A very warm day here in the miserable Midlands, the warmest I can remember for a couple of years.

I was woken this morning by an inquisitive wasp which presumed to enter the window I left open last night.   An old colleague of mine once consumed a large quantity of magic mushrooms harvested from a golf course, fell asleep and woke to find a four foot bee navigating his bedroom; fortunately my own insect visitor was considerably smaller.  Still fairly irritating at 5 AM though.

I watched some of the coverage of the D-Day commemorations over the weekend.  I recalled that two decades ago, it was decided to make the 40th anniversary of D-Day a huge spectacle, since it was thought that many of its participants wouldn't be alive for the 50th.  But it seems that quite a few of the old soldiers are still around twenty years later and I was quite touched to see them marching proudly in their medals, reliving their memories.  At a time when the armed forces of Great Britain and the US are driven by the malice, vanity and greed of cynical politicians, instruments not of liberty or justice but of chaos, exploitation and destruction, the achievement of their predecessors 60 years earlier seems doubly noble.