IT’S TOO EASY TO BE NARROW WHEN it comes to nature. I was a bad birdwatcher through and through, and I thought all the other bits of nature were for wimps. Now I do my best in all taxa. My most recent step was to become a bad botanist: my life is incalculably richer as a result.
I wrote about sport for The Times for more than 30 years. And we had a tradition: we dealt with the mad intensity of it all with relaxed amiability, even while I was filing live from the Olympic 100m final.
When I spoke to Barry back on the desk at Wapping, I didn’t snap: “Length? Deadline?” I said: “Much about your way?” Barry being, of course, a fellow birder. He told me about swallows in Buckinghamshire and I told him about the hobby I’d seen in the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing. In this fashion, working conditions were better for all.
“Evening Barry, much about?”
“Huge influx of painted ladies.”
And I thought: that’s a butterfly isn’t it? How pathetic! Who cares about butterflies? I didn’t even know what
