As is now well-known, Ulez (the ultra-low emission zone) will expand from 29 August, taking in suburban parts of Kent, Surrey, Essex, Herts. This fact gave Richard Lofthouse, an editor and motoring journalist, an idea. He has done much to help car4Ukraine.com, a volunteer group within Ukraine which seeks gifts of 4×4 pickups abroad and repurposes them to help the war effort. Some are armour-plated, for instance, and fitted with a gun turret at the back. Others can be turned into field ambulances, and so on. There is an endless need for wheels in Ukraine, the life of each pick-up ‘in theatre’ being a matter of weeks. As I write, nearly 300 such vehicles have been contributed, well over half from British donors. These include five given – and in some cases driven over – by Dr Lofthouse personally. From 29 August, thousands of 4x4s will come forward for scrappage. His thought was that Transport for London should therefore give car4Ukraine some of these vehicles. There would be no compromise of Ulez’s purpose – which is the dispersal of polluting vehicles, not global carbon reduction. Owners of the 4x4s handing them in would still be paid by TfL but they could, if they wanted, tick a box which would send them to Ukraine rather than the scrapheap. This idea was taken up with enthusiasm by Vitali Klitschko, the dynamic mayor of Kyiv. He had been much encouraged, after the invasion last year, by Sadiq Khan’s announcement that Londoners ‘stand shoulder to shoulder’ with Ukraine. Klitschko’s office therefore wrote to that of the Mayor of London suggesting the scheme. How disappointing that it received a dusty answer from the Mayor’s people: ‘In practice there are some barriers that would make this impossible…’ The main one, apparently, is that, to earn a grant, ‘the scheme requires proof that the vehicle has been scrapped at an Authorised Treatment Facility’. The ‘application process and backend systems’ would go awry if efforts were made to change them. One would think that if there were a will, there would be a way.

There is a hopeful but tense atmosphere in our household. For more than 25 years, my wife has been catching, recording (and then releasing) the moths that come to her trap. On warm nights, she turns on her 70-year-old metal Robinson contraption with its mercury vapour bulb. The moths, drawn by the light, are caught inside the trap’s collar and doze on the egg boxes Caroline provides. Early in the morning, she identifies and records all the moths she finds, both species and quantity. The most exciting ones are those so rare that they are called Red Data Book species. She has found 12 of these species in her career, plus one moth, Bright Neb, never before found in the county of Sussex, and another, Forest Twist, not seen there since Victorian times. If a moth is of a species she has not found before, she photographs it and sends the pictures to the county recorder, Colin Pratt, to confirm identification. On a very good day, the haul can be 130 species. In the early years, she concentrated on macro-moths. Then, as her knowledge grew, she began to study pyralid moths, a subset of micro-moths, some of whom resemble bird droppings. These led her to micro-moths more generally. In this she is greatly helped by the Field Guide to the Micro-Moths of Great Britain, by Phil Sterling and Mark Parsons. The total number of moth species in Britain is about 2,500. Of these, the great majority is composed of micro-moths. It is fair to say that many micro-moths, though often beautiful under the microscope, look to the untutored eye (mine) like small grey smears. In the 1990s, because she had started from nothing, Caroline quickly found hundreds of species. It gradually became slower work to find new ones. Nevertheless, the number is still growing. She reached 800 species in 2018. Earlier this month, she found, for the first time, the Heart moth and the Brown-Veined Neb moth, both rare, and the rather less rare Gypsy moth. This took her list of species to 899. The tension arises because we now await the 900th.

What makes it particularly tantalising is that we may already have passed that point. Last week, Caroline found two moths new to her collection. She thinks they are Phycitodes Saxicola (Small Clouded Knot-horn) and either Endothenia ustolana or Endothenia pullana (Bugle Marble or Woundwort Marble) but is not sure. When identification is very hard, even the great Colin Pratt would not claim to be the highest authority. The only way to be sure is by what is known as ‘gen. det.’, which means determination by genitalia. Moths have sexual intercourse by ‘a lock and key’ system, so any key not fitting the lock is clearly a different species. As I write, some expert, somewhere, is staring very hard at the private parts of these two tiny moths. I hope he or she gets the work done before the Online Safety Bill, with its obsessive anxiety about genitalia, passes into law. It might clamp down on this unusual occupation.

Part of the fun of the enterprise is finding so many secret treasures in one’s own garden. Ours does have some entomological advantages. It is near a river, and the sea is only 12 miles away. This means that interesting immigrants, the moth equivalent of the ‘small boats’, venture up the river: we are in a ‘wildlife corridor’. We also benefit from living on the edge of a village and one which, thank goodness, has no street lights. Not everyone is so lucky. Nevertheless, a great many people, particularly in the warm south of England, will find hundreds of species of moth to admire in their gardens, if they look.

David Baddiel (see last week’s Edinburgh Notebook) invites suggestions to rival his claim that Einstein was the most iconic Jew ever. How about Jesus, and/or his mum? Both have certainly appeared in more icons.