Details are emerging of how an impoverished writer, Jake Wallis Simons (32), was driven to kill a squirrel for food yesterday. “I was having a glass of water in the garden,” he explained, “when I saw a movement in the branches of the tree. It wasn’t premeditated or anything. I was hungry. I just acted.”

He picked up a pebble from the flowerbed and hurled it up at the tree. “In an extraordinary stroke of luck,” said Simons, “it happened to hit him right between the eyes. What are the chances of that?”

The animal dropped, dazed, to the ground, whereupon the writer seized it by the tail and put it out of its misery by swinging it against a fence-post.

“I made a nice pasty,” Simons recalled fondly. “My children dined well that night.”

Animal rights campaigners demonstrated outside his house that afternoon, but then, according to a neighbour, “seemed to lose interest and wonder off.” Simons, meanwhile, is confident that the squirrel did not give its life in vain. “That influx of protein allowed me to survive as a writer for another 24 hours,” he said. “It gave its life for another 1,254 words of my new novel.” He admitted, however, that there is a chance that these 1,254 words will end up being edited down to one.

A spokesman for the squirrel community was unavailable for comment.

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