Dear Readers, I am in tearing haste today, as I have an assignment to submit for my End of Life Doula course. I have decided to proceed and take the Diploma, which will give me the skills I need to work with dying people and those that they care about, but first up I have to submit a case study for an imaginary person. Well, suffice it to say that this is a much more emotional trip than I had thought – although my person didn’t actually exist, I was very cut up when they ‘died’. However, I was somewhat cheered up by this rather splendid book on flies that has arrived from good old NHBS.

In my view, we don’t appreciate flies enough – even the bitey ones do a grand job of feeding birds and bats and clearing up all manner of putrescence. Plus I always learn so much from these books. I’d never even heard of a long-palped cranefly, but these guys are splendid – look at those tiger stripes!

I have written about soldierflies before, but have never seen an orange-horned green colonel, more’s the pity.

And how about a stiletto fly? These guys apparently stand around on their tippy-toes, when they aren’t ‘lekking’ (i.e. gathering in numbers to fly around and impress the females). The larvae are ‘large, elongated and predatory’. Just as well we’re not little defenceless maggots.

The great thing about flies is that even if there’s nothing else about, you can usually find a fly. Expect to hear plenty more over the next few months (now, that’s something to look forward to, I’m sure.