Sheer Abundance

Sorry to return so soon to the subject of butterflies – but really this has been a quite amazing summer, an object lesson in the dramatic impact of a good long spell of sunshine and real warmth on the butterfly population. Barely a month ago, the situation was not looking good, despite signs of promise. The terrible early spring weather seemed to have left a lasting mark on the early fliers. Now, however, things could hardly look more different. I haven't seen such sheer abundance in years – sometimes it's hard to believe this is England.
 Last week I returned to Mitcham Common and was immediately rewarded, several times, with close-up views of purple hairstreaks, and having got my eye in, I realised that many of the oaks on the common were alive with these little beauties, flying about the tree-tops in such numbers as I've only seen once before in my life. And there were many more purple hairstreaks in the oak trees on Bookham Common yesterday when I led my walking friends (whose interests lie chiefly in old buildings) on a butterfly walk. Silver-washed fritillaries and white admirals were flying in huge numbers, to spectacular effect, and all that was lacking was an encounter with the purple emperor. He, however, was settled somewhere in the treetops, with no intention of showing himself, even on such a gloriously sunny day. Ah well, you can never count on the emperor.

Talking of butterflies, here's an addendum to my recent post, Seventh Worst Butterfly Year. Last year's figures – reported, inevitably, as a tale of dramatic declne – showed that several species, including common blue, white-letter hairstreak, orange-tip, pearl-bordered fritillary and wood white, had increased in numbers, in some cases dramatically,  year on year. And over the long term (i.e. since 1976) 22 species (over forty percent of UK butterflies) have actually become more abundant. That is hardly a picture of unrelieved doom and gloom – and, if this weather continues, next year's figures should paint a much more hopeful picture. They might even be presented as a good news story – can such things be?

Eight Miles to Breakfast

On this day 200 years ago, John Keats, on a walking tour of Northern parts with his friend Charles Brown, wrote a letter to his brother George (whom he had left, with his wife Georgiana, at Liverpool, where they took ship for America). 'I have slept,' he began, 'and walked eight miles to breakfast at Keswick on derwent water  – We could not mount Helvellyn for the mist so gave it up with hopes of Skiddaw which we shall try tomorrow if it be fine – today we shall walk round Derwent water and in our way see the falls of Low-dore...'
  Eight miles to breakfast! Keats, like most of the Romantics, was a serious walker. The stereotype of the Romantic poet as a kind of Fotherington-Thomas ('Hullo clouds hullo sky') wandering vaguely through the fields in a state of abstracted rapture could hardly be less appropriate. These people were heroic walkers as a matter of routine, thinking nothing of 20 miles a day and more – and Keats was no exception, as he showed day after day on his 1818 walking tour. Speaking as one who, in his younger days, would sometimes walk 20 miles or more, I can confirm that it's no joke, and to do it day after day would have been a major challenge. For someone of Keats's height – barely five feet – it would have been even more so, and yet he took is all in his surely rather short stride (his legs must have been a blur), and still had energy left over to write substantial letters to his family and friends. He was – until his health failed – as tough physically as he was mentally.
  In the course of this letter to George, Keats drops in a charming little lyric:

Sweet sweet is the greetings of eyes,
And sweet is the voice in its greeting,
When Adieux have grown old and goodbyes
Fade away when old time is retreating –

Warm the nerve of a welcoming hand
And earnest a Kiss on the Brow,
When we meet over sea and o'er Land
Where furrows are new to the Plough.

  (Has anyone ever set that to music?)
  Keats then jokes about the sheer volume of his letter-writing: 'We will before many Years are over have written many folio volumes which as a Matter of self-defence to one who you understand intends to be immortal in the best points and let all his Sins and peccadilloes die away – I mean to say that the Booksellers will rather decline printing ten folio volumes of Correspondence printed as close as the Apostles creed in a Watch paper...'
 Keats had to end his walking tour prematurely when he caught a particularly bad 'cold'. Returning to Hampstead in August, he found his brother Tom seriously ill with tuberculosis. Keats nursed him tirelessly until his death in December. Barely two years later, John Keats would himself be dead from the same terrible disease.

Dangerous Moonlight, Black Air and Marginalia

At Day's Close: A History of Nighttime by A. Roger Ekirch had been languishing on my bookshelves for some while, largely because it's such a damn'd thick, square book. But then, the other day, it occurred to me that if ever there was a book for bedside reading, this was it.
  I haven't got far into it yet, but am enjoying its wide-ranging and, er, illuminating treatment of its subject – the nighttime world of our pre-industrial ancestors. I was reading the other night about the fearful power attributed to the moon, which could so disorder the 'moistures' in a person's body as to turn them into 'moonstruck' lunatics, or even strike them dead. 'The moon,' writes Ekrich, 'also impregnated the night air with pestilential damps, widely deemed an even graver menace to human health. Darkness signified more than the temporary absence of light. According to popular cosmology, night actually fell each evening with the descent of noxious vapours from the sky.... Some individuals described themselves 'within night', as if enveloped my a mammoth black cloud.'
  This sounded familiar... Of course – the philosopher de Selby (known only from commentaries on his works) in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman had rather similar ideas about the nature of nighttime. Darkness, he declared, was 'simply an accretion of "black air", i.e. a staining of the atmosphere due to volcanic eruptions too fine to be seen with the naked eye, and also to certain "regrettable" industrial activities'. As for sleep, that was 'simply a succession of fainting fits brought about by semi-asphyxiation' caused by the 'black air' of nighttime. As various of de Selby's commentators point out, there are one or two problems with this theory – not least that darkness can be instantly dispelled by striking a match or turning on a light. De Selby's answer to this was that 'black air' was 'highly combustible, enormous masses of it being instantly consumed by the smallest flame, even an electrical luminance isolated in a vacuum'. However, his strenuous efforts to bottle 'black air' in containers of black glass or opaque porcelain seem to have come to nothing. The commentator Bassett took de Selby's 'black air' theory as 'final proof that the great brain was out of gear'. A few centuries earlier, he might have been taken more seriously.

As for my daytime reading, this has been devoted largely to a novel of which I'll be writing later. My copy is amusingly embellished with pencil-written annotations by a tireless Welsh pedant whose self-appointed mission is, it seems, to correct all Anglicised Welsh names back into their unsullied original forms. He also finds time to correct any perceived errors of fact. How very thoughtful of him.

Dignified or Efficient?

The great brouhaha occasioned by the 70th anniversary of the National Health Service has been hard to avoid – and, for me, equally hard to understand. Is there really that much to celebrate about an over-managed, producer-led health service that is excellent in some areas, terrible in others, and overall (certainly in world terms) second-rate? Why is it so widely loved and cherished, to the point where any attempt to reform it, rather than hosing it with ever larger sums of taxpayers' money, is fiercely resisted?
  Well, here's one way of looking at it. In his famous essay on The English Constitution, Walter Bagehot distinguishes between the constitution's 'dignified' and 'efficient' elements. 'Dignified' (or 'theatrical') institutions 'impress the many', exciting reverence and awe and creating loyalty and national cohesion (the supreme example is the Monarchy). 'Efficient' institutions unglamorously get on with the necessary work that keeps the wheels of national life turning smoothly. Now, a health service, however constituted, surely belongs in the 'efficient' category – it's there simply to handle our healthcare needs as best it can – but somehow 'our NHS' has ended up among the 'dignified' institutions. It is indeed, as Nigel Lawson once observed, 'the closest thing the English have to a  religion'.
  What's more, it seems to have been 'dignified' from the moment of its birth. Perhaps this was understandable in the immediate postwar years, when there was a widespread belief that central control could achieve great things, and there was a strong urge to build a 'New Jerusalem' in a nation bound together as never before by the experience of total war – and victory. It was also undeniable that the prewar system of healthcare was very far from satisfactory, and had stored up all manner of problems and huge pent-up demand. In those particular circumstances, it's understandable that the new health service might have seemed such an obviously good thing (though the doctors certainly didn't see it that way) and such a focus for hope and national unity that it belonged among the 'dignified' institutions. But seventy years on? Surely by now we should be able to look levelly at the NHS and see it as just another way of running healthcare, and by no means (at least in terms of outcomes) the best? Or would that be, in another of Bagehot's phrases, 'to let daylight in upon magic'?
 Still, it could have been worse if  Bevan had had his way, nationalising GPs' practices and turning the GPs into salaried employees of the state (the doctors won that battle). And we can be relieved that the Attlee government didn't adopt a similar approach to something even more essential to life than healthcare – food. If it had done, we may be sure that we'd have been living ever since with food shortages, rationing, little or no choice, and a bloated bureaucracy lurching from one food crisis to the next, while siphoning up ever more of our money.

White Letter Day Again

A belated Father's Day outing, this sunny Sunday, with my favourite son and favourite granddaughter (I have only one of each, so no favouritism) was full of delights – and among them was a glorious profusion of butterflies. Marbled whites, ringlets, meadow browns and skippers were everywhere, flying in such numbers as I've rarely seen since the butterfly-rich days of my youth. It just goes to show what wonders a sustained spell of dry sunny weather at this time of year can work, even after such a late and shaky start as this butterfly season had. What's more, we spotted what looked very much like a dark green fritillary flying, fast and straight, overhead – and a little later, by way of a grand climax, a white-letter hairstreak flew down and posed briefly on a leaf, its wings neatly folded to show their beautiful markings. This happened just yards from my last encounter with this oh so elusive species. Truly a magical day.

Solstice

It's the summer solstice today (here in the Northern hemisphere) – and, as it happens, a glorious sunny morning. Radio 4 is celebrating with poems new and old scattered through the day's schedules. Just before 9, I was startled to hear Shakespeare's Sonnet XCIV being read:

They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show,

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,

Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:

They rightly do inherit heaven's graces

And husband nature's riches from expense;

They are the lords and owners of their faces,

Others but stewards of their excellence.

The summer's flower is to the summer sweet

Though to itself it only live and die,

But if that flower with base infection meet,

The basest weed outbraves his dignity:

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

A great poem, of course, but hardly redolent of midsummer, I think?
I wonder if this much more summery sonnet, by Richard Wilbur, will make it onto Radio 4...

Praise in Summer

Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savour's in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?

The last shape of things

On this day in 1955 Philip Larkin wrote the short and surprisingly sweet Long Sight in Age...

They say eyes clear with age,
As dew clarifies air
To sharpen evenings,
As if time put an edge
Round the last shape of things
To show them there;
The many-levelled trees,
The long soft tides of grass
Wrinkling away the gold
Wind-ridden waves – all these,
They say, come back to focus
As we grow old.

It was unpublished in his lifetime, and some think it unfinished, but it works perfectly well as it stands. As usual with Larkin's poems, the formal structure is precise but barely noticeable. Here one abcacb sestet is followed, and thematically echoed, by a second after the semicolon. The poem is perfectly rounded; there is no evident need for more.
  Long Sight in Age now features as part of a Larkin display at the Hull and East Riding Eye Hospital, even though, in ophthalmological terms, what 'they say' is clearly wrong: ageing is usually a matter of increasingly fuzzy vision, declining acuity of long sight and short sight both. As our eyes age, we enter an increasingly impressionistic world of 'ghostlier demarcations' (not, alas, accompanied by 'keener sounds').
 For me, oddly, things have not been so simple on the ocular front: after I retired, my long sight surprised me by coming back, so that I no longer need glasses for distance, only for reading (and for that my eyesight has become definitely worse). Meanwhile, of course, my mental world becomes more fuzzy and impressionistic, and names, in particular, are harder and harder to retrieve from the decrepit, over-stuffed filing cabinets of memory. This is only a minor nuisance, and the effort of retrieval is probably good mental exercise, even if takes its time. Better two days late than never?