Shutting the bantams up at night has become a matter of sneaky timing. I go into their house and throw down a handful of mealworms, chucking a few, temptingly, through the hatch to attract any stragglers. Then i go round the back of the house and closed run, so that they don’t see me because, if they do, they follow me and go back into the open run. Tonight, a couple of them dashed after me and I only just slammed the door in time.

The alternative, of course, is simply to wait until they’ve gone to roost, but that’s getting later every day and it’s not halfway through May yet. i can see I’ll have to set an alarm to remind me, as the summer goes on, because I’ll forget. It doesn’t really matter if the run is open, as long as it doesn’t happen too often and attract the fox. It would take some effort for Reynard to dig his way in, though.

I managed to get some work done in the garden between a couple of heavy showers. Sadly, I have no enthusiasm for gardening any more, though I hope that will change in time. There are so many things that I want to want to do – perhaps I’ll start to feel like the old Z, one of these days. I sat down in the sunshine for a few minutes and felt a sharp prickle on my hand. It was a ladybird, biting me. I watched. It was deliberate. It moved a little and bit again. I ended up with an oval patch of half a dozen bites, one of which had definitely broken the skin. I looked for a rose with aphids on, to shake it on to, but no aphids to be found and I supposed it must be very hungry, to attack me. After it finished, it wandered across my arm and I moved it onto a plant.

I also rescued three honey bees, two of them trapped in the porch and one, too weak to fly, that was ambling across the carpet. It walked onto a piece of card and I took it out and leaned the card on a self-sown clump of snapdragons. i went back for some sugar, as it seemed so feeble but, when I came back, it was busy nuzzling into one of the flowers, so evidently was finding its own food. Poor thing must have got trapped in the house yesterday and 24 hours without food, at this time of year, was almost too much for it.

I was upset to read of Dooce’s death. She was one of the original bloggers and was very successful for years. A very frank writer with a brilliant way with words and a tendency to over-share – she clearly had a lot of personal problems and, more recently, acknowledged alcoholism and depression. Suicide, when she so adored her teenage daughters, is a shocking end to her life.