Were there many animals in your young life?

Yes, there were.

I mean, I had a succession of pets when I was small.

I had a white mouse or two white mice, in fact, one or three other.

I had a rabbit at one point.

I had hamsters and guinea pigs and And my sister had lovebirds at one point.

And I remember playing with those or admiring those when I was small.

Can you tell us a bit about how this came about, where you were roughly in the world, in Great Britain, I should say, and how it unfolded?

And then to become an instant New York Times bestseller for the hardcover, an instant New York Times bestseller for the paperback, it just felt perfect.

Well, I think there is something magical about hairs.

I really do.

It's a big word to use.

But I noticed when I first started raising the hair during the lockdown and I was carrying on doing my work on foreign policy, at the beginning, I didn't tell anyone I worked with that I was doing this because I almost had the feeling that they would take me less seriously or that I shouldn't really mix these two worlds.

And my world of politics was serious.

And So I didn't I kept it to myself.

So now in retrospect, how has your life changed and how what is your approach now to work?

Yeah.

And all the dead things that have, have, have broken off and rotted and looked so unpromising will restore life.

And in the process, while they all look dead, they're actually sustaining life.

Birds are feeding off them, and the ground is being enriched and, and, you know, all the new growth is being made possible.

And I, I found it incredibly consoling to realize that there are these underlying rhythms to life that govern our lives.

And, and that's when, you know, it is just that basic fact that even when things look really, really dark, you know, renewal is usually just around the corner because that is human nature and that's our great capacity, and it is also the sort of nature of the environment around us.

So I, I, I, I found myself studying it almost in a daze.

... "I wanna respect that nature as much as possible."

Yeah

... made me and, and being in one place looking out of the window or going on, on small walks in this one patch of the countryside in the north of England made me realize that my sense of the passage of time was very warped by living in the city.

And obviously, you know, in extreme circumstances you notice the weather in, [laughs] in cities.

But often you don't notice the passage of time, and everyone around you is moving at the same kind of speed.

There's a sort of, um, you know, like a, a demographic.

You know, everyone is the same sort of age and the same sort of stage in their career and frantically busy.

And I found it fascinating to have the chance to realize that in the course of a year in the countryside you see these patterns repeating themselves, and you see at the most simple level, you know, the, the grimness of winter giving away, giving way to spring, into summer, into autumn, and then also realizing that, that things dying have-

Yeah

And then one day, Chloe was standing in the kitchen, watching the hare in the garden.

And my eye fell on this dry stone wall, as we call it, which is a particular way walls are built in the countryside here.

It was quite high, more than four foot tall.

And the hare, it was standing on top of this wall, looking at me.

And there was only two ways it could go.

It could drop back down into the garden or it could jump down on the other side and it would be in the wild.

And I just froze.

out.