Backlit

I ended today with several photos I like, but this is the one that speaks to me the most: its sombre tones match my mood today, but I find the backlighting of the Painted Lady's wing quite uplifting.

I took it in the beautiful show garden at Hillers, where R and I went this afternoon for a late lunch. I haven't been to Hillers for around six months, since I began to find the bird hide area a depressing place because the birds weren't being fed on a regular basis, but having put my head into the hide this afternoon I was happy to see that everything was back to normal, so I'll be resuming my visits pretty soon. The garden was looking - and smelling - spectacular, and though I slightly quail at the thought of how much irrigation must have been needed over the past couple of months to keep it that way, I was thrilled to see that the place was alive with pollen-feeding insects. It just shows what can be achieved, given the will and the resources.

I was grateful to R for suggesting lunch out, because I'd found myself feeling both sad and somehow unanchored this morning. It has been quite nice though, to read a variety of tributes to HMQ over the course of the day. My favourite is this, which comes from the Daily Telegraph - a paper I'd never remotely consider reading, but which was flagged up in a daily email newsletter I receive, called The Knowledge:

The Queen never “let the mask slip” in public, says Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph, but in private she had an “impish” sense of humour. If someone’s phone went off in her presence, she had a stock response: “You’d better answer that – it might be someone important!” She and a bodyguard once encountered two Americans on a walking holiday near Balmoral. Somehow they failed to recognise her, and one asked where she lived. “I live in London, but I’ve got a holiday home just the other side of the hills,” she replied. The American asked if she had ever met the Queen. Gesturing to the bodyguard, she said: “Well I haven’t, but Dick here meets her regularly.” Impressed, the American asked for a photo – of him and the policeman. The Queen duly took the snap.

Behind closed doors, she sometimes referred to herself and her family by the nicknames given to them by Private Eye: Brenda (the Queen), Keith (Prince Philip), Brian (Charles) and Yvonne (Princess Margaret). She liked a practical joke, too: when Philip grew a beard with a “distinct ginger tinge” during a long voyage without her in 1957, the Queen and her staff greeted him “wearing fake ginger beards”. And like all the royal family, she enjoyed “nothing more than when things go wrong” at their tightly-choreographed engagements. During a visit to Trinity College, Oxford, the Lord-Lieutenant of Oxfordshire and his wife both fainted, and in the ensuing commotion a college servant fell over and dropped a drinks tray. “We’ve had a wonderful lunch,” the Queen told her hosts. “Bodies all over the place!”

I do recommend The Knowledge, which comes from the founder of The Week (which is also an excellent read, but is available only via paid subscription). The Knowledge is free, and you can sign up to receive it here.

This evening the King made a moving speech, promising to try to follow in his mother's footsteps and paying loving tribute to her. He's been a champion of green causes for decades, and I hope that he'll be able to find a way to influence our current, abysmal Government into taking the environment more seriously.