Marbled White

These are good times for those of us who enjoy the urban/suburban 'edgelands'. Increasingly areas that used to be mown to within an inch of their lives - in parks, on commons, beside roads and railways, in gardens even - are being left to get on with it. The result - if there are a couple of rightly timed mows in the course of the year - is that decent approximations to flower meadows are growing up everywhere. And, as the battle to control it is gradually lost, that ubiquitous Chinese invader, Buddleia Davidii, is more rampant than ever - and gloriously in flower now. This is always good news for butterflies and those of us who love them - though, oddly, I've yet to see a butterfly taking a serious interest in a Buddleia bush so far this year. Lately I've been watching, from my train, a promising area of flowery railside edgeland - brambles and wild peas galore, hogweed, toadflax, thistles, hawkweed, willowherb - between Croydon and Selhurst. I've seen disappointingly little in the way of butterflies there this year - but today my patience was rewarded when I spotted, flying merrily among the grassheads, a Marbled White! Not my first this year (that was a rather wonderful sighting on a Father's Day walk with my son), but my first ever on that railside plot. Just the thing to cheer the heart of a weary commuter...

Meanwhile...

There's another blast from the Nigeness past on the Dabbler today.

My Misunderstandings - Well, One of Them...

In his poem Taking A Walk With You, Kenneth Koch admits to his many and various (and wonderfully inventive) misunderstandings - ah, here it is (click 'more')... On the centenary of the birth of Bernard Herrmann, I might as well confess to one of my misunderstandings. For years I thought the great film music composer and the (identically named) conductor of the BBC Northern Dance Orchestra were one and the same. The poor fellow must have fallen on hard times, I thought - or alternatively, how kind of him to abandon Hollywood to come over here and perform jaunty dance orchestra settings of pop hits. At that time - the early Sixties - the NDO loomed large in the life of us young pop pickers. With even Radio 1 and the pirate stations still in the future, and BBC Radio reluctant to spend good money spinning platters by those upstart beat combos, we were obliged to listen to many a chart single performed live by the swinging hepcats of the NDO. We were not impressed, fine orchestra (of its kind) though it was, and fine bandleader though Bernard Herrmann was. But he was one Bernard Herrmann, and THE Bernard Herrmann was another. Still, it's consoling to know I wasn't the only one to confuse the two - the BBC often did, and so, at one time, did THE Bernard Herrmann's widow: check out the paragraph headed 'Before you met him, had you ever heard of him?' here.

The Brown Revival

At last, a new black! And the good news is that it's brown. In my small way, I've been clearing the path for this paradigm shift for years, only wearing black shoes with seriously dark suits (which I seldom wear), otherwise favouring various shades of brown suede. Admittedly my fellow style pioneers include Ken Clarke, possibly England's worst-dressed man - and if the brown shoe revival can't find as an icon someone better turned out than Jude Law (what IS he wearing? Certainly not socks), then this movement could be doomed. But I fancy brown will prevail - it's just more natural, more earthy, softer, less of a statement than black.
The weighty matter of the brown revival found its way into the increasingly bonkers Today programme ('Setting the agenda for the nation') this morning, with Sarfraz Mansoor and no less a style guru than Top Gear's James May talking it over in a rather lacklustre manner. The conversation strayed to beige and thence to linen - and so to the brown linen suit, which both agreed was a pretty whizzy idea. As it happened, just as this conclusion was being reached, my valet was easing me into my brown linen (£20 well spent on eBay a couple of years ago). We exchanged a knowing smile. And now here I sit at my NigeCorp desk, the glass of fashion and the mould of form, brown of suit and shoe. It seems Frank Zappa was wrong after all.

A Meeting with the Emperor

Today I saw my first Purple Emperor! I've had dubious glimpses of this second largest and most elusive of our butterflies in the past: high in the treetops, briefly outlined against the sky, something very large hurtling along, or once something I'm fairly sure was an Emperor flying up virtually from under my foot, but gone before I could be certain. This time, however - this time was different...
It was a perfect butterfly day - hot late-June sun, a clear blue sky, only the slightest breeze. I got off the train at Ashtead, walked onto the common and right at the edge was greeted by Meadow Browns and Ringlets (I'd seen a couple of those dark beauties yesterday - my first of the year) and a bright Tortoiseshell. Skippers, Large and Small (and perhaps Essex), were dashing about busily, picking fights with one another and anything else that got in the way. As I headed into the woods, I was soon greeted by what I was hoping for - White Admirals and Silver-Washed Fritillaries, gliding up and down the wooded edges of the paths, in and out of the broken light, so beautiful, so heart-lifting. In my wanderings I saw too many to count - all splendid fresh specimens (though one White Admiral already had tattered wing edges). Being fresh and full of energy (the Fritillaries seemed to be all males, cruising their territories), they were reluctant to settle, but one White Admiral perched, wings folded, on a nearly sunlit leaf, I focused my binoculars on it, and enjoyed a long close-up look at those beautifully patterned white-on-speckled-bronze underwings.
A while later, I turned from my path to admire one of the common's most impressive veteran oaks (these were once pollarded, suppyling wood and timber, and acorns for the pigs foraging on the common). Nearby a couple of grey-haired men in grey windcheaters were training binoculars on a pair of oaks a little farther off - were there Emperors in the treetops? I thought about going up to them and finding out what they'd seen, or were looking for, but decided against and retraced my steps to the path I'd been on. Pondering which way to go, I opted for a small pathway to my right, and as I turned on to it, down flew a White Admiral and settled a few yards ahead of me. Except it didn't exactly settle; it was walking around in a slightly agitated, quite unwhiteadmirallike manner - and wasn't it too big for a White Admiral? And too - it briefly spread its wings - too purple?!
I don't know if my heart missed a beat. I certainly gasped with astonishment and wonder. My first Emperor! And what a beauty he was (only the males have the purple sheen, and the females are seldom seen) - a splendid newly-minted Emperor in all his imperial purple glory! I stood stock still and watched as he quartered the narrow path, testing the ground with his proboscis as he went. The path, despite the sun, was slightly damp and muddy, and clearly there was something to the Emperor's taste in that half-hardened mud (they seem to need or enjoy minerals, no one knows quite which or why, and they can be attracted to the ground by the most revolting man-made lures, not to mention horse dung). The Emperor was so intent on his task that, over the minutes that ensued, I was able to edge closer and closer. At one point he flew up and towards me, and it seemed he might be about to perch on me. I held my breath, but he turned and resumed his investigations of the mud.
In the course of these enchanted minutes, I was treated to the glory of his full-spread wings, the purple flash of the Emperor briefly in flight, and, when he finally found the patch of mud that was most to his taste, those astonishingly beautiful underwings, with their patterned blur of mixed colours - greys, red-browns, even pink and silver, and the single bright eye-spot on the forewing... It was such a perfect encounter, it felt like a dream (I've had my share of Emperor dreams) - but no, there he was, real, a step or two away - my first Purple Emperor! Eventually, of course, he wearied of his mud and flew off, vouchsafing me one last flash of his imperial purple before, with an effortless turn of speed, he disappeared into the trees and was gone. Leaving me stunned, suffused with joy, and feeling as if a great blessing had been bestowed on me.

So... Okay...

So, why is it that people on the radio and TV have taken to prefacing their answers with the word 'So'? It's quite a recent phenomenon - I seem to remember Appleyard, in his blogging days, noting it - and at first it was, I'm pretty sure, confined to politicians. Now everyone's at it. I can see the attraction for politicians, as it gives the (entirely misleading) impression that the answer given follows logically and seamlessly from something before. Presumably 'experts' in other fields feel that the 'So' suggest some kind of unassailable authority... On this morning's In Our Time (Melv and his guests were talking Malthus), one of the assembled experts was firmly of the 'So' school, unable to answer a question without a preliminary 'So' - while another was equally firmly of the 'Okay' school. Using the 'Okay' preface, I suppose, suggests that you saw that question coming and have your answer ready and waiting. The blizzard of 'So's and 'Okay's was irritating and distracting. What's wrong with 'Well', an honest meaningless word that buys you a little time without suggesting some kind of phoney omniscience? So maybe that's precisely what's wrong with it.

Stone Me...

A South African palaeontologist wants to test Shakespeare's bones for evidence that he was a pothead. A quick glance at the concordance suggests that he is surely onto something: Shakespeare uses the word 'weed' 21 times, 'grass' 23 times, 'joint' 22 times and 'pot' 14 times. And he's no stranger to the dope famine either - 'The time is out of joint...' A compelling case, I'm sure you'll agree.