ALEXANDRA SHULMAN: I don’t blame the millionaire who put an electric fence around his mansion – I caught scabies from a fox watching Netflix on my sofa

Over the weekend, a tawny monster crawled under the garden fence and slowly walked around our yard. It was an adult canine fox, the size of a giant corgi, with a magnificent bushy tail (unlike most of the mangy she-foxes that lived on our road).

I opened the kitchen door to scare the intruder away, but he stood still and kept an eye on me before taking another fancy lap around the building and jumping over the fence into a neighbor’s yard.

Foxes appear to be proliferating in central London. I saw one of these in a garden square in Belgravia the other day, and another last week when I came to a Christmas party on an expensive Kensington street where every property would qualify for the top level of Rachel Reeves’ mansion tax.

In our area of ​​west London they are now as common as a Deliveroo rider. Look out the window on any given evening and you’ll spot one of them wandering around or hear them screaming like a tortured baby.

So I have some sympathy for multimillionaire businessman David Walsh, who decided to install an electric fence around his £44 million home in Notting Hill to keep the foxes away.

Mr. Walsh says sarcastically that his wife is afraid of them. But a number of objectors in local neighborhoods think the fence is both ugly and grossly over-the-top. Judging by the pictures, it adds a touch of Wormwood Scrubs to the elegant enclave.

Even so, something needs to be done about these urban troublemakers.

I know there are those who consider foxes to be very cute animals that should be treated with the same affection we give to pets. I almost felt the same way when I saw that furry, almost cute animal in my garden; But then I remembered the trauma of a fox visit a few years ago.

One afternoon, I came into our living room, where the television was left on, to find a small, grayish fox curled up on the couch, happily watching Netflix. The fox had walked in through our open kitchen doors. Startled, I shouted to my partner David to help chase the unwanted visitor, which took a while, and after the visitor was dispatched I sat on the sofa where the fox was to compose myself.

A few minutes later, and it was only a few minutes, I felt a slight itch on my butt under my pants. I ignored it, but an hour later a vivid red rash appeared.

I took an antihistamine pill and hoped because today was Friday; Don’t these always happen on Friday? – that the rash would disappear the next day because I couldn’t go to my GP surgery on the weekend.

But it’s far from that. The next morning the rash had spread and was painful.

I went to the local Emergency Room, where I was miraculously quickly examined, even though the doctor had no idea what was going on. He said it was some sort of allergic reaction and prescribed the steroid Prednisolone as well as Fexofenadine, a very standard antihistamine taken for hay fever.

On Sunday I was ready to skin myself. I spent hours in the bathroom, the only place where the itching subsided, and I applied bottles of chamomile lotion that I remembered being used for chickenpox in childhood. The nights were unbearable; I couldn’t sleep, I tore my skin.

On the third day, I saw my private doctor because I couldn’t get an NHS appointment straight away. He examined me and said it looked very painful, but he couldn’t tell me what it was. He prescribed a stronger steroid Dermovate and a dermatologist recommended it.

Although I have a moderately severe reaction to mosquitoes, I’m not one to be allergic to anything and I was absolutely sure it wasn’t a mosquito. I thought it might be a previously undiagnosed food allergy, but it seemed unlikely. These spots were small, hard and raised; It wasn’t like the large, blistering marks typically seen in allergic reactions.

The fact that we were flying to Croatia for a week-long holiday in a few days only added to the stress of the matter. It was impossible for me to go anywhere in this state. I had to find the solution.

Alexandra Shulman caught scabies from a fox that snuck into her house and curled up on the couch.

The two-hour drive to the dermatologist on the other side of town was excruciating as I struggled with inflammation.

He examined me and concluded that he couldn’t be sure, but that it was probably ‘eczematous folliculitis’ (an infection in the hair follicles) and added an antibiotic used for acne to my growing list of medications.

But that didn’t work either. The rash got worse over the next week and spread all over my body, arms and legs. In desperation, I made another appointment with another dermatologist. On the way there, I talked to my ex-husband about my situation, and he said without a moment’s hesitation: ‘It looks like scabies.’

I said impatiently that, having consulted with several competent doctors and one of the capital’s leading dermatologists, I imagined that if this were a relatively common condition of scabies, one of them would recognize it.

However, when I went to the examination room, I mentioned this to the dermatologist, who, almost as an aside, said to him that it did not look like scabies, but that he would take a sample for examination.

The result came within an hour and I quote: ‘The diagnosis is human sarcoptic mange caused by infestation of the dog/fox scabie mite sarcoptes scabiei var canis. I must say that this is the first time I have encountered this situation in over 30 years of dermatology.’

Beautiful. Fox scabies or scabies.

Luckily this type of scabies isn’t passed between people, so I wasn’t contagious, but I had to smear the same disgusting-smelling liquid used for head lice all over my body for a few weeks.

Alexandra Shulman writes that fox numbers are increasing across the country, but none of them can solve the epidemic

Croatia was included in the list of holidays that have never been experienced before.

This was an extreme example of the damage foxes can do, but it’s not the only problem I’ve encountered. They leave trails of litter in the garden, drag plastic bags and empty takeout wrappers from one house to another, and knock over recycling bins. They tear down garden fences by digging huge holes underneath and ripping out the slats, and leave their poop – fox droppings – outside doors and on windowsills.

In September, while I was away, my stepdaughter came home one evening to find shoes scattered throughout the rooms, some in perfectly good condition, some in tatters.

At first, surprised at what it could be, he thought an intruder had arrived, but I quickly recognized the dastardly presence of a fox who had probably managed to get in via a broken cat flap.

Having someone’s shoes ruined (fortunately she didn’t seem interested in my Gucci kitten heels, preferring David’s old slippers) was unpleasant enough, but the thought of foxes wreaking havoc around the house at night was even more disturbing.

Despite the damage they caused, no one could find a solution to the fox epidemic that ravaged England. That’s why I fear that, whether we like it or not, we are doomed to share our neighborhood with these predatory exotic vermin.

Maybe electric fences aren’t such a bad idea after all.