Ani, thankfully, had already gone to stay with her friends that evening or else the whole encounter would have taken a tragic turn. She objects to aerial invaders of any description… and don’t get her started on the whole builders-on –the roof affair… Yet although I think it is for her that the back door stays open in all weathers and at all hours of the day and night, she was not there…so the loud whirring drew only my attention, not hers.

A couple of feet away a huge red blur appeared to be hovering at eye level, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea what it was! Overseas readers may well think this is a rather small creature, but honestly, for a British moth, this thing was huge! Unexpected in both size and colour… I had never seen anything quite like it.

It seemed I wasn’t going to see it for long either, as it dived into the glass housing round the electric light and began panicking at the heat. It was stuck, the big wings having no space to manoeuvre. Flicking the light off and grabbing a teaspoon… possibly not the cleverest idea, metal and electric, but it was the only thing thin enough at short notice, I climbed precariously on the table to try and get it out, coaxing it gently. Seconds seemed to take hours before it was safely removed and the poor thing dropped to the chair and sat there, obviously traumatised.

Once it had recovered a little I thought the best thing to do would be take it outside and tried to carefully enclose it with my hands. It flew off, of course, heading straight back towards the light. I switched it off again immediately and listened for the whirring of wings, not daring to move in case I stepped on it. Nothing. I couldn’t hear a thing. Cautiously switching the light back on, I caught sight of it sitting on my sleeve… the dressing gown almost the same shade of pink as the little creature. It crawled onto my hand and sat there, showing no inclination to move. And so began a delightful, up close encounter with a beautiful thing… albeit a brief one as I was determined to get the moth safely outside into the darkness before it headed back towards the light.

I looked it up… it is an elephant hawk moth, and oddly I had been writing of both elephants and hawks that day. Oddly, too, that quick bit of research laid to rest a long mystery of a huge caterpillar seen in childhood with painted ‘eyes’. I had never known what it was, but had come across it climbing the bright pink of the rosebay willowherb one day, poised like a snake about to strike, which, I read, is a defensive posture to fool predatory birds.

You always have to wonder when something like this happens… should you interfere? Let Nature take its course? I couldn’t just sit there and watch it fry… It is drawn to the light, it seems, with that same irresistible impulse that draws us towards another source.

Yet the electric bulb, glowing hot and destructive, is not a natural thing and these moths are denizens of the cool night. The imago… the adult moth… sees well in both darkness and light, but lives wakeful in the shadows. Not unlike us, really, living in the shadows of ourselves. We too flutter blindly in a false illumination, beating our wings on the glass cage of ego and illusion, yet we are ever drawn towards a source so bright it would consume all we are should we reach the true source… and there are worse ends than being consumed by Light.