- Joe Bennett communes with nature, and puts it to rights.

Spring provides ample opportunities to commune with nature. For a hardened Southern man though, perhaps that is too much of a good thing.

We like to name things. We name the little things and the big things, from the microbes and insects, to the moon and the sun. And it was the sun that burst over the hill this morning and lit the frosted glass door as if for the returning Messiah. How could I not get up from my desk and pass through the sunlit door to the garage and sit in the chair I keep there for just such moments and bask a bit? After the basklessness of winter, fresh spring sun is sumptuous.

So I sat to feel the impact on my flesh of photons dispatched eight minutes earlier from a distance of – one moment while I look this up – 151 million kilometres. (What happens to photons when they land? Do they fizzle and fall to the floor? Do they enter my flesh and stay? What exactly are they? Does anyone know?)

Photons were bombarding everything equally, the magnolia, the hydrangeas, the fiercely sprouting lawn, revving it all up, feeding the spring, tipping the energy in that makes it work.

My arrival disrupted the world of my garden but, by sitting in silence for a bit, absorbing the photons, keeping still, I became part of the place, a piece of the landscape, and bit by bit the world returned. Led by a hedge sparrow, aka a dunnock.

There is much to be said for hedge sparrows. I like their neatness, their shyness, their fusewire legs and claws, their hypodermic beaks. But above all I like knowing they are hedge sparrows, as opposed to the larger more gregarious house sparrows with their different plumage and their fatter beaks. To identify any creature, any plant, to pin a name on it, brings a little order to a random world. And we like a little order.

The bird was pecking at invisibilities near a hydrangea. I stayed very still. It came to within three metres of my feet, darting, intent, scratching a living.

Then, nearer still, a movement. How tuned we are to movement, how alive to the alive. And this alive was a beetle, scuttling along a concrete ridge that keeps rainwater out of the garage. It went with the monomaniac intensity of all living beasts.

And what a beast it was. An inch or so long and luminously black, polished to a lustre, flattish, and segmented like a truck and trailer. The legs were hinged out to the side like a crocodile’s legs and they drove it along the concrete bund at a speed of three or four metres a minute. Not photonic, but good going.

I watched it pause at the far wall, then take a left and a right and disappear behind a tub of lavender. And at the exact moment that I thought of getting up from the chair, the sparrow took flight.

I got up not because I had done basking, nor yet because I had work to do, though I did. I got up because I wanted to identify the beetle. And thanks to the internet, it didn’t take long. Briefly I thought it was an Eyrewell ground beetle Holcaspis brevicula but, as I’m sure you know, only 10 examples of this species have ever been found. It turned out in the end that the beast, as you will already have guessed, was the far more common burnt pine longhorn beetle, Arhopalus tristis. Good to know. Named and tamed.