“They’ll just die off in the first frost” everyone said. So what do we have? Record October temperatures and a mini-heatwave forecast for the weekend. They can’t get enough of the rotting apples lying around. Some of them are so pissed they’ve fallen through the downlights onto the stairs. I’ve considered leaning out of the window and spraying the entrance which according to the experts must be done at night when the hive is inactive. Will I be the only one hanging out of the window and cursing late at night?

Around 2am something very large keeps landing on the roof just above the wasps’ nest . Whatever it is hammers on the roof tiles for a while before I scare it off. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I should take a leaf out of Attenbrough and let nature take its course. It sounds like a prehistoric bird but it must be an owl. I’ll look it up on the web and send a message to Katie H. at Autumnwatch to see if she knows. Maybe they could come round and install their tiny cameras.

Speaking of the BBC in the wild, dumbed down former intellectual Michael Wood’s BBC4 series The Story of England, a Brave Foray into the Sticks, shows that English people living in the Midlands have grown out of their militant car worker phase and are now fully re-established in the wild and multiplying. They installed their tiny cameras and observed these strange creatures. A few famines, plagues and French invasions along the way have toughened them up and they’re now ready to be called Little Englanders again. This series, like most of the Beeb’s output these days, seeks to establish an English national identity as spurious as Sir Walter Scott’s creation of Bonny Socks Scotland. Wisely Woods has avoided a Morris Dance, but it’s early days. The Scots learned the hard way about hubris in the 70s and I fear the BBC are luring the ill-informed English down the same piss soaked road to shouty nationalism. Or perhaps they want to stem the tide of emigration and keep Provence and Tuscany for themselves.