0220 hrs in the forest and the otherworldly effect created by the lights of the bad guy’s land rover. Mmm….It’s odd how I never see the likes of so-called expert wildlife enthusiasts Chris Packham, et al in situations like this.

As it happens, I’ve been doing a lot of night work over the past two or three months (particularly in the forest) to make up for the daytime hours (about four or five a day on average) I’ve spent sitting patiently reading and drinking multiple cups of coffee in Gloucester Hospital canteen while my wife endured three consecutive courses of intra-venous chemotherapy treatments. She’ll be needing a fourth apparently, in the New Year. Unfortunately, Her multiple myeloma cancer has had a sudden and fairly aggressive resurgence and she’s fighting it with a strength and determination (not to mention continued lashings of manuka honey and large mugs of green tea) far beyond anything I’d be capable of. Strangely (or perhaps not), it was Tess’s early detection of the sinister changes in the levels of the extremely toxic para-proteins in my wife’s blood back in the summer and her increasingly concerned behaviour towards my wife that alerted me to the fact that something was definitely amiss!