***
Perhaps the most moving event of the summer was the story of the white-throated needletail. This bird is, I have learned, a native of Asia. So when word got out that one had strayed so far off its commute as to have landed on Harris, swarms of "twitchers" descended on the Hebridean isle.
No sooner had they arrived than the creature, displaying that same sense of direction which had caused its fame, flew straight into one of the mammoth wind-turbines which the Scottish Executive has put up in order to ruin all remaining areas of natural beauty.
There must be photographs of the bird's last moments but, perhaps out of consideration for public feeling, none has so far surfaced. I think this quite wrong. I do not deny they will be upsetting. I suspect they will show the poor creature glancing shyly over its little shoulder as it heads, unknowing, into that greatest migration of all.
But good must come from tragedy and it seems to me that we unionists will have missed a trick if we do not lay this tragedy at the door of the Scottish "first minister", Alex Salmond. Perhaps a reader could do a Julian Assange and leak the images of the white-throated needletail's final moments? Of course this might rebound and result in some form of public statuary similar to the "Animals in War" memorial ("They had no choice") which makes me grind my teeth every time I go down Park Lane.
***
My one engagement in August is a debate at a weekend festival in the Oxfordshire countryside. Though the setting is wonderful as are the people I meet, anyone wanting to know what has gone wrong with such festivals can find it summed up in one word: "yurt". The fields are full of them, inhabited by people of all ages still trying that free-love, drop-out thing, 40 years too late and at the wrong Woodstock. I hear an intake of breath as I warn the audience of the terrible damage done by optimism, and extol the need for restraint in society. I recognise that I am as welcome as a temperance preacher at last orders and rush back to Dr Johnson.
