CRYPTOLINK: Is this wallaby Jeremy Beadle reincarnated?

Highgate Cemetery, the final resting place of Karl Marx and Jeremy Beadle, has recently become home to a wallaby

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Highgate Cemetery, the final resting place of Karl Marx and Jeremy Beadle, has recently become home to a wallaby. 

The wallaby in question is, it turns out, far from dead, even though this is the principal requirement for those seeking permanent residence in Highgate Cemetery. In fact, it is alive and kicking. 

Its residency is well-testified. Unlike those brief and blurry films of the yeti or the Loch Ness Monster, video footage of the Highgate wallaby is crystal clear, and lasts a good few minutes. There are some sharp photographs, too.

‘It is quite extraordinary and so unexpected,’ says one of the guides, Melanie Winyard. ‘To spot a wallaby in London is quite strange. It’s a mystery how he got in, but now he’s in, it’s quite a good place to be as he won’t be crossing the roads.’ 

But how did the wallaby get there? Did someone bring him in and then abandon him? If so, the person in question was disobeying the rules, which forbid all pets other than guide dogs. 

A few years ago, America suffered a spate of granny-dumping, with senior citizens abandoned on freeways by their selfish offspring. Might this be a case of wallaby-dumping? On the other hand, it would have been hard for anyone wishing to smuggle a wallaby through the ticket office by the entrance gate. 

It is, I suppose, perfectly possible that someone disguised their wallaby as a very small, jumpy human being — Mr Speaker Bercow springs to mind — before sneaking him past the ticket-seller and setting him loose in Highgate Cemetery. But if this were the case, then Mr Bercow’s absence from the House of Commons would probably have been noted by now, and his excitable wife, Mrs Sally Bercow, would have kicked up a song-and-dance about it on her wide range of social media. Wallabies are not so rare in Britain as you might suppose. In 2005, the Rev Stephen Trott, a member of the General Synod of the Church of England, was returning from holiday in France when his Peugeot  406 collided with a wallaby that was attempting to cross the M1 near Junction 14 in Buckinghamshire.

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