THERE’S NOTHING like a comma, is there? But the Comma butterfly is a beautiful butterfly and over the last two days I’ve seen a number of species I haven’t spotted for years.
Yesterday I saw a Brimstone, a beautiful Red Admiral, a Small Tortoiseshell, an Orange Tip, Fritillaries of different species I didn’t recognise and only one Large Cabbage White. They are common or garden.
And butterflies, when I was a kid, weren’t isolated. True it is that you don’t see huge flocks of Red Admirals, which I did when I was a kid in Aberdeen. But there were enough of them to make me realise that if you don’t keep a bit of wild around, you end up with sterility.
You’re never far from the countryside in Oxford. Yesterday I walked up to a pub called The Perch in Binsey Lane. There’s plenty of streams on the way, and I spotted a Perch or three on the way. It’s years since I’ve seen a Skylark, I long to lie in grass again and watch and listen to these beautiful creatures as they ascend into their vertical niche, high high up, and drop, silently, to the grasslands again. ♦
