Mick Hartley

Matt Ridley, in the Times [£]:

Is there anything as glorious as an English spring? I don’t want to sound jingoistic, but surely nowhere does it quite as well as we do. In most of America, spring is a shockingly sudden transition from cold and mud to heat and mosquitoes, with a brief dogwood moment in between. My American-born wife retorts that we do every other season abominably. Certainly the Americans do autumn (fall) much better than we do; they have clear, crisp days and bright leaves, while we shelter from gales and drizzle. That is because we live downwind of an ocean, which is warm in autumn and generates wet weather.

And (not to keep boasting) we generally do spring better than most of Eurasia, too. The almond blossom is nice in Andalusia, and the thaw on the Ob is (I am told) magnificent, but nobody can match a dawn chorus of birds in an English copse. The chiffchaff and the chaffinch, the blackcap and the blackbird, the rapture-recapturing song thrush, the drowsy numbness of the nightingale — you just cannot beat them.

And, of course, the bluebells.

This is Ashridge Estate, in the Chilterns:

 

 

 

  

 

 

The problem with visiting large bluebell woods is that you keep getting drawn this way and that by the allure of deep blue patches – over there, and down this little path, and, ooh, look over there, until you find, as did Hansel and Gretel, that you've completely lost your sense of direction and haven't a clue how to get back to where you started. Though maybe that loss of orientation helps with the sense of being in a different, slightly magical, world.

 

 

 

 

Not a soul in sight. In fact I hadn't seen anyone for about an hour. Then…deer:

 

Notoriously shy animals, deer. That means….I must be miles from anywhere!

 

Then, a hundred yards further on – a man pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair.

How far off the track is a man with a wheelchair going to be? Sure enough, the car park was just a short walk away.

And the little café. This is England, after all.