First!

My first butterfly of the year - a Comma! There it was, in  a small grassy clearing beside one of the woodland paths in Holland Park, basking in the suddenly warm sun. It was a small specimen, surprisingly fresh and lively. Between basks he would take off on a few short gliding circuits - almost brushing me with his wings as he passed - before settling again in a sunny spot. After ten minutes or so of my rapt attention, he flew off into the woods, and I went on my way, grinning like an imbecile. The butterfly year begins! And a full month earlier than last year.
(That's not my photograph, by the way.)

Heliograph of the Day

A big day for birthdays today - my Derbyshire cousin for one. But it's also the birth date (in 1765) of the great French inventor Nicephore Niepce, who in 1825 created what is accepted as the oldest surviving photograph. It's not much to look at - an almost abstract view of a roof and some angles of a building  - so I've put a more decorative later still life above this post, one that neatly compendiates the French preoccupation with the table. Niepce called his photographic technique 'heliographie' - 'sun drawing' (it involved a mixture of bitumen and lavender oil). Years before this, in 1807, Niepce had also built the first working internal combustion engine, which was used to power a boat on the river Saone. The combustive mixture included clubmoss spores, and Niepce called his engine a 'pyreolophore' - 'bearer of fire and wind'. How poetical the language of science and technology once was...
Today is also the birthday (in 1792) of the mathematician, astronomer and much else, Sir John Herschel (below) - who, happily, was in his old age the subject of some extraordinarily expressive portrait photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron.
And it's the 139th birthday of Maurice Ravel - which Radio 3 is marking by devoting the entire day to his works. Bravo! say I.

318 Today

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, a prodigiously talented painter even by Venetian standards, was born on this day in 1696. A master of huge decorative schemes, but equally dazzling on a small scale, he is one of those artists who tends to be undervalued because he makes it all  look so easy. His best paintings are such airy creations, full of light and colour and movement, with little of the sombre or 'serious' about them, and his free, dashing brushwork gives the impression that they are just dashed off. Like Veronese's, they give a big hit of immediate sensory pleasure - and, to the more serious-minded, that will never do. Perhaps the forthcoming Veronese blockbuster at the National Gallery will change minds about him, but Tiepolo for now will have to wait.
 Meanwhile, here is a glorious Tiepolo ceiling panel - no one was ever better than him at turning a ceiling into a sky - depicting Nobility and Virtue defeating Perfidy, though the real subject is more like Celestial Blue and Ravishing Rose-Apricot defeating an exquisitely toned range of Greys. To think that just five months ago, I was looking up at this very painting on the first floor of Ca' Rezzonico. Hey ho...

Over on The Dabbler...

I write about a most extraordinary butterfly man.

Fixing our eyes on the distant Horizon...

I must be in a bad way; last night I watched a repeated Horizon on BBC4 about, er, what happened before the Big Bang. I've often wondered... Well no, to be honest, I haven't, but it was good to hear about the Big Ideas the boffins are tossing around these days - sometimes tossing at each other with a degree of force and venom. Roland Penrose, who was Mr Big Bang for years and was happy to declare that there couldn't be a 'Before' because Time 'came into being' with the Big Bang, has done a commendable volte face and now has his own ideas on Before. So do a whole battalion of other megabrains, who speak of Inflation (which seems to be the big alternative to Big Bang), Multiverses, Black Holes, Swiss cheeses, Gravity Waves, things called 'Branes (i.e. membranes) that exist in ten-dimensional space, whatever the heck that is... Towards the end, the succession of frankly geeky males was broken by the welcome surprise of a rather glamorous and exotic lady Prof who'd had a Eureka moment over a cup of coffee. It involved String Theory and the Universe being a Wave, and for some reason it seemed to mean that there needn't be a Before. I think.
  Okay, so what is all this about? Is it looking for something 'before Time' - surely a logical contradiction, as without Time there can't be a Before? Or is it a matter of pushing back yet further
the really big question - how does Something emerge from Nothing? Do any of these new ideas actually answer that? Can the question ever be answered in terms of Space-Time reality? Doesn't it ultimately belong somewhere else? Perhaps it loses some of its difficulty if we acknowledge the existence (hardly the word, but what can you do?) of a timeless world - a world such as we sometimes subjectively and intuitively know, and which, after all, we inhabit for a large part of our lives, 'Returning each morning from a timeless world', as Auden puts it. Incidentally, for those exercised by the question of whether God exists, this acknowledgment would, in a way, settle the matter:  'Dieu n'existe pas, Il est eternel.' I think that was Francois Mauriac. I'm sure he wasn't thinking about what happened before the Big Bang.

Blackbird

And then this morning, surfacing during Farming Today and managing to stay awake through the rest of the programme (whither Ukrainian grain?) - and then came Tweet of the Day. And it was the one and only Bill Oddie - and it was The Blackbird!
 Happily my window was open, and so it was that a radio blackbird joined in with the blackbird in my garden and those in the gardens beyond as they greeted the morning light - a magical few moments of perfect blackbird polyphony...
 Explaining how blackbirds' territories overlap, Oddie signed off with those beautiful closing lines of Edward Thomas's Adlestrop:

'And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.'

And outside my window, mistier, farther and farther, all the birds of Carshalton, Northeast Surrey and adjacent parts of South London sang on. I really should live in a shire.

Ain't It Enough

I've been laid low for a couple of days by what we used to call 'gastric flu'. It's been no kind of fun, but the upside of this kind of prostration is that I get to spend lot of time in bed or on the sofa, drifting in and out of sleep, with the radio on. And you never know what you might hear in your more wakeful moments. Early one morning I became aware that one of Garrison Keillor's radio shows was on (this must have been Radio 4 Extra), and there was some familiar-sounding music - as I surfaced, I realised it was Old Crow Medicine Show, and they were performing the lovely song Ain't It Enough. Ketch Secor was on vocals, but it's really better suited to the gentler voice of the peerless Willie Watson, as here...