Dear Readers, after all the excitement of Sunday’s East Finchley Festival, it was as much as I could do to  trundle out of the front door to my dental hygienist’s appointment. What a way to start the week! There’s nothing like having your gums probed with a sharp metal instrument to put you in a good mood. I do, however, remember Mum making me promise to look after my teeth – she ended up with dentures, and they were a nightmare, what with all the falling out and stuff getting stuck underneath them and general nuisance. Then when she was in hospital one of the nurses managed to drop and break them, and it was yoghurt, porridge and custard for the rest of Mum’s life. I have her make up bag, and yesterday I was looking for my lipstick when I found a tiny screwed-up advert from a newspaper, for ‘denture repairs’. You think you’ve shut the door on grief and then it climbs back in through the bathroom window.

Anyway.

I noticed the enormous fly in the photo above landing on the  buddleia – it sounded like a bomber as it flew in. What is it, though? I suspect that it’s the hoverfly Eristalis tenax, though these insects can be difficult for the amateur to identify to species level. Otherwise known as a drone fly, the males, like this one (in male hoverflies the eyes generally meet in the middle of the head, while in females they are more widely spaced) defend territories, usually based around a particular shrub or flowerbed. I shall have to keep an eye open for this chap, as they apparently try to ‘see off’ everything from bumblebees to butterflies. However, as I haven’t seen him before he might just be dispersing – the larvae are known as ‘rat-tailed maggots’ and live in water, preferably heavily polluted water.

In a piece of information that I count as ‘too much information’, rat-tailed maggots can exist inside humans that are forced to drink contaminated water. Whilst unpleasant for the humans, I am impressed that the larvae can survive in the extremely acidic environment of a mammal stomach – they must be extremely tough little critters. Fortunately, normally they just live on the bacteria in sewage tanks and ditches, and the flies that emerge skip around on the flowers and are significant pollinators. They have a passing resemblance to bees, which may give them protection except from particularly swat-enabled human beings.

Anyway, my thoughts were then distracted by a rabble of swifts flying up and down the road. Every so often they would fly up towards the eaves of the houses, though as far as I know no house on our road has a swift’s nest. Just imagine if we all put up swift-nesting boxes! It’s too late for this year, but maybe I’ll send someone up a ladder to pop up a swift box next year, though I need to find out about the orientation – although the birds were interested in our eaves, they are south-facing, so surely too hot? Let me know if you have any ideas, Readers…