THE scent of mown hay, kicked up after we emerge from the dappled woods and cross the baking fields to reach my son’s workshop in a huge and ancient barn deep in the Czech Republic countryside, brings back memories, as if the nose can remember the sweet smells of long ago.

I read in an old National Geographic magazine (2002) that scientists had mapped human impact on the natural world and estimated that 83% of the total land surface and 98% of the areas where it is possible to grow the world’s three main crops — rice, wheat, and maize — had been directly influenced by human activities.

Once during the recent very warm weather, standing at a country crossroads trying to make up my mind which way I’d go, I found my boots stuck in the tar. I almost had to reach down to lift and unglue them.

A dead dolphin at Broadstrand, Seven Heads, West Cork, carried in on a high tide and now above the tideline, so not likely to be carried out again. It’s a big animal, rotund and heavy. It’s on a popular walking route: what’s to be done?

DURING the month of the scaraveen (discussed extensively by Donal Hickey on this page last week) “rough winds” did indeed “shake the darling buds of May”, as Shakespeare so perfectly described the emerging blossom, and its annual rout, some 400 years ago.

A COUPLE of years ago I wrote about a fuzzy-haired Czech professor with a head full of brains who had discovered a virus that could get into a human mind and make its owner reckless, writes Damien Enright