Life & Wisdom Quote by Nigel Dennis

There is a quiet dare tucked into Nigel Dennis's matter-of-fact confession: if you want to take the measure of the world, start with what refuses to be measured. Photographing badgers is not just a charmingly odd origin story; it is a miniature manifesto about craft. The double emphasis - "very, very difficult" - reads like the voice of someone trimming sentiment and leaving the blunt fact of friction. Difficulty is not romanticized, just logged, as if the struggle itself is the apprenticeship.

The subtext is about choosing a subject that won't perform. Badgers are "shy and nocturnal", which means the photographer (and, by extension, the writer) must adapt to the subject's schedule, not the other way around. You're forced into patience, silence, and long stretches of apparent failure - conditions that resemble writing more than people like to admit. Dennis frames seriousness not as prestige but as commitment: the first "serious project" is serious because it demands discipline, not because it guarantees an audience.

Context matters here: for a mid-century British writer, badgers carry a particular cultural charge - folkloric, half-seen, native, stubbornly unglamorous. Choosing them rejects the obvious, the scenic, the human. It hints at an ethic of attention aimed at the margins, the inconvenient hours, the subjects that don't care if you're watching. The line works because it's lightly comic while being dead earnest: the joke is the badger; the truth is the grind.