Raindrops...

... keep falling on my.... neck. Or more accurately on my pronotum and elytra.

That scans beautifully, I'm sure you'll agree. I'm really quite pleased with it. Although it's possible that I'm having a fever dream: I have the Boy Wonder's most recent cold, which is what I believe is called a doozie in some circles, and I've spent most of today getting wet, and then failing to dry out properly. And my much loved Scarpa boots have been letting in water.

Oh wait - I feel another song coming on. Though it's not Traffic's finest moment, let's be honest.

So, anyway, this morning R and I went - through vile weather and almost indescribable traffic - to the Circle of Hell that is Bicester Shopping Village, for the purpose of me buying him a couple of shirts as part of his birthday present. I'm not sure whether I'd place Bicester Village in the Third Circle (Gluttony) or the Fourth (Greed), but I know for a fact that I didn't belong there: there was a queue of people waiting outside Dior, in the rain, to be allowed to enter the shop. 

We'd only gone because R likes Tyrwhitt shirts, and this is their nearest physical store to us, but even a dogged determination not to have made a completely wasted journey wasn't enough to persuade us to buy anything, from the small selection available in their tiny premises. The only redeeming feature of the entire trip was a decent lunch at the Farmshop.

Back at home, I did some chores in the kitchen while keeping an eye on the garden, waiting for the rain to stop. As soon as I thought it had, I rushed out with the camera - but I was wrong, or at least previous, and got drenched yet again. On the plus side, if I'd waited until the sky actually cleared, which it did for roughly twenty minutes at about 8.30pm, there wouldn't have been enough light in this corner of the garden for me to have even found a beetle, let alone photographed it. Sometimes you just can't avoid suffering for your art, but luckily, as you know, I'm a very stoical person, and I never complain.