Every year for the 18 years we lived in our house in Waller Road the vixen used our garden to raise her cubs. We called her “the vixen,” though I suppose there must have been more than one vixen because the life of an urban fox is typically short. The week Simon, my husband, and I, moved in a neighbor told us about our resident fox and referred to her as “the vixen,” as if there had only ever been one. She’d had her den in our garden, but that would be the last year she did, for we had moved in with a dog, a lurcher, and lurchers are a hunting breed. We also tidied the garden, cut down the grass which grew to mid-thigh, pulled out the thicket of brambles and ivy and dismantled the rotting wooden shed, which I guessed had most likely sheltered her den. I saw her often, that first summer, crouching on the roof of the next door’s shed or in the long grass of their garden. She would watch me battling the long tap roots of the borage which had invaded our garden. When I turned away or went inside, she would dash across our garden, slipping through the gaps in the boards of the old fence: Wilder Things: Modern Life Among the Foxes and Coyotes

“I am 20. I am walking along the King’s Road in Chelsea in London. It is the 1980s. Three men are coming towards me; they are clearly together, though the foot traffic on the pavement requires each to walk a half pace behind the other. They are white, dressed in tight jeans and cap-sleeve T-shirts. The first man, as he passes, looks me in the eye and says: “You’re a pretty girl.” The second one smirks, but says nothing. The third one leans into my face and breathes: “Nigger!”

My final year at university and I had a part-time job working for an American foreign correspondent. One of my tasks was to pick up the broadsheets each morning, and in those pre-Internet days I would leaf through them and clip and file any articles on the stories he was covering. That day was a Saturday in summer. I generally came in later on the weekend and the street was already busy with people. I was on my way to his house with my haul of newspapers when I passed the three men.

You’re a pretty girl. Nigger.” Go to the source for the rest of this essay: Power Walking