Angst

This picture is really for blip legend Treshnish, to illustrate that there are worse things than a yellow shovel

We called in at the hardware store to buy yet more sticky draft excluder/gap filler to continue this summer's relentless wasp war. Where I thought I had sealed the doors, they found a small gap I had neglected. They also found a wasp-sized gap between two huge pieces of timber that have seasoned apart. Decorators' caulk is effective, if inelegant. 

Listening to the cricket commentary cheered me up - not because we are beating New Zealand - I'm in two minds about that - but because, between overs, Jonathan Agnew remarked that he had found it a wasp-infested summer and that his plum tree, prodigious last year, had yielded four plums this year, and the wasps ate them all. It's not just us, then. Cricket commentary at its best

I suppose someone must have designed this display. I'm quite impressed: you've got to have some confidence to put a pink shovel front and centre. There is an awful lot of plastic here. As the climate crisis has finally, 20 years too late, gained some salience, the plastic problem seems to have faded from the headlines - as if our minds can only live with one crisis at a time. In my student years, we sat up late and worried about nuclear weapons. Today, we are probably closer to a real east-west nuclear conflict thank at any time since 1963, but nuclear war, for now, remains a second-order crisis, something to worry about when I've won the wasp war