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| Photo: Butterfly Conservation |
Last weekend we had the fun of having our grandchildren and
their parents to stay. When one’s surrounded by news of bereavement and illness
it’s easy to be overwhelmed by sadness – and to forget that there’s much to
enjoy. For example, just this minute a yellow brimstone butterfly has settled
on the mini cauldron of deep mauve violas which have been flowering non-stop
since some good friends gave them to Jane last autumn. Now it has bounced away
over the garden in the spring sunshine, while a wren sings with its surprising
piercing trill on our fence. I wonder whether this year it will complete its
nest in the eaves of our neighbour’s garage. I think the males build a number
of nests – and last year this one wasn’t used.
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| Observer's Book of Birds |
And yesterday evening we were at my favourite coffee shop,
Cornerstone in Grove, with some good friends. We watched a three-minute video
clip, which Tim described as the macro and the micro. It’s called Cosmic Eye.
It starts with a girl, Louise, lying on a lawn in Google headquarters in
California, and pans out fast through the universe and beyond to the limits of
our knowledge and then reverses the process into her eye until it reaches the
opposite limits of our knowledge to quarks and beyond, before bringing us back
to the human being lying on the grass. Some of us understood it better than
others. The big unanswered question, according to Tim, is what’s the unifying
theory bringing the cosmic and the quantum together. Being a simple
non-scientist, I was left with a sense of awe at the extraordinary diversity of
existence.
I’m reminded of the most memorable lectures I went to in
Cambridge, which were given by Professor Donald MacKinnon, not about my
subject, English, but about philosophy. Besides his eccentricity and the
gripping intensity of his engagement with the topic, I particularly remember
one phrase of his, “the infinite variety of creation” or maybe “of nature”. I
remember I thought at the time, “Yes, that’s the excitement of being alive.”
