There’s something inherently funny about badgers.

Those funny shaped paws, the elongated noses and the whole gangland face paint thing - that and potentially carrying cattle killing doses of TB.

Hilarious.

Beck and I have always thought so, anyway. From the Paul Weller badger on Harry Hill in the late nineties to a sign in the Lake District reading ‘Beware Badgers’ that made us think of heavily armed creatures lurking behind the hedgerow waiting to carjack passing motorists.

When a plantation of diseased trees on the railway embankment were cut down the Brockley Society Newsletter (putting the rock back into bROCKley - no, seriously) ran a poem lamenting the poor trees. I can’t remember the exact details, but it did wistfully imagine badgers living in the trees and using the railway lines as a means to traverse the city.

On the way out to Sevenoaks there’s a village-of-sorts called Badger’s Mount. When we drove through once, years ago, a crap song by some forgotten American pop-punk band came on the radio. The chorus went ‘she’s the girl all the bad guys want,’ but I heard ‘she’s the girl all the badgers mount.’

There were some other equally filthy lyrics, which fortunately are lost to memory.

At the Camra beer festival at Earl’s Court a couple of years ago Steve, Jamie and I wandered onto the Badger Brewery stand. In the corner was a telephone box with a direct line ‘to the badger’. Obviously, we rang up and some bored woman in Dorset had to endure yet another group of slightly inebriated blokes asking ‘are you really a badger?’

Anyway.

A friend of mine is a sci-fi writer and has a short story involving a disease that enhances pets so they become intelligent. His character owns a fairly psychotic, talking cat.

(It’s better than I’ve made it sound, so apologies to the writer.)

In trying to get published he’s discovered that several short story specialist sci-fi websites have in their submission guidelines ‘no talking cats.’

I suggested he change it to a talking badger, but he didn’t seem too taken with the idea.

Can’t imagine why.