Glow-worms

Glow-worms are one of those memories of childhood for me. I’d never actually seen one before, in spite of growing up in the English countryside, but they appear in children’s books so I grew up believing in them. They are so romantic -little insects that produce a light at night. The glow-worm in James and the Giant Peach provides light for the entire crew of the peach. But I didn’t know what they really looked like. When my mother told me that they lived near her, in a cemetery in Stroud, I was keen to go and take a look. At about 22:00 on a fine evening at the end of July we went up to the cemetery to see if we could find any. And we did! Two things surprised me about them; their colour and their intensity. Never having seen one, I had only ever imagined what they would be like. I had imagined a dull yellow glow that you would miss if you weren’t looking closely enough. But that’s not how they looked at all. The intensity was on a par with a green LED, such as you might have on the front of a T.V. And the colour was bright green – not the kind of colour I had imagined at all. We saw several of these lights in the long grass, but as we didn’t take a torch, I have no idea what the insect that made them looks like. I did try a photo, but there was not enough light for the autofocus, and without a flash all I got was a blur. But here is the blur so that you can appreciate the colour of the things.