Licky

"and then I said to her ... and she said to him ....." and on and on she droned.

If you look carefully you can see the enormously long tongue of this common drone fly as it sups the nectar of the lilac in the sunshine this afternoon.  I think there's a small parasite on the fly's rear right hand leg, you can see it better in large, but its pretty tiny, perhaps not even as big as a pin head.  As Jonathan Swift wrote in his satirical poem "On Poetry":

"The Vermin only teaze and pinch
Their Foes superior by an Inch.
So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller yet to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum:
Thus ev'ry Poet, in his Kind
Is bit by him that comes behind"

There's a bit of a cold wind, but the sun is shining so everything looks lovely outside.   But the temperature has definitely dropped.  It feels much more like Autumn now than summer.  What a contrast from the very warm August Bank Holiday weekend last year.