Quickened Silver

Beneath June's cut thorns,

Found legless lizards new-born.

A nest of live nails. 

Ephemera flap

Fraternise, but don’t befriend the butterflies.

My erstwhile companion, the territorial small heath,

Who let me photograph her outer-wings on dull days,

But never basked her marigold inner wings to camera,

No longer patrols her sandy, gorse border-lands.

The stegosaurus of death falls to the forces of 'truth'

I can understand why it is that, instead of changing the way we report Covid deaths to make the statistics more accurate, someone has chosen to simply deprecate the graphs we had all come to know and love. Even Wikipedia seems to have withdrawn these depressing daily barcharts.

Statistics are of limited value when the underlying method is hidden. In mainstream media, in which I include much official output, the 'necessary' simplification of complex subjects usually results in the obfuscation of the method. It is only now, when the obfuscations have come to skew the results that something closer to the truth has emerged.

I was gob-smacked, back in May, to hear that, in the UK published figures for Covid deaths, the reporting rules differed according to which country was reporting. Scottish deaths for example only included those who had tested positive for Covid and whose families had agreed for their deaths to be included in the statistics.

Now, on the long spiky tail of the stegosaurus, we learn that English statistics for Covid deaths include everyone who has ever tested positive, irrespective of their eventual cause of death.

If the meteorite theory for the extinction of the dinosaurs appears unlikely to you, let me offer a more plausible explanation. I believe the end of the dinosaurs was probably brought about by a simple update of the truth.

</rant>

Alliterative nonsense tea

The first sup of Darjeeling, taken as I entered the kitchen carrying my bowl, to swill the Crunchy Nut Cornflake semi-skimmed slurry from my teeth, gave me pause. Its earthy, bitter-sweet undertones stroked my tongue, like yesterday's bracken compost bouquet under mixed deciduous boughs,  as I strode the butterfly flecked boulevards. A foreign sun's shine-fed sinensis foliage infusion teleportation!

Talking heads

Bright yellow heads of hawkweed sway gently across my lawn,

like balanced plates on their serried stems.

They dip in turn, as insects visit, to spin them up again.

Heathen summer walk

The recent sprinkling of rain, breaking a month of drought, has loosed the expected flush of flowers. On my lawn, short stemmed grass has already seeded, attracting goldfinches that flash and flit amongst tall stems of hawkweed.

Across the neolithic landscape on the village’s Southern side, small channels hold water again and the sward has returned, lush. Clover and bird’s foot trefoil are dominant at ground level, with bell heather in all the shades of sugared almond. The heather is dotted with basking and sparring silver-studded blues and close to one of the more permanent pools, a dragonfly lanced by me, too fast to leave any more than an impression of purpose. The harsh call of stone chats rises from gorse heads and from the marshes, the slightly mad warbling of lapwings. Above all, when all else is quiet, invisible skylarks sing from out of the blue.

In the lanes, hedged by blooming bramble, clouds of meadow browns were disturbed by my passing.

Under the shading woods, buzzing insects threatened, triggering false alarms from stretched spider strands; I waved my arms to discourage feeding. In sunny patches, spotted woods patrolled.

Summer; barely pausing for low pressure

Older foals begin to gambol.

Poached and pock’ed water meadow, commonly too wet to traverse, has dried.

Passerines comb my shasta daisies for spiders and the first meadow brown visits, seeking nectar.

My potato patch looks like yesterday’s plated salad leaves (but green shoots show).

The ‘lawn’ is too rich in flower and bug to groom now, it buzzes with bees and flaps with finches.

Yellow hawkweed nods tall and proud, with buttercup competition. Speedwell and plantain, clover and shaded bugloss shake amongst the seeding stems of grasses.