Simon Barnes

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It's a rum business, dealing with monsters. In one bit of Australia human beings are tenderly helping stranded whales back into the sea. Just a few miles away - anyway, as these things go in Australia - sharks are tenderly helping themselves to human beings with unprecedented frequency.

That's the wild for you. In one aspect, it is pitiful, delicate and helpless and people long to give it the best care they possibly can. In another aspect, it frightens the bejesus out of us. Both aspects are inescapable; both aspects are an essential part of our love for wild things: essential parts of being human.…  Seguir leyendo »

I went birding this week: I ended up dragoning. I took a stroll around the RSPB's lovely North Warren nature reserve near Aldeburgh and - well, I didn't expect to see much, in terms of birds, tell you the truth, a little early for winter, a little late for summer. But it's never a bad idea to take a nice walk in a nice place, so off I went.

And the place was alive with dragonflies. I don't mean a few dozen: I mean hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Every step I walked, there were dragonflies in sight: sometimes clouds of them rose up before me.…  Seguir leyendo »

Billy Connolly doesn't really like the Olympic Games. “A bit Nuremberg,” he said. Well, it's true that there tends to be an awful lot of flagwaving going on at both an Olympic Games and a Nuremburg Rally.

But it's really quite easy to tell the difference. At the Nuremberg Rallies, all the flags were the same.

At the Olympic Games here in Beijing, at the lowest possible count there are 205 flags: those of the 204 nations taking part, and the Olympic flag, which was absurdly goose-stepped to its flag pole with a classic John Cleese silly walk by the People's Liberation Army at the opening ceremony, as if to prove that Billy was right.…  Seguir leyendo »