Category: UK

l’esprit de l’escalier

Fire escapes are good places to sit on hot evenings and last weekend found me at the top of a rather attractive red and yellow metal staircase with a glass of wine by my side.

I was very tempted to break into song, but didn’t really think the neighbours would appreciate my rendition of Moon River, so instead I read my book. But it was a long summer evening and I’d already spent several hours on a train, so the light lasted well past the last page.

Reading turned to thinking.
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a little focus

Once more I’m sitting here with a host of possible topics to write about and, once more, it’s proving difficult to zoom in on one specific idea and get a blog post written.

As I said last weekend, “When you’re stuck for something to write, it is often because you are looking vaguely around you and there are simply too many potential subjects.”

Pinning down a single idea is like trying to find the queen among the heaving life of an ants’ nest or a hive of bees, a specific car in a multi-storey carpark, one precise tree in the forest…
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irrelevant facts

In yesterday’s post, I touched on how the natural world is changing and how, while words I learned as a child are being lost from children’s vocabularies, there will presumably be a need for new words for the invasive species that are making their way to the UK common.

This got me thinking about how so much of what I learned in school has been superseded.
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naming memories

On a visit to south Wales this week, when I stepped outside the back door, I found the iridescent creature pictured above sunning itself on the rosemary bush. Without doubt, it was one of the most eye-catching beetles I’ve ever seen.

I don’t claim to recognise all the insect life of the UK, but I was surprised just how unfamiliar this one seemed: I was pretty sure that even if my Observer’s Book of Common Insects and Spiders were not stuffed in a box at the back of a storage locker somewhere in rural Spain, it would not help me to identify it.
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summer blues

I was wondering why I seem to find so little to post about recently. After all, there’s no less news than there used to be. If anything, there’s probably more than ever. Perhaps that’s the problem: there is just too much information around for me to process it effectively and I think I feel less informed than ever.

Which may explain why I have fallen back on posting photographs.
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