This morning, while standing in a stretch of bog in the shimmering heat, I had a flashback to an event that had occurred almost 20 years ago. Back then, while standing in another bog (probably near Loughrea) on a sunny summer day, I’d got a call from a well-known low-frills airline with whom I’d booked holiday flights. They rang me to let me know that they’d have no problem changing my flight by a day (thanks to, quelle suprise, striking French air traffic controllers), but obviously, now I’d have to pay the last-minute, premium price for the ticket, rather than the low cost original price.
The reason this memory popped into my mind is not because I’m still annoyed by it – au contraire, the holiday was still great, and I haven’t really had any issue with flights since, which isn’t a bad run. No, the reason was that, on the day I got the call, I had just photographed (and identified) a pretty pink flower called Ragged Robin (Lychnis flos-cuculi) for the first time. And today, standing in a different but similar bog in Galway, I came across a similar stand of ragged robins, and hence the associated memory.
The picture above is of a Painted Lady butterfly feedling on the flowers. As it happens, Painted Ladies are long distanced flyers, untroubled by the Gallic temperament of air-traffic control. the butterflies migrate to Ireland from North Africa to breed – they do not survive the winter.