WE DENIZENS of the 21st century have been deprived of one of the fundamental pleasures of humankind: something that the people of all previous ages accepted as a matter of easy, casual and obvious right.

What we have lost is the unthinking, unambiguous delight in a lovely day: the soul-deep certainty that he who kisses a joy as it flies dwells in eternity’s sunrise.

Take yesterday morning. Gorgeous. I haven’t moulted into my winter plumage yet — just dragging on a pullover for the morning chores, and feeling a faint bloom of sweat beneath it as I completed the more strenuous of them. Sun shone; robins sang; and behold, a butterfly. How extraordinarily, insanely, hilariously fabulous; how horribly disturbing, how deeply spooky.

I didn’t kiss it as it flew, for all that it was a joy. A red admiral, I think, but the vision was too fleet and too fleeting to be sure. A butterfly! With November more than halfway gone. What the hell’s going on? And the trees still mostly green, the leaves dancing in mere solos and pas de deux.

There have been a couple of frosts out this way, and I assumed that they must have killed off the last of the stragglers. But no: here was a late flutterer, wondering whether or not he was going to hang on until Christmas. How many more butterfly days before Christmas? A deeply alarming thought.

Now I am not a gloom-monger by nature. I kiss joys as they fly with the best of them. I don’t spend my time panning through rivers of gold in order to find a precious speck of dirt. But I know, as everyone does, that the climate has gone haywire, and done so at an express, non-natural pace; and that nothing very much is being done to stop it.

In their delightful book The Meaning of Liff Douglas Adams and John Lloyd use town and villages names to fit concepts for which there is no readily available word. An ely is the strange feeling that something, somewhere has gone horribly wrong. It is the moment in the shower before the knifeman strikes.

And with each clue about climate change, I get that curious sensation of ely. It is all the more strange since the message comes disguised as the most cheering possible news. How can a butterfly be bad? Every bone in our body tells us that butterflies are good: we associate them with the spring, with sunny days, with gardens, with moments of outdoor dalliance, with drinks in the garden. But here was a butterfly telling us in the most beautiful possible way that something somewhere — something everywhere — has gone horribly wrong.

• I WORRY, even when the signs of spring come. This is because these days, they are coming too early, and also because the way of life for migratory birds gets tougher with each passing year. Now I hear, to my horror, that the football World Cup of 2010 is going to play havoc with our swallows. True, the World Cup will be held in South Africa, but that’s just commuting distance for a swallow.

  The problem is that the South African Government wants to upgrade an airport in Natal in time for the World Cup. The airport is, by chance, a place where three million swallows roost every night of the British winter. The evening dances are, they tell me, one of the most dramatic wildlife sights in Africa, and I’ve seen a few of those.

  Upgrading the airport will destroy the swallows’ home and hence the swallows as well. It is not a situation that offers a compromise. To lose the swallows will be a terrible thing for both countries. I hate it when sport gets in the way of conservation; and speaking as a sportswriter, conservation is the only decision to make every single time.

• AND SO TO OZ. I shall be spending the next three weeks in Australia, and this space will temporarily become an Ashes Notebook. But I’ll be wild again before long.