- NEWS
10% tax on junk food to tackle obesityA 10% tax on fizzy drinks, sweets, biscuits, crisps, and chocolate is to be recommended to the health minister as a way of tackling the country's soaring obesity problem.
Prayer vigil for fine weather as farmers queue for fodderA 24-hour prayer vigil for fine weather has been held on the Kerry-Cork border.
- WORLD
It’s technology, Jim, but not as we know it WHEN Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry first dreamed up the concept of a television show based in the unexplored universe of Outer Space in 1964, the world was a very different place.
Berlusconi’s party girls dressed as nuns, Obama Silvio Berlusconi's private disco featured women dressed not just as sexy nuns and nurses, but also as President Barack Obama and a prominent Milan prosecutor that the former Italian premier has accused of persecuting him.
- BUSINESS
IBRC delays loan valuations, saleThe valuation and sale of IBRC loans has been pushed out by six months to November and December of this year.
The smart money is always on SeánFounded four decades ago, its annual turnover is now €2bn.
- SPORT
The Terry Reilly Interview: The Godfather of GalwayOver the course of almost half a century, Liam Sammon has been in service to Galway football. Now he hopes a new generation can restore county pride.
Super Blues keep double in sightsJoe Schmidt's side won their third European trophy in successive years and gave Connacht reason to celebrate also as the Westerners gained entry to next season's Heineken Cup courtesy of their neighbours to the east.
- LIFESTYLE
Let in the seasonal lightYOUR wardrobe isn't the only thing that needs updating once the barometer starts to rise.
It’s a guy thingDid you cry with your buddy while watching Fergie say farewell at Old Trafford?
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Wondrous free art, so close to home
By Damien Enright
ON sunny days — rare this summer — as we walk the lanes, bees are buzzing, flowers blooming, butterflies fluttering and birds carolling from the trees.
When we lean over the bridge, small trout skitter across the stream bed to hide under the bank or rush into the shelter of the water crowfoot, its long green tresses bedecked with white flowers. Driving home in the dusk, we see a fox cub on the road. Barely bigger than a marmalade cat, it is setting out into the world; bright-eyed and foxy, it is hard not to wish it well. At the pond, we see a clutch of fluffy ducklings rush after their mother, flapping their tiny wings, and then launching themselves into the water after her as she leaps from the bank. With composure they swim off after her in a perfect line.Foxgloves nod over the country roads, especially where the ditches have been cut back, and felled woodland is a haze of pink with foxglove flowers which I always think look like thumb stalls, as worn by those with sore thumbs or sail-makers sewing canvases. Valerian sprouts from old walls and the pink corridors continue into the towns.
On these recent nights the sea has been flat, reflecting the magnificent sunsets. We are fortunate to live on the coast of West Cork and to see them from our windows or balcony or from the beach below, looking up the bay past the village, looking west. The dark clouds turn blue and make the panorama all the more magnificent as they lie like a mountain range across the crimson sky. This is art for free, in slow transition for an hour before black night seals up all in rest.
Familiarity breeds disregard and when such sights occur regularly, they cease to inspire as at first. This is also the case with the minutiae of our immediate environment, the everyday things that inhabit our streets or gardens, however small. As children, we see them in their strangeness and glory. Now, we explore their natural history and the roles they play in our local world.
The weeds that grow in cracks in the pavement bring forth flowers, often as pretty as those in the flower-beds. The insects they attract are often as wonderful in their construction and bright in their colours as the flowers.
The solitary flower at the butt of a wall attracts a bee. The flower is pink or yellow, its petals each a work of art, the symmetry of its structure perfect.
The bee is black with stripes of gold, or russet red with a black tail. But while the bees have their intrinsic beauty and their usefulness in pollination, the insect on the flower may not be a bee but, perhaps a horsefly, its body also russet, a fly that stands on thread-thin legs and sports two banded, iridescent eyes and patterned wings. It has its beauty too, perched on a leaf and not in the business of biting one.
Generally, horseflies do not bite except on warm summer days when one walks, perspiring, in the fields or sits, half-dressed, on a river bank after a plunge into the brown water. Such were my early researches into horsefly behaviour when I bathed in the River Suir and sat with my friends in the Tipperary water meadows on long-ago afternoons.
Today, taking a break in the garden — somewhat dishevelled after the storm of June 14 — I noticed bees of various shapes and sizes bumbling through the flowering shrubs and the wild flowers across the stream. Curious to distinguish the species, I fetched my camera, took some close up pictures and transferred the images onto my computer. Then, I consulted my books to try to identify them.
I haven’t yet succeeded with them all, but my brief foray into the garden delivered aesthetic delights to match a visit to an art gallery. There are few butterflies yet flying this year, but there are the bees — and besides, butterflies do not hum sonorously in the heat of the afternoon. Rimsky-Korsakov composed an orchestral piece entitled The Flight of the Bumble Bee.
The bees are there, if not the butterflies, and the flowers regain their glory after the storm has passed. Nature does not succumb to darkness. Light and continuity prevails.