There's a bit of a story behind tonight's blip. Firstly, let me apologise for the quality - it has a very narrow depth of field and also suffers from camera shake. Here is the explanation (or excuse, if you prefer!)

Just after tea, there was a ring on the doorbell and there stood my neighbour. He's well into his eighties and he rarely comes round to our back door, so something was up.

What it was, was that he had found a strange caterpillar and didn't know what it was and would I like a look at it. So I grabbed the camera, put the macro lens on and went up the garden while he walked back round to the fence on his side.

He appeared with an old and battered frying pan, and there, on the edge, was the most enormous caterpillar. Fortunately, I'd seen one before. It was the caterpillar of an elephant hawk moth. It took me some time to convince him that it was actually native to this country, but he eventually accepted it.

I took the frying pan with caterpillar to show the rest of the family and then - my son having looked it up on the Internet - put it on the fuchsia bush and took a quick picture. Unfortunately, it was a shutter speed of about 1/13sec and was even worse than the one up above. The caterpillar then proceeded to fall off. It seemed quite happy on the ground, so I tried another shot with he ISO ramped up a bit, but it was still too slow. I tried a third (which is the one I've blipped) and then thought, 'well, it's not moving very quickly. I'll go and give Len his frying pan back and then come back and take some proper pictures.'

Big mistake. He kept me talking and by the time I got back, the caterpillar must have gone into overdrive - it was nowhere in sight. I looked around where I had last seen it, lifted foliage up, checked twigs which looked like a caterpillar, but to no avail. It was gone, along with my chance of getting a decent shot.

The moral to this story is 'a caterpillar on the frying pan is worth two in the bushes'. AND I picked up a couple of insect bites which are itching like mad!

I hope it wasn't eaten by some marauding blackbird while I was talking to Len and somewhere in the flowerbed it is pupating.