Dont Be An Armadillo

The nine-banded armadillo has a party trick that kept it alive for millions of years and is now getting it flattened on the roads of Texas with depressing regularity. When something frightens it, it doesn’t curl into a ball, despite what every cartoon you watched as a child would have you believe. Only the three-banded species can manage that particular bit of origami. The nine-banded one does something far more dramatic… it leaps straight up into the air, sometimes three or four feet, like a startled pensioner who’s just sat on a hedgehog. Against a coyote, this is genius. The predator lunges, the armadillo springs skyward, and the coyote gets a mouthful of dust and a lingering sense of humiliation. Against a pickup truck travelling at sixty miles an hour, it’s a death sentence. A car would pass harmlessly over a frightened armadillo that simply kept its nerve and stayed low. Instead it jumps, meets the bumper, and becomes another statistic on the hard shoulder.

I’ve been thinking about that armadillo more than a retired RAF policeman reasonably should. What strikes me isn’t that the animal is stupid, because it isn’t. It’s doing exactly what served its ancestors perfectly well. The problem is that the world changed and the instinct didn’t. It’s still fighting the last war, still dodging a predator that no longer exists while the real danger bears down on it with headlights blazing. And the longer I’ve lived, the more armadillos I’ve met who walk on two legs.

Life, in my experience, has never once paused to let anyone catch their breath. I grew up in a service family, which meant that before I’d worked out where I belonged, I was usually being moved somewhere else. Colchester, Germany, Oslo… new schools, new uniforms, new playground hierarchies to decode, and the eternal status of being the new boy with the funny accent, whichever country I happened to be in. Children of military families learn quite early that the ground beneath them isn’t permanent, and that the only real choice you have is whether to engage with the new place or spend your time pining for the old one. Some of the kids I knew went one way, and some went the other, and I can tell you now, decades later, which of them seemed happier.

Then came Hull, and twenty-six years of the education, friendships, early jobs and early mistakes that shape a person whether they like it or not. School asked whether I could make the grade. Work asked the same question in a louder voice and with more serious consequences. The RAF Police asked it again, with the added bonus of shouting. Later, in senior security management, the question became whether I could make the grade while also carrying everyone else’s, and I learned that being the man who puts things in writing earns you a nickname and very few dinner invitations. None of these questions ever stopped being asked. They just changed accent.

And that’s before we get to the things nobody puts on an application form. Friends change, sometimes so gradually you don’t notice until you’re sitting across a table from a stranger wearing your old mate’s face. Family members die, and the world has the bad manners to carry on regardless. Friends die too, and at sixty-six the phone calls with that particular tone of voice come rather more often than I’d like. Careers that seemed permanent turn out to have an expiry date. Money behaves like money always does, arriving slowly and leaving briskly. Relationships ask more of us than we expected to give. None of this is unique to me, which is rather the point. It is the standard package. Everyone gets some version of it, and nobody gets to opt out by ticking a box.

For a great many people, the challenges go deeper still. The world has a long and shameful habit of questioning who people are allowed to love, interrogating whether they’re entitled to be who they say they are, and generally treating anyone who doesn’t fit the expected mould as a problem to be debated rather than a person to be met. Imagine spending your life defending your existence to people who’ve never once had to defend theirs. That’s not a challenge you grow out of. If anything, you just get better at spotting it coming.

So yes, life gives us challenges. Always. Growing older doesn’t thin them out… it simply adds new ones to the pile and leaves the old ones lurking in the corner, waiting for a quiet moment to make themselves known again.

Here’s where I need to be careful, because “don’t be an armadillo” sounds like the sort of thing a motivational speaker shouts at a conference hall full of middle managers before selling them a workbook. And I don’t think it’s that simple, because I think there are two very different kinds of armadillo, and they deserve very different conversations.

The first kind is the wounded one. This is the person who has been hit, and hit hard, by grief or illness or poverty or a family that turned its back on them for being who they are. When that person pulls the armour tight, they aren’t being cowardly. They’re surviving. Sometimes the shell is the only thing holding a human being together through the worst season of their life, and anyone who tells them to simply drop it and face reality has never had reality land on them with its full weight. I’ve seen people in uniform carry things that would have broken most civilians, and the way they managed it was often by refusing to look at it all at once. That isn’t weakness. That’s triage. If you’re in that place right now, this piece isn’t a lecture aimed at you, and I’d rather you kept your armour than let anyone shame you out of it before you’re ready.

The second kind of armadillo is a different animal altogether. This one has never actually been hit. It has simply decided, quite comfortably, that it would rather not know. It doesn’t want to hear about the friend’s diagnosis, because hospitals are depressing. It changes the subject when someone mentions debt, because money talk is vulgar. It has strong opinions about other people’s identities and sexualities while making absolutely no effort to understand a single one of those people’s lives. It reads the headlines that confirm what it already believes and scrolls past the rest. It has built itself a lovely warm bubble, furnished it nicely, and then complains loudly whenever the outside world has the cheek to knock on the door.

This is the armadillo I’m actually talking to. Because what this second creature fails to understand is that the bubble doesn’t protect it from anything. The world outside keeps happening regardless. The friend still gets ill. The economy still wobbles. The young person in the family still has to work out who they are, and will do it with or without your support, though they’ll remember which one you chose. Refusing to look doesn’t make the truck go away. It just means you’re facing the wrong direction when it arrives.

In my working life, threat assessment was simple in principle and difficult in practice. You never pretended a threat wasn’t there because it was inconvenient. You also never treated every single threat as the end of the world, because if everything is an emergency then nothing is, and you’ll exhaust yourself and everyone around you before the real one turns up. You looked at it properly. You weighed it. You decided on a proportionate response, and then you got on with it. It wasn’t glamorous, and it rarely felt brave, but it worked far better than either panicking or ignoring things and hoping for the best.

I’ve come to think that’s the grown-up alternative to the armadillo. Not the panicked leap that gets you killed by the very thing you’re trying to escape, and not the bubble where you pretend the road isn’t there. Just the slightly unfashionable habit of looking at the world as it actually is, deciding what you can carry, and being honest with yourself about the rest. It means reading the news that makes you uncomfortable now and then. It means asking a friend how they’re really doing and staying for the answer. It means letting someone explain their life to you without preparing your rebuttal while they’re still speaking. None of this is heroic. All of it is harder than it sounds.

What nobody tells you about armour is that it gets heavier the longer you wear it. When you’re young, it feels like freedom, a way of moving through the world without getting hurt. By middle age it’s become a habit, and by the time you reach my vintage you can find yourself carrying an enormous weight of things you decided not to feel, not to know and not to face, and wondering why you’re so tired all the time. The armadillo, I’m told, has a shell made of bone covered in tough keratin plates. It’s genuinely remarkable engineering. It also means the poor thing sinks like a stone in water and has to either hold its breath and walk along the bottom, or gulp enough air to inflate its own gut and paddle across. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere about what we drag around with us, and I’ll leave you to finish it yourself.

I’d love to end this by telling you that I’ve mastered it, that I always look reality square in the eye and never flinch. That would be a lie, and I’ve spent too long in professions where lies eventually come back to bite you to start telling them now. I still jump. Some news arrives, and the old instinct fires before the sensible part of my brain has had time to put its boots on. Some phone calls I let ring a little longer than I should. Some subjects I steer around at dinner because I’m not sure I’ve got the strength for them that evening. The instinct never fully leaves. It’s been built into us over a very long time, and it was useful once, and occasionally it still is.

Maybe that’s all any of us can really manage. Not to stop being armadillos entirely, because I’m not convinced that’s possible, but to notice when we’re doing it. To feel the muscles tense for the leap, or feel the shell drawing tight, and to ask ourselves, just for a second, whether the thing we’re defending against is actually there, or whether we’re still dodging a coyote that died years ago while the headlights get closer.

I don’t know which one I’m facing most days. I’m not sure anyone does. But I’d rather keep looking than find out the hard way.

Until Next Time