I remembered today that l had flatly refused to leave the car in 1992, and that my parents took my little sister around Butterfly World while I stayed in the car park.
Silly. Butterfly World’s amazing! I can see why my sister loved it. In the hothouse of a tropical warehouse, hundreds of butterflies flutter around the exotic leaves, nibble on fruit stacks, and land on you while you walk around the carefully organised paths. Some butterflies were gigantic - the size of your hand! Others were tiny and bright and colourful. As a fourteen year old I was indifferent; in this century, I was enthralled by the biology and variety.
Caterpillars turn into soup inside the chrysalis. I mean they literally dissolve into a gloopy mess of proteins before nature reassembles them as butterflies. Of the 24,000 species of Lepidoptera, they all do this - driven by the urge to push through this incredible life cycle from pupae to insect. It’s incredible!
What impulse makes a caterpillar do this? What’s so built in to their innate circuitry that one day they attach themselves to a leaf, spin a membrane, shed their skin and let this otherworldly chemical process take over? As humans we have to learn how to adult, how to react to our tricky adolescence, and how to function as grown-ups, despite our own weird chemical impulses, and definitely not because of them! We need help from adults who can communicate that stuff! Seems butterflies have it sorted - a lesson I might have learned faster as a fourteen year-old, had I not been bored in the car outside Butterfly World in 1992.
Meanwhile, a hundred years before, Queen Victoria was probably gazing out across the terrace at Osborne House, just a few miles up the road, wondering about transitions of her own.
This was our next stop today: the enormous grounds and palazzo of Osborne, East Cowes, in which the Queen and her Prince Consort, Albert, (not to mention their nine children) lived.
The estate is enormous - from the house, we walked down to the beach where Victoria’s bathing machine is still stationed. The walk took half an hour, and the land still stretched as far as we could see in all directions. Cedars and elms and oaks and firs whispered to each other as the late summer breeze rippled through them. You really could imagine the Royal Family and their very prim entourage there.
The house itself is a huge palace, designed by Albert in the Italianate style. The story goes that the view of the Solent reminded him of the Bay of Naples, and inspired the sandstone brick and the Belvedere towers, not to mention the wide Mediterranean terrace. It really is elegant! We were there on a day when the sun continuously fought with the showers, so sometimes the house seemed dark and imposing, other times as brightly lit as a Tuscan monastery or a Spanish villa. My favourite thing though, was of course the way the shadows interplayed and the sun beamed from the rain washed stone, all the brighter with the dark receding clouds behind it. Against the rich green velvet of the grounds and the trees, the autumnal blue of the sea and the glistening white of the wave-tops, it was a delightful landscape.
Inside, the furnishings are no less opulent than you would expect from a royal palace. There are wide hallways with grand staircases, there are drab paintings in faded gold frames, and there are corridors and arches and porticos and alcoves showing off the very finest Victorian idea of art, statues, curios and marble busts.
A living area is resplendent with glittering chandeliers and mirrors. In front of a fireplace, a low-seated gold-upholstered couch in front of a precisely carved mahogany table - two piano stools, deep red fabric in front of a highly varnished piano, embedded with tiny inset paintings and motifs. There are velvet cloths on small round tables, and a much larger dining table set for nine, with a handsome chair at the head, just in front of a splendid bay window of tied-back gold curtains.
This, I noted, felt like it might have been the very beating heart of Victoriana in the middle of the Nineteenth Century: the epicentre for every well-to-do home in the realm, with its miniatures, its marble finish, its ornaments on stands, and its sober-faced portraits. Perhaps it all started here. Perhaps every Victorian home in London wished it were Osborne House.
There was a billiards table - huge, with faded brown baize and an ornately painted frame. I imagined Albert bending tightly over its polished edges, lit by candles, swirled in smoke, as the balls clicked and clacked between the cushions.
It’s always seemed strange to wander around someone’s house without them there. I felt no doubt that Queen Victoria, who’d kept the place precisely as Albert designed it, even after his death, would not be amused at all that it was now open to what, the real public, or that it would be owned and run by an independent organisation, English Heritage. But there it is - her own son, Edward VII hadn’t been quite so attached to Osborne, and had been quick to gift it to the nation in 1902. I guess he saw more shadow than sun.
Anyway. I’ve gone on about it too long. We had a lovely time there dodging the showers and taking in the scale of the place. Somehow my Mum walked over 3km around Osborne House and gardens, which is incredible, but also exhausted her to the point where we were forced to (actually it was my suggestion) get fish and chips on the way back.
So butterflies and palaces. It’s been a grand day of taking in the finery of nature and the ornateness of finery. I am extremely glad that this time, on either occasion, I was wise enough not to insist on staying in the car park.
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