'It's perhaps not surprising...'

 I was amused to read in the latest issue of Butterfly magazine that counting butterflies reduces anxiety by nine per cent on average, while also 'enhancing mental wellbeing'. It seems that spending just 15 minutes watching and counting butterflies made people 'feel more connected with nature'. Who'd have guessed? The research that came up with these findings was conducted by Butterfly Conservation in collaboration with the University of Derby, and comes ahead of this year's Big Butterfly Count, in which thousands of people note what butterflies they see, and in what numbers. 'It's perhaps not surprising that spending time in nature, looking at butterflies, is good for our mental health,' says Butterfly Conservation's head of science, with commendable understatement. The finding is of course yet another example of science validating what we already knew, thereby making it somehow more 'true' than it was before receiving this essential endorsement. And there's more, equally unsurprising: it seems the salutary effects of watching butterflies  last for six or seven weeks after the butterfly watching ends. 
  All this is, I suppose, mildly heartening, but I fear those taking part in this year's Butterfly Watch might find the experience less sustaining than usual. It's been a dire butterfly season so far, with way too much rain (and wind) and way too little in the way of sunshine and warmth. As it happens, I'm just back from a couple of days in Worthing ('Worthing is a place in Sussex. It is a seaside resort'*), where this morning the sun was shining brightly and the wind had dropped, so I was hoping to see some butterflies as I took my constitutional – but no such luck: in particular places where before I've seen the likes of Painted Ladies, Red Admirals, Commas and more, nothing was flying but a few whites and a single Speckled Wood. I'm already dreading the jeremiads that will surely follow the results of this year's Big Butterfly Count... 

* Jack Worthing to Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, which was written in Worthing.)