Reading

Text A: from a newspaper feature about urban foxes (2025, written for this paper) At 2 a.m. on a Tuesday, in a car park behind a supermarket in south London, I am sitting in the dark with a flask of tea and a wildlife photographer called Dev, waiting for a fox. 'They're creatures of habit,' Dev whispers. 'She'll come along that wall, check the bins, then cross to the railway line.' Twenty minutes later she does exactly that: a slim vixen, rust-red under the orange streetlight, trotting along the top of the wall as neatly as a cat. She pauses, looks straight at us with an expression of mild contempt, and is gone. Britain has an estimated 150,000 urban foxes, and they divide opinion like few other animals. To some, they are a thrilling scrap of wildness in the concrete. To others, they are pests that rip open bin bags, dig up lawns and scream in the night like murder victims. Councils receive thousands of complaints a year. The truth, says Dev, is that foxes have simply adapted faster than we have. 'We built cities full of food and shelter, and then we're surprised something moved in.'

Text B: from a Victorian naturalist's notebook (written for this paper in the style of the period) March 14th. — Walked out at dusk to the old quarry on the common, where Thomas the gamekeeper assured me a vixen had made her earth among the fallen stones. He spoke of her with the bitterest enmity, she having carried off, by his reckoning, no fewer than eleven of his master's pheasants since Michaelmas. I concealed myself behind a thorn and waited the better part of an hour, growing very cold. At length she appeared — a lean, handsome creature, her brush tipped with white, who stood upon a stone and surveyed the country with an air of entire possession, as though the common, the quarry and the gamekeeper himself were all her property. I confess I could not share Thomas's hatred. There is something in the fox — her cunning, her boldness, her perfect fitness for the life she leads — which commands a kind of admiration even from those she robs. I resolved to say nothing of the earth to Thomas, and walked home through the dark well pleased with my evening.

Text A: from 'The Swimmer' (written for this paper) The water was colder than Maya had expected, cold enough to punch the breath out of her, and for a long moment she simply hung there in the green, arms out, while the shock went through her like a bell. Then she began to swim. The lake was a mile across. Her grandmother had swum it every summer for sixty years, until last summer, when she hadn't, and this summer, when she couldn't. 'Just to the island,' she had said from her bed, her hand light as paper in Maya's. 'Swim to the island for me, and tell me what the water's like.' Maya's arms rose and fell. Her breathing settled into the rhythm she had learned in a chlorinated pool in town, every third stroke, a gasp of sky. Below her the lake went down into darkness. She tried not to think about it. Halfway, she stopped and turned on her back. The shore was a thin line of trees now, the cottage a white speck. The island looked no closer. Her shoulders burned. A heron lifted off from the reeds, slow and grey and enormous, and flapped away over her as if she were not there. She thought: I could turn back. Nobody would know. She thought of her grandmother's hand, light as paper. She turned over and swam on.

Text B: from 'The Ascent' (written for this paper in the style of an early twentieth-century adventure story) By the third day the guides had stopped speaking, and Harrington understood that this was a worse sign than any complaint. The ridge narrowed above them to a blade of ice no wider than a man's boot, with a drop on either side that he did not care to measure. The wind had risen in the night, and now it came over the col in long, howling gusts that threw powdered snow into their faces like flung sand. 'We go on,' said Harrington, though no one had asked him. He had dreamed of this mountain since he was a boy in a draughty schoolroom in Kent, tracing its outline in an atlas with an inky finger. He had told the newspapers he would stand upon its summit by the end of the month. He had told himself a great many things. Behind him, Old Pemba planted his axe and looked up at the cornice that hung over the ridge like a frozen wave. Then he looked at Harrington, and in that look was everything the guides had not said. Harrington set his jaw and took another step.