Round about now, exactly as I type this, the massed cyclists of the Tour of Britain should be storming through our crossroads, heading towards but not quite going into the centre of the village, instead turning left up the steep hill that is Grains Road, aiming for Grains Bar, one of the highest points in our town. It’s not quite the Puy de Dome or the Col de Tourmalet but it’s steeper than I would even dream of attempting on my bike. Phil, however, used to ride up there back in the days when he cycled to work every day! What a hero!
We might consider walking, definitely not cycling, up Lark Hill which is quite steep enough for us, still on the lookout for the butterflies we saw up there in profusion a couple of summers ago. So far we’ve seen only a few butterflies and nothing like the numbers we have seen in the past. However, according to some chap writing in the Guardian, this has been a very good year for butterflies. He had feared that last summer’s drought would have adversely affected the numbers of butterflies this year but he says, “My garden buddleia barometer has recorded the highest total of peacocks and red admirals (more than 20 on one bush) in the nine years I’ve lived here.” Apparently unsettled weather is good for butterflies; “butterflies can happily cope with daily rain if there are also warm, dry periods and, most importantly, caterpillars’ food plants aren’t shrivelling up”. So we should not write off this summer as a complete failure - but I really would like to see a few more butterflies myself.
That last statement is an odd one for me, considering my absolute refusal to go into the butterfly zone when I went to the zoo with my son and family last Wednesday. I walked back through the aquarium and met them all outside. The idea of some of the huge butterflies and moths they have in such enclosures is just too much for me. The prospect of some large winged insect landing on me is something I simply could not cope with.
Thinking of insects, I read yesterday, or maybe the day before, that Paris has been spraying the city and its surroundings to get rid of nasty, disease carrying tiger mosquitos.
We have personal experience of tiger mosquitos. Some years ago, more years than I really care to confess to, we spent a couple of weeks at a language school in Viareggio, Italy. We stayed with a delightful lady called Maria who was mildly obsessed with Che Guevara and had posters and pictures of El Che all over her house. We often ate on her lovely indoor terrace, which was wonderful but for one thing - extremely aggressive mosquitos which attacked the bare legs under the table. These were “zanzare tigre”, Maria explained, tiger mosquitos! They had started coming from Africa to Italy some years previously and Viareggio council had sometimes reluctantly sprayed the area with insecticide.
Most of us survived by zapping the bitten places with Afterbite but Phil had a major allergic reaction. Each bite developed a nasty lump, the size of a 2 pence coin, or even bigger, and he became quite feverish. We ended up at emergency first aid and a course of antibiotics. It rather put us off the idea of retiring to somewhere warm and sunny … where there night be mosquitos … and now whenever we travel to somewhere that mosquitos like to visit he takes antihistamines before we set off.
So the news that tiger mosquitos have needed to be eradicated (or at any rate sprayed) in Paris is not welcome. How soon before they cross the Channel? Maybe our damp summers will put them off.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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