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.

“I don’t mind the heat but will those damn doves never stop!,” I asked my wife, paraphrasing poor Caruthers, the prototypical English administrator in the heart of darkest Africa, driven demented not by the doves but by the incessant drums.

I suppose I should have wondered about the unfamiliar silence that lay over the city of Yogjakarta in central Java when I was woken at 4am by the call of the muezzin to dawn prayers at the mosque.

THESE dark evenings, against the grey sky, rooks tour in their thousands and squawk and caw and make metallic noises that overwhelm all other sound but for the lambent, repetitive notes of a blackbird and the full-throated variations of a song thrush carolling from the top of a tree.

COLIN BARNES, originally from Sussex, has been fishing in Irish waters for over 30 years.

ON Jan 22 we learnt that, after heated debate between factions, the European Commission pledged that by 2030 it would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% compared with 1990 levels, and produce 27% of its energy from renewable sources by the same date.