The Great Centenarian

 Well, there's no escaping the Attenborough centenary – it's everywhere, and will be all day, with a special concert from the Royal Albert Hall on TV this evening. It was 100 years ago today that the Great Man, our most assured National Treasure, was born – in Isleworth, by the Thames in Middlesex (though he did not grow up there). I remember Isleworth from my childhood: it was there that, despite the state of the heavily polluted river, I saw my first (and for a long while last) Kingfisher. A flash of electric blue, unmistakable, unforgettable...
    So, Attenborough. In his prime a great broadcaster and communicator, and even a great Controller of BBC2, responsible for Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. As regular readers of this blog will know, I found Attenborough in his later years hard to take, such was his insistent focus on Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change. Having bought in to Paul Ehrlich's Malthusian predictions of planetary catastrophe caused by human overpopulation (which hasn't happened), Attenborough then bought in to CACC and its similarly dire predictions, continuing to push the notorious Michael Mann 's Hockey Stick model long after it had been shown up be mathematical nonsense. Though he was a genial fellow, a mensch and an all-round good egg, there was a disturbingly anti-human strand in Attenborough's thought. But never mind: he was, overall, a great good thing, his early achievements, I hope, outweighing later developments – and the quality of his brilliant earlier documentaries outweighing the gee-whiz visuals and lame commentary of much of his later work. Enough: de centenariis nil nisi bonum. Even I salute you, Sir David. 

   And here I'll append my own Nature Note: yesterday I saw my first swifts of the year – a pair flying high and passing from sight, and then, later, a single bird swooping down almost to within touching distance. Always a red letter day (and a little late this year), always a joyful, heart-lifting experience.

  And here, for good measure, what I think is one of the great nature poems (set in a garden, like Attenborough's latest series, The Secret Garden). It's by Emily Dickinson –

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad, —
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, splashless, as they swim.