I know we all know it, but sometimes we forget: copying and pasting from the internet is a dodgy business. Especially when the original internet content was typed up from a book source. A poetry fan, say, with half an eye elsewhere. Hence those ‘all the poems of…’ sites which seduce us, except they are typo-ridden. It is dispiriting to google ‘Elizabeth Bishop see abled wooden houses painted that awful shade of brown’ and get so many hits. That should be gabled, not abled. Too late though. The enie is out of the bottle.

On a very hot day last week, the flying ants emerged. Not that we saw them flying as such, though it was disturbing to see them crawling around paving and glinting their way through the grassy areas. Then the starlings arrived, easily a thousand of them. They’d perch on the wires and then drop down for another methodical sweep of the dunes, then back to the wires. That was that, for another year.

Discovered earlier this year in the wind-eroded dunes of Ballinreavy Strand, Donegal. Previously unrecorded. Wouldn’t want to be standing under it when it goes, as it surely will. The supporting stones are already sliding to the bottom of this steep dune. Is there an archaeologist in the house?