Terminator

I made a lightning macro raid on the garden this morning, before R and I set off to collect the Boy Wonder and bring him home for the weekend. The weather was threatening, so a lot of invertebrates were staying under shelter, but tiny Terminators were out in force on the yarrow, wandering up and down and picking off aphids as they went. In the ladybird/aphid war the aphids don't have much going for them, except that they can excrete a kind of sticky wax that gums up the ladybirds' mouthparts, and at this time of year I often see ladybirds with blobs of wax around their heads. This little predator still looked quite clean though, so it must have been a relatively recent arrival at the feast.

The Boy was in fine form today, though he and I did have one disagreement on the car journey between Monmouth and Croome, when he began to take off his safety straps and - reasonable persuasion having failed - I spoke sharply to him. He stopped, one arm half in and half out of the strap, and stared at me silently, with a level of fierce anger that would have been genuinely unnerving in a full-sized person. After a few seconds I tried reasoning with him again, and his response was, "I don't want to speak to you. I will talk to Granddad." R then asked him if he would please put his arm back properly through the strap, and he instantly complied, while continuing to bestow a silent Death Stare on me.

The incident was soon forgotten, and we had a brilliant time at Croome. We had sausages for lunch, played hide-and-seek in the shrubbery, took a trip to the hollow tree, explored the Temple Greenhouse (B, looking around at the cream walls and white window frames: "Why is it called a green house?") and checked out the swallows that are nesting there on the tops of a couple of the pillars (B, finger to lips: "Sssh, Grandma. You must talk ve'y quietly or you will scare them!"), and finally walked down to the lake and round to the grotto. Then we went to Waitrose, which was surprisingly good fun too.

Back at home, B helped me make a fruit salad, while declining flatly to eat any of the fruit himself, and then watered my patio pots. Then he spent a long time on the swing, sometimes just chatting and sometimes playing word games that were both nonsensical and funny, and hooting with laughter at his own inventiveness. It was while he was swinging, pushed by R, and I was sitting on the garden bench next to the swing chatting to them both, that B suddenly turned to me and quietly said, "Sowwy." I was genuinely perplexed - the car incident by this time being a good five hours behind us - and said , "I don't understand, Darling. I don't think you've got anything to be sorry about, have you?" He didn't answer, but a few minutes later he repeated, "Sowwy," before moving on to talk about something else.

He's a remarkable little person, this Boy of ours. Not always the easiest of furrows to plough, but generally rewarding, and often surprising. I feel as though I learn something every time we meet.