Butterflies, Proms, Ibsen

 I spent most of the weekend in Derbyshire with my cousin, revisiting Buxton – the riverside gardens really are very fine – and, yesterday, taking a walk in and around Bradford Dale. As we wandered amid an astonishing abundance of butterflies – painted ladies, peacocks, red admirals, commas, gatekeepers, meadow browns, ringlets, blues and whites (sadly only one tortoiseshell) – it occurred to me that I haven't really said anything about this wonderful butterfly season. The profusion of painted ladies is not quite as prodigious as in the annus mirabilis of 2009 (when an estimated billion of them swept over the country), but I'm sure in many places it is not far short – and peacocks are having a remarkable year, with huge numbers of early fliers followed by even larger numbers of high-season specimens. It seems much the same could be said of most species – thanks largely to the summer being properly warm – so I'm wondering how the alarmists of Butterfly Conservation will spin this one into a bad news story. No doubt they'll rise to the challenge...
   Also in Derbyshire, we watched the First Night of the Proms, enjoying the Copland and Gershwin, the staggeringly talented Yuncham Lim playing Ravel, Finzi's rarely performed For Saint Cecilia – and conductor Dalia Stasevska's kimonos. Then they went and spoiled it all with the finale – the joint forces of the BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Orchestra belting out the dreary and tiresome 'Wonderwall'. Surely, with the music of Oasis being so closely associated with 'Andy' Burnham, the BBC could have stopped this happening on the eve of his coronation. It felt very like a celebration, and the BBC has surely swooned more than enough over the King of the North.
  And we also, for reasons that I won't go into here, watched on BBC iPlayer a 1982 production of Ibsen's Little Eyolf, starring Anthony Hopkins and Diana Rigg. It's a play I had never seen before, and the first act, in which everything happens, struck me as completely bonkers. The next two acts, in which everyone talks, did nothing to improve my opinion of Ibsen, a playwright whose works I once studied but am, alas, unlikely ever to return to. Still, it was a great weekend