Dragonflies and a Painted Lady

I spent some time yesterday at the seep on the track above our house looking for, and then finding, the golden-ringed dragonflies which I had seen there before. Sadly, the dragonflies were not in a mood for a picture or so I came home grumpy with disappointment - only to find....

....an absolutely stunning painted lady in our garden, sharing the buddleias with several other butterflies, including at least four red admirals.

I was back at the seep this morning determined to capture at least one good picture of the dragonflies, to find them in such a co-operative mood that I came away with at least ten pictures worth keeping, though....

....finding them against the background vegetation wasn't easy.

The female golden ringed is supposed to be Britain's largest dragonfly but these particular ones aren't very big, perhaps constrained in their growth by....

....the short, cool summers and long winters.

I sat for half an hour in warm sunshine watching them come and go, and chasing each other all over the place, these frantic flights often ending in vicious, buzzing combat which often resulted in them falling to the ground.

Early Driving Experiences

The first car I ever drove was a Mini Cooper which belonged to a friend whose family owned large farming interests in Kent. He must have been very confident in me as I was sixteen at the time, the 'lesson' took place in an orchard where there were plenty of trees to bump into, and driving a high-performance Mini Cooper was.... exciting.

The next vehicle I drove was a one-and-a-half ton Bedford truck - picture shows the sort of thing though the one I drove was dented, dusty, dirty and grey. This was in Southern Rhodesia where I spent two terms working in a school out in the bush, and was told by the lovely man who was my 'boss' for the 50% of my time that I spent working on the estate - the other 50% was time spent teaching - that I was no use to him until I could drive; and the only vehicle available for me to learn and practise on was the Bedford. It was a pig of a machine in which I spent almost as much time veering off the road and bashing uncontrolledly through the African bush than on the road. One of the joys of the beast was that one had to double-declutch in order to go down the gears.

Once I had the hang of how to drive, the first job I had was to convey one of the estate staff's wives in to hospital in the nearest town as she was having trouble giving birth to her first child. She screamed all the way. So did I.

The next car I drove, back in England, was my parents' Morris Traveller, in which, at the age of 17, I took my test. That I passed was something of a miracle as I stalled the car in the middle of a roundabout, managing to get it going again but in the certainty that I had failed. The examiner passed me: the stall had occurred in torrential rain and he was impressed with my sang froid, learned, of course, from driving a Bedford truck.

A Littleferry Alternative

With today dawning fine but with rather too much of a chill westerly, in the normal way we might have been planning to hop into the car and drive to Littleferry for a brisk walk but, having no car now, and not having had time to organise other ways of getting there, we had to content ourselves with our usual walks from the house.

Not that Littleferry was entirely forgotten for one of the first butterflies to cross my path was this small heath, a butterfly we don't normally see here but which is common at Littleferry.

A number of other butterflies were on the wing, including red admirals and this very smart painted lady, in considerable contrast to the painted ladies we've been seeing recently which have been very moth-eaten. I assume that this is the last generation of their great migration north from lands around the Mediterranean.

There were other pleasures too. The tracks around us aren't a favourite place of devil's-bit scabious but there was a large patch of it growing along the banks of a small burn, with plenty of flies and bees in attendance. The only things missing were some of this plant's varieties - while flowers and pink.

Littleferry has fine views but this one, from the top of the track that leads to the hut circle, is equally good illustrating, as it does, the depopulation of the countryside following the clearances and the consolidation of land into croft holdings which, in due course, also largely failed..

A Sunny Sunday

The day started blustery, with a westerly wind which continued to harass us all day, so it was no surprise when, on our customary gentle Sunday morning walk, we saw the first swallows sitting on wires, a sign that they are contemplating a long journey south.

Sadly for our small birds, this bird won't be migrating out of their area. This is the first time we've seen the sparrowhawk hunting from the ground.

For the first time in ages we've have the sun out almost all day, though only at intervals, but this did bring out the butterflies. As well as tortoiseshells, in search of pictures we enjoyed chasing....

.....several red admirals and....

....the first peacock in some time.

All the butterflies were on the buddleias, of which we must have upwards of ten in the garden, but the butterflies' other favourite, verbena, is also out. We've noticed this before, that the butterflies aren't rally interested in the verbena until it's been out for some days.

The butterflies on parade included a couple of rather unwelcome whites, though we do have our brassicas covered with netting, and what is probably the same painted lady we've been seeing over some weeks, now looking very ragged.

So we've seen no less than five butterfly species today, a rare event.

The important thing is that we've also seen the sun. The last few days, with the constant wind and grey skies, have been very wearing. Sadly, the forecast is for the south of England to be back in a heat wave, which usually means we are back under cloud.

The Last Car

Last Sunday we drove out to Littleferry, leaving the car by the Littleferry-Golspie road while we walked through the forestry to the beach. Then, yesterday, our second daughter and I took it in to Inverness and sold it to WeBuyAnyCar for a price which I consider to have been very reasonable - and slightly more than we had expected. We returned home in a very enjoyable two-hour journey by train.

I have no intention of buying another car. I'm over eighty, I am well aware that my reactions are slowing, and I've been feeling increasingly nervous on roads like the busy A9. It's high time to stop, particularly as I can walk away from driving in the knowledge that I have never had an accident, and never claimed on our insurance policy. I wish I could feel optimistic about it but we now have to learn how to get by in a world that is increasingly dependent on the motor car.

I have owned, along with Mrs MW, a total of sixteen cars, starting with my Land Rover in which a friend and I travelled into the Sahara as far as Colomb Bechar, and ending with our last car, sold yesterday, a very different VW Polo 1.4 automatic. In between, we've owned a Morris 1000, a VW Beetle, a Morris 1200 and an Austin 1300GT, a Morris Marina - the worst car I ever bought - two Minis, a Triumph Toledo, two Ford Escort estates, a Volvo 240 estate, a VW Transporter, a Freelander, a Hyundai i10, and the VW Polo.

I enjoyed driving almost all of them, the main exception being the Marina, but feel no nostalgia for the open road. 

Yet More Damp, Cold Days

 We've had very little in the way of sunny blue skies in the last few days, with temperatures struggling to reach 15C - we've even seen one day with the midday temperature a measly 13.5C - and cold, almost wintery northeasterly and northwesterly winds. However, even if it's only for a few moments, if the sun comes out so do the butterflies, though in desperately small numbers for the time of year. Yesterday we saw only two red admirals, a tortoiseshell and a white. What's so frustrating is that one of their favourite plants, the buddleia, is in exuberant bloom.

The damp weather does however, suit the fungi, which are beginning to 'flower' in the pine woodlands behind our house. Mostly it's old favourites like this brittlegill but we've also seen some rather strange new ones, like....

....this one, which may be a puffball which has popped.

We're also seeing some old friends putting in an appearance. This one is about 18" high and closely resembles a pile of variously-shaped fresh bread rolls. Its identity escapes me but I remember it appearing in exactly the same spot this time last year.

Unless the weather makes a drastic change, this is going to be the coolest, dampest, greyest 'summer' we've experienced in our seven years on the east coast.

The Advice

I wonder what I would have suggested if this eight-year old had asked me for one bit of advice which would help him navigate the decades he was to live.

The photo was taken in a studio in Mombasa in 1953, and it was to go into his new passport. Previously, he hadn't had a passport even though he travelled widely both within East Africa and on the routes from Mombasa to England. He hadn't needed one: as a minor, he was included on both his mother and father's passports.

Some of the most difficult years of his life came immediately after that visit to the studio, for the separate passport had been needed so he could travel back and forth to England alone, this necessitated after his parents had decided to sent him to school in England, returning to his East African home for two months each (English) summer. This regime would continue until he was sixteen, after which his parents retired from East Africa and his holidays were centred on wherever they were living in England.

So, what advice would I have given myself? Perhaps it should have been something simple, like "Never tell a lie," because it has always seemed to me that lies are too often uncovered, at great cost. Yet something like that seems far too simple to be of much use.  I think I would rather have urged the small boy to be true to himself, that is, to trust, in all the complex decisions in the life that stretched before him, in the small voice that is within all of us, the voice of, at the same time, one's conscience, one's gut instinct, one's guide.