June

A new week, a new month – and new hope that this disgraceful lockdown is beginning to ease, or at least to fray at the edges. It's become increasingly clear that it was never necessary, is quite probably counterproductive, and that the costs – in economic and social terms and in lives lost – will far outweigh any presumed benefits. Not that Boris Johnson had any choice but to impose it, such was the clamour at the time from the public, the media and 'The Science' (Boris's far too loud backing band). What still astonishes me, sentimental nostalgist that I am, is the eagerness with which the English people embraced a wholesale confiscation of their liberties unprecedented in peacetime – and many of them still seem to want it to go on and on and on... Happily others are busy releasing themselves from this bondage already, hence the perceptible fraying at the edges and the noticeably more relaxed atmosphere. The churches, however, remain firmly closed, locked and, to all intents and purposes, redundant. If the Church of England had set out to prove once and for all its complete irrelevance, it could hardly have done a better job. What it tells us about that institution is deeply depressing...
On the other hand, it's certainly been a spring to remember. The weather has been simply astonishing, at least here in the Southeast – all through April and May, day after day of unbroken sunshine. And the butterflies! I've never before seen so many Green Hairstreaks, Grizzled Skippers and Small Blues [below], and I've already spotted two species I wouldn't normally expect to see till well into June (Large Skipper and Meadow Brown). The 'lockdown' has kept me closer to home than usual, and as a result I've discovered lepidopteral riches in places I would not have looked before. Today, as the sun still shines, my plan is to go a little further afield to see what discoveries await me...