Well Readers, that’s the exam over and done with – I have a suspicion that I’ve done ok, but then I always to tend to compare what’s possible in a 3 hour exam with what I can do for an assessment, and the former always comes up feeling a bit thin. Never mind. Let’s wait for the results.

In the meantime, we have had a little bit of an ant invasion – they are clearly coming through a hole next to the washing machine. They then walk up the wall and send out search parties across the kitchen work surfaces, bless them. Today I will be sealing up the hole, but it does remind me of those ‘flying ant’ days, when all the queens go on their nuptial flights before spending the rest of their lives underground, laying egg after egg. Was that one glorious day worth all the days and nights in the dark, I wonder? As a child I was always entranced by the wings left in the gutter, scintillating like so many shards of glass.

I’ve written a bit about it here and I rather like the poem below. It’s not mid July yet but, for me, the summer starts now!

Love Song, 31st July by Richard Osmond

Today the queen ant and her lovers
took their nuptial flight, scattering
upwards like a handful of cracked
black peppercorns thrown in the face
of a bear, the bear being in this case
a simile for the population of Lewisham
and Hither Green.

There is an increasingly common assertion
online that the winged of every ant nest
in Britain take off on the same bright
morning. This says less about ants than it does
about the state of media in which we place
ourselves: connected enough to hear
and repeat all claims and verify some,
yet prone to confirmation bias
owing to algorithms which favour
new expressions of that which we already
hold to be true.

Myth moves in step with commerce.
When merchant ships arrived
once per season from the Orient
they brought silk and saffron and stories
of dog-sized ants which mined gold
and took to the sky only to defend
their treasure from camel-riding
thieves. Now we receive the exotic
via fibre optics as a stream of
high frequency trades.

My love, I can’t speak with authority
on commodity futures, the wonders of the east
and the behaviour of insects in Liverpool
and Tunbridge Wells or any city
outside my directly observable reality,
but it’s flying ant day in my heart
if nowhere else.