Sitting by the garden pond, I read my way through the afternoon. I wasn’t alone for long. The sunshine soon brought our neighbour’s honeybees to drink. Landing on the floating starwort, they sipped gratefully. Wild bees too flew about the pond margins, queen bumbles searching for nesting sites. A page or so later, a little spider scurried over the little pool. No need to use waterweed as a raft, this spider walks on water. After a while a chiffchaff began to sing from the birch above the beehives. The first summer songster to arrive, its endless call of chiff-chaff tolled through the day like the Angelus bell.