 
Park LifeTuesday 13th June 2000
 
A SMALL MOTH, no larger than a fingernail, is flying in the morning sun. It reminds me of a Small Tortoiseshell butterfly with its red background - the colour of antique velvet - marked with two light orange spots and edged with a thin border of grey. Cat's Ear grows from a crack in a drystone embankment wall. There are so many of these hawkweed-type flowers that I take a closer look to check that it really is cat's ear; the stems have tiny triangular bracts on them.
Thornes Park
A brood of Mallard ducklings are all brown with lighter markings (the normal wild variety) except for one that is an overall buffish colour, like a farmyard duckling.
Thornhill Park
We pause for a flask of tea on a shady bench overlooking Thornhill Park. As it is below a Sycamore the bench is beginning to get sticky as honeydew, excreted by aphids on the leaves above, drops onto it.Park life isn't quite what it was when I was young. One of the girls on the swings stops to answer her mobile phone. At the foot of the slope, by the moat of the ruined Hall, smoke drifts from the new litter bin. Two boys come along and give it glancing kung-fu kicks.
It pulls meat and plucks feathers from its prey, staying hunched over it even when the girls walk up the slope just ten yards from it.
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The Park looks at its best in the sunlight; the fountain playing amongst the colourful flowerbeds in the walled garden, the duck pond as green as pea soup and the purple-blazered school children taking their traditional picnic lunch; a packet of crisps and a cigarette.
I'm so enthralled with this 21st century idyll that I miss the arrival of a Kestrel that Barbara spots stooped over its prey - a brown or grey songbird - at the foot of another sycamore just twenty yards away.