Isles of Wonder

It was the poor old Queen I felt sorry for - obliged to participate in that puerile James Bond stunt, then sit through yet another dreary pop concert and an endless parade of grinning athletes. You could see she wasn't really enjoying it, not the way she enjoyed the Jubilee flotilla - or Epsom, come to that. She must have been thinking wistfully back to the 1948 Olympics, and wondering where it all went wrong...
  As for the content, such as it was, of Danny Boyle's Opening Ceremony spectacular, this came across (to me at least) as little more than a sentimental, politically correct primary school History lesson - appropriately enough for a Games whose logo was clearly the product of a primary school design project. Yes, the Boyle extravaganza was bold, brash, bizarre, bonkers, and a truly astonishing technical achievement. But to me it all had a weirdly post-apocalyptic feel, as if the survivors of some great collapse had come across a machine whose levers they could press to make it work - but they no longer knew what it was for, what it meant. It seemed the expression of an absence, a loss - but executed in the most extravagantly triumphant and positive terms. Very very strange...
  But never mind all that. This morning, as I was walking through the subway that links the platforms at my railway station (where, as throughout London, most of the staff are wearing nasty purple-pink jerkins to remind us that the IOC's in charge for the duration), I spotted at head height on the tiled wall what seemed to be a pair of dead leaves, perhaps snagged in a bit of spider's web. But no, it was a resting Poplar Hawk moth, like the one in the picture - a bit more faded, and a little ragged, but still beautiful.  Life, in all its random wonder, goes on.