidence of the cat, but many sightings have been reported, including one from a surprised motorcyclist in Kings Norton, near Stoughton. Periodically, BBC Wildlife and Big Cat Conversations podcast report on sightings nationwide.

Generally, countryside residents tolerate these mythical cats. If they are real, they are unlikely to impinge on humans. The panther in Stalling an Ambush observes:

She knew two things about humans. They weren’t edible but they were dangerous.

So, in the novel, when radio programme researcher Frances Winter is despatched to interview a Stoughton resident about another sighting, she runs through the interview on autopilot. The interviewee doesn’t have any evidence. Frances drives out to the airfield to take a photo. The novel imagines Pennbury got the go ahead, but was stalled as the economy stalled in the Credit Crunch, and the aero club had abandoned their home. 

Frances discovers something that shouldn’t be there – observing waiting, adapting – and now has the unlooked for responsibility of deciding how much the world needs to know and what the cost of knowing can be. Stalling an Ambush is described as an uncomfortable, tense novel of observation, responsibility and the consequences of the wild not being in secluded places. Her manager observes,  "You know, when you get over the fact that these are serious killing machines, they’re actually quite attractive."

The novel is firmly rooted in the eastern Leicestershire countryside, drawing on both real and fictional locations. Previously I had a short story, Snowena, printed in an anthology, Gentle Footprints which included what turned out to be Richard Adams' last published short story. His story Leopard Aware was written from the viewpoint of a leopard. 

That prompted the idea of exploring some of the story of Stalling an Ambush from the panther’s viewpoint:

"There were old traces of fox, badger and pheasant. No recent scents. No other cats. No recent smell of human either. She slid into the undergrowth. This was her territory now.”

Stalling an Ambush is available from most online bookshops, including Bookshop.org.

Emma Lee was born in South Gloucestershire and now lives in Leicestershire. Her poems, short stories and articles have appeared in many anthologies and magazines in Britain and abroad.

The Joy of Six 1569

Matt Gallagher reports that "the UK quietly sent one of its most senior security officials to a Trump administration summit which proposed to turn global counter-terrorism infrastructure against the political left."

"The values that translate to a modern Liberal success in terms of voting demographics are not simply responsible economics, but a commitment to individualism, social justice and equality; values that when communicated clearly can drive the support of those they affect most, alongside the conscientious urban populations, all of whom now flock to the Greens for these same reasons." Rose Runswick argues that the Liberal Democrats should stand for more than "business".

Josiah Mortimer on the problems with the government announcement that domestic plug-in solar panels are now allowed in the UK.

Samir Jeraj says cuts to council spending, including on adventure playgrounds, are jeopardising Leicester's recovery from the riots of 2022: "Staff, supporters and the local community are campaigning against the cuts and there are city-wide elections next year, which could reverse decades of Labour domination in the city. Opposition parties ranging from the Conservatives to the Greens are opposing the cuts to the adventure playgrounds and they could become a symbolic issue in the campaign."

"The digital sources barely scratch the surface of what exists in big archives, in tiny archives, in people’s attics. So save yourself the bother, save the planet, save the erosion of your cognitive faculties and learn to do it properly." Sophie Michell sees no role for AI in family history.

"There are six publicly known positive DNA results that match the leopard (Panthera pardus), two from recent years: from Gloucestershire in 2022, from a hair snagged on a barbed-wire fence in the vicinity of a sheep kill; and from Cumbria in 2023, when DNA was found on a carcass – again, of a sheep." Rick Minter makes the case that there are big cats living in the British countryside.

Big cat found in plant pot after two-month search

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this story from Norfolk.

A Savannah cat, like the one in the picture here, is a cross between a domestic cat and a small wild cat from Africa called a serval. So this one was probably rather on the small side for a big cat.

But, as one of the judges remarked, this does prove that they're out there.

Green children, lethal crinolines and the bandicoot bandwagon

The current Fortean Times has an article by John Clark on the famous case of the Green Children of Woolpit. It begins:

They were green. There were other strange things about the two children, a boy and a girl, found by harvesters in the fields of the Suffolk village of Woolpit on a summer's day in the 12th century. But it was their green skin that people first noticed. There was much more to the story, but that's how it began.

He suggests that the children were Jewish and were either fleeing persecution elsewhere in East Anglia or had been separated from a group of travellers from abroad. This would explain several puzzling aspects of the case, including the children's green colouring.

This issue also revisits the subject of death by fire in women wearing crinolines, finding an example from as recently as 1938. The unfortunate woman was Phyllis Newcombe, who was engulfed in flames at a dance at Chelmsford. Her case is often seized upon as an example of spontaneous human combustion by believers in the phenomenon.

But I was most taken by the Great Bandicoot Panic of 1996. This was a initially a marketing stunt designed to get these small Australian marsupials into public consciousness before the launch of a new Playstation game called Crash Bandicoot.

Bandicoots, the campaign said, were invading Britain and were a serious pest to farmers and gardeners. And, sure enough, members of the public soon report sighting the beasts. The fact that what are called "bandicoots" are in reality several different species meant that anything from a mouse to a badger could be mistaken for the new menace.

So bandicoots were seen in the East and West Midlands, while the South Wales Daily Post reported three separate sightings in two days. And:

During a rumination on the existence of the Rutland Tiger - a local Alien Big Cat - the Rutland Times appeared to accept the presence of the "Australian bandicoot" as a fact.

Then the game was launched, the Christmas silly season passed and, all at once, the bandicoots disappeared.

Incidentally, the Rutland Tiger may well have been left over from the sudden and botched closure of the safari park at Bonkers Hall. This followed an unfortunate incident involving a coachload of nuns. 

These were not, I must emphasise, the Sisters from Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes, who are more than a match for any tiger.