"You Dirty Rotten Swine You! ....

.... You've deaded me!" said Bluebottle, created and played by Peter Sellers in The Goon Show. The show ran from 1951 to 1960 but I never heard it as we weren't allowed to listen to the radio at home. I think Prince Charles was a fan.

I've christened the north west of our garden Crab Corner as I unfailingly find crab spiders there every year. This is my first Misumena vatia of the season that was lurking, perfectly camouflaged, in a freshly opened hawthorn flower. It was the unusual angle of the hapless bluebottle that attracted my attention.

Today's poem is You, Andrew Marvell by Archibald MacLeish. https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/you-andrew-marvell

The poet is referring to Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress. It's a poem about "time's winged chariot hurrying near" and "The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I fear, do there embrace." Archibald Macleish is not only talking about human decay and death but the death of empires. The places he mentions are familiar from current news. I think it's a quite beautiful description of nightfall, if one discounts the underlying meaning.