A Great Walk and A Real Pain

Last weekend I was walking in Ladybird Land again – that land of abundant may blossom, tall cow parsley and gambolling lambs. This time it was in Derbyshire, where, because of the more northerly latitude, things were very much as they had been in Buckinghamshire on Mayday. Happily the weather was every bit as glorious, with warm sunshine and blue skies (populated by crazily energetic swifts and graceful swallows and martins). With my cousin, I enjoyed a long (by my present standards) walk, taking in Lathkill Dale, Youlgrave and Bradford Dale, ending at the pub/hotel at Over Haddon, with its magnificent views – one of the best walks in all of the Derbyshire Dales, though at present the river in some stretches of Lathkill Dale is dry. The chiffchaffs and other warblers were singing lustily, and Orange Tips, Brimstones and Peacocks were flying in good numbers – also, much to my delight, my first Common Blues of the year, three of them, looking fresh and lovely, in Bradford Dale (last year I only saw one in the whole year). The following day began with the grand surprise of a Wall Brown (once common, now scarce) settling to bask briefly in my cousin’s garden, and continued with my first Small Copper of the year (last year I didn’t see a single one) at a nearby nature reserve, along with my first definite Red Admirals of the year – and they were very definite, as is the way of Red Admirals. But it was not all butterflies and walking: we also watched a superb film, which I heartily recommend to all who haven’t seen it – A Real Pain, the directorial debut of actor Jesse Eisenberg.
  As all the world probably knows by now, this tells the story of two mismatched cousins, once close, now far apart, who use their recently deceased grandmother's legacy to go on a Jewish heritage tour of Poland. Eisenberg co-stars as the more sane and settled of the pair, while Kieran Culkin plays his maddening but strangely charismatic loose cannon of a cousin, who at every point seems about to throw the whole tour into jeopardy. Both performances are superb, but Culkin's is simply astonishing. 'Funny, heartfelt and moving in equal measure,' one critic said of A Real Pain, and it is all of those things. I'm already looking forward to watching it again.