Good Butterfly News

What with this sunny weather and not being at NigeCorp HQ today, I was out of the house like a shot and down to Ashtead Common to see if the butterfly situation has improved. Reader, it has, and, among much else, I saw half a dozen of these beauties and a round ten of my favourites - including one melanistic form (very exciting, if less handsome) which was feeding on a bramble flower until chased off by a Silver-washed Fritillary. I also had a very close encounter with a Purple Hairstreak, right at the end of my finger... Things, it would seem, are looking up in the butterfly world.

NHS - The Way We Were

As the NHS - still regarded by more than half the population as 'the envy of the world' - approaches its 60th birthday, and Lord Darzi of Desert Island Discs prepares to unveil the most important report in the entire history of the service (hem hem), I pass this on without comment. Enjoy. Reminds me of when I had my tonsils out...

Supererogation Sunday

Since it is Sunday, here's a word you don't often hear these days - supererogation. It sprang back into my mind, after a long and unremarked absence, as I listened to a radio report on the deliberations of the House of Commons committee on climate change. This committe is pondering the government's Climate Change Bill, which proposes - nay, pledges - a 60 per cent reduction in the UK's carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. You might well think this was quite unrealistic and ludicrous enough to be going on with - but no, not for those fine virtuous MPs assembled in the select committee. Nothing would do but they must raise the figure to an altogether fantastical 80 per cent. What is this if it is not an exercise in competitive virtue, in supererogation? More proof, if any were needed, that belief in climate change has left science - and indeed reason - way behind and is now a matter of quasi/pseudo-religious faith.

No News Is Good News

Less than a week ago, freshly returned from a spell of blissful newslessness in France, I suggested we might all be happier for not following the news. Since then, semi-consciously, I have been almost following my own suggestion. Apart from a quick, dispiriting skim of a single Sunday paper, I have ignored the newspapers altogether - a risky course in my line of business perhaps, but what the hey? I can report that I feel a great deal less miserable about things, a good deal less mentally cluttered, confused and ground down - and I have done more of the things that are worth doing (reading books, listening to music, staring slack-jawed into the middle distance) with the time saved by not ploughing through the depressing, banal, ill-written, self-important, vastly oversized publications that make up our much prized 'national press'.
(On the subject of size, it's always a shock to come across a national newspaper from even 30 years ago - they were tiny! The stranglehold of the printers' unions was in all kinds of ways deplorable - but at least it meant small, easily digestible newspapers - and more time for the population to get on with their lives, doing things more worthwhile than reading the papers.)

Lafcadio's Day

Happy birthday, Lafcadio Hearn, born on this day in 1850. His was surely one of the most extraordinary careers in literature. A lovely island, Lefkada - I spent a holiday there once. I remember taking a long, rock-strewn walk up to a famous waterfall, and finding half a dozen swallowtail butterflies drinking at a rock pool...

The Tuft Sedge of St Helena

I don't know about you, but I always relish stories like this - and, happily, they're surprisingly common. I love the fact that this plant was last seen in precisely 1806, before Napoleon set foot on the island. 'Extinct' or not, it's been there all along. Let's hope it sticks around.

Keep Death Off The Road

This is, of course, good news - but what's striking about it is how dangerous the roads were in 1926, when car ownership was a luxury limited to the relatively prosperous (though the record year for road deaths in the UK remains 1941, when they topped 9,000, presumably owing to the blackout). Back in the deadly 20s, a chap could stroll in to a car showroom, pick a model, have a little chat with the salesman, then drive off - as did my own grandfather, a gentleman of Victorian vintage (long generations on that side of the family) who should never have been allowed behind the wheel (like me, I suspect). When 'driving', he would lounge in his seat, as if enjoying a cigar at the club, his legs negligently crossed over the pedals. Naturally this caused a degree of brake-accelerator confusion and many run-ins with idiot motorists who had foolishly got in his way. After he sailed serenely into the side of a bus, with all his family aboard, my grandmother finally prevailed on him to give up the automobile for ever. For myself, I have never driven