THESE days, flat hedgehogs are all too often seen on west Cork roads and, no doubt, on roads all over Ireland.

ON these dulcet summer evenings, more often than not, sunlight streams down the west-facing bays of West Cork.

AT a family gathering in Cork City on a recent weekend, I walked through a Japanese garden, the owner of which is a dedicated cultivator of bonsai trees.

WALKING a bohreen above the sea last week, on a day that was dull, but warm — intermittent patches of bright sunlight, a pearl grey blanket overhead, and heavy heat beneath — I suddenly found a half dozen butterflies zipping madcap around me at a rate approaching the speed of bats.

SIGHTS not to be missed this week: firstly, the Water Crowfoot in your local river.

IN Maine, on the western shores of the Atlantic, daffodils were blooming with the same enthusiasm as on our eastern shores a month ago.

WHAT an outstandingly beautiful day was April 28.

THE Cork and Kerry mountains were golden with gorse when we drove west last weekend, not Irish dwarf gorse, which displays its glory in September, but French gorse, the tall fellow which Goldsmith described, in The Deserted Village, as “blossom’d furze unprofitably gay ... ”.

TO paraphrase the well-worn phrase from the great poet, TS Eliot (who may well have stolen it from someone else), his advice to writers was: “Don’t plagiarise, steal.” We arrive at the end of our journey, and find the place we should have visited at the beginning.

Wandering around the island of Lombok you’ll encounter everything from sea turtles to black water buffalo. Among the less friendly fauna Damien met was a scorpion, which dealt him a vicious sting.