A fly on a flower in the sun – for a moment the world stops, winds backwards and it’s an almost-summer day, an illumination like a dreamy scene from a film. As one storm chases another in from the south-west, a sodden buzzard hunches on the crossbar of goalposts and glares across playing field puddles to roads awash with rain and ploughed fields pouring into ditches.
Flood warnings, blocked drains, bank bursts, landslides, traffic disruptions, homes and shops inundated and with more rain to come – then, this very ordinary miracle happens. Hidden between the rags of Atlantic weather fronts under ominous skies, a little wonder occurs when, like planetary alignments, fly, flower and sunlight dock together.
The fly, I think, may be Melangyna umbellatarum, a species of hoverfly that lives around goat willows nearby, whose larvae feed on aphids and adults fly from May until September. Living on borrowed time, this creature has the sharp glint of a jewelled craft whose mysterious pilot is making a final journey to fuel up before the forecast gale blows it into oblivion. The flower, its last port in a storm, is Lonicera periclymenum, the honeysuckle.
This summer, honeysuckle flowered strongly in this tall hedge and had a couple of flushes, filling the still air under trees with a swoon of fragrance until it was flail-battered. However, as if in defiance, a few new white flowers appeared that looked even more exotic, white tubes of sweetness dipped in yellow and scarlet-pink and opening for the audaciously wobbly, golden stamens. Here the straggling revellers from a summer festival that folded when the weather changed a couple of weeks ago come suckling honey to restore their powers.
On a bright autumn day, against all the odds, this sun trap along the hedge under a clear blue sky becomes redolent, not of summers past but perhaps of one to come. The fly, the flower and the sun come together in resistance to the flood, an illumination of dreamlike quality between days of rain.
