Itchy

I woke up this morning to the discovery that overnight I'd done something catastrophic to my back. I levered myself approximately upright, and limped carefully downstairs with the aim of making some tea, but the act of lifting the kettle defeated me, and I had to give in and stumble back to bed. I'll gloss over the effort that took, and the language that I used to express my feelings about the situation, but in the end I managed to get onto my Shakti mat - and there I stayed, for the whole of the rest of the morning.

At noon I tried the vertical thing again and found it slightly easier, though my posture was simian and I was listing quite heavily to starboard. R had gone out by this time, but had kindly left me his heavy back strapping, which I applied as tightly as I could manage, and tottered out into the garden with the camera. Two hours later, seething with frustration at my uselessness but too exhausted to keep trying to push through the pain, I accepted defeat and went back to bed.

Unsurprisingly, virtually none of the photos I managed to take were worth keeping. But I do quite like this one, which shows a female Eristalis pertinax hoverfly delicately scratching one of her back legs with the other, while resting on a vibrantly fresh shoot of my Roseraie de l'Hay rose.