The British public are so damned polite and relentless in their praise that it comes as a breath of fresh air when you receive a complaint. About five, or it may have been ten, years ago (probably ten as it came hand-written) I received a letter from a visitor saying that it was all very well building gazebos and towers from which to enjoy the view, but this was next to useless if the viewer wasn’t given any clue as to what they were looking at. ​

Slow life doesn’t come any slower than this.  The life models had to keep perfectly still, sometimes in water, for up to an hour.  Alan Ward, who holds a life class at the Storey Institute every Saturday, booked 11 models, 5 male, 5 female and one trans-gender, to pose for his students in my garden.  We were expecting a washout, after two inches of rain had been dumped on us the day before, but by a miracle the clouds disappeared just as the models started to arrive and we were bathed in sunshine all day long.  

I’ve been road testing my new toy, aka the Google Glass, by using it to record a video while out on my bike. The picture quality in video mode isn’t as good as it is for still pictures, but I think it did pretty well whilst I hurtled along at speeds of up to 30 mph. You get a good sense of the fun I’m having on these narrow country lanes.  ​

The bees are back- if they ever went away. As this video vividly shows, the flowers on my echiums are smothered in bees. And as there are several dozen echiums in the garden and each flower spires is between 4 and 6 feet long, this amounts to an awful lot of bees. Honey bees prefer blue flowers, so the lavenders and salvias are also getting their fair share. After the blue flowers in popularity come the white, of which my cabbage palms and sea kale are doing well in attracting bees.
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In spite of the plethora of honey bees, I don’t keep a working hive at the moment. I’ve got a hive, but can’t spare the time to make my own honey, so I leave that to the experts. As a result I rely on my favourite shop, the Farm Shop at Sizergh for my honey supplies. I buy runny honey, supplied by Nook Farm in Cumbria, which is perfect with my porridge in the morning. But when I looked for the Nook Farm brand, the clear honey was out of stock, so I picked up the jar pictured below. It looked just the ticket, with its artisan jar, and farm shop price. Luckily, I checked the label, which disclosed that it isn’t local at all, not even British. The small print revealed that it was the “produce of EU or non-EU countries”. To my mind, that’s a bit of a con trick. If I was looking for rubbish like that I’d go to Tesco’s and pay half the price. Perhaps I should make my own honey after all.

I caught the squirrel red-handed, or in this case red-toothed, with a ripe strawberry in its mouth.  Not just any strawberry but one of the fattest, reddest, juiciest in my crop.  At moments like this Jeanette Winterson*-like ideas of revenge come to mind, but as the squirrel isn’t as tasty as a rabbit, I’m told, I contented myself with thoughts of a cruel and painful punishment.  But squirrels move fast and I didn’t have my gun with me. ​