This uninspiring photo is of a hoverfly hovering in the garden. Please note it is a hoverfly – not a bee. But it buzzes just like a bee. In fact its common English name is the drone fly because of its noise. And when one comes in the house Jo leaves the room – very quickly.

If, as occurred the other day, I happen to be having a lie down, Jo finds herself separated from her laptop, her phone and her paperwork until I get up. Jo being separated from her phone for half an hour results in a severe attack of delirium tremens (colloquially, the DTs, "the horrors", "the fear", "the abdabs" or "the rats"; afflicted individuals referred to as "jitterbugs" in 1930s Harlem slang; literally, "shaking delirium" or "trembling madness" in Latin). So I arrived downstairs to find an unhappy Jo who became even more unhappy when she found out she’d been excluded from the room by a hoverfly.

“But it didn’t hover!”

OK, so sue it, I thought. Sometimes they don’t – especially when they are travelling from A to B trying to find a way out!

Jo doesn’t usually utter profanities (except at the computer) but she managed to call the marital status of the parents of this little insect into question!
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