Sitting pretty

Sitting pretty among the sweet violets in the sunshine this morning, this Hairy-footed Flower Bee stopped me heading off to Slimbridge for the second time in ten days. At breakfast time all four of my weather apps had suggested that I might as well go birding, because the weather was likely to be too poor for there to be any insect activity - but I didn't get where I am today by believing what other people tell me, and when I went outside to check, the garden was buzzing.

To be fair to the forecasters, about an hour after I took this the cloud rolled in, the temperature dropped, and all the inverts disappeared off into shelter - but I didn't care by then, because I already had my photos. Deciding that it was now too late to go to either Slimbridge or Farmoor, I turned my mind to improving the garden. Sadly R had already gone out, which precluded me from using power tools, but there's always some kind of manual work you can do, and in this case it was pushing a trolley around Stratford Garden Centre, where I bought a couple of dramatic purple heucheras for the crown chimney pots on the patio, some 'Munstead' lavender, and a big bowl of pale blue grape hyacinths. Then I decided to clean the car, by taking it to the hand car wash at Long Marston.

By the time I got home I was positively glowing with housewifely virtue, and felt that I more than deserved some coffee and biscuits, and a nice sit-down.