I had a day off today. What a busman's holiday though - not content with sitting in traffic on the M25 every time I take my car to work, I decided to go to that palace of contradictions, Ikea.

As if we don't have enough furniture in our house at the moment - you can't move round our ground floor for stuff still after the weekend's house clearance - we decided we needed a corner unit for our 'Billys' so off we went to do battle on the North Circular (I refused point blank to go past my office to go to Croydon....it wasn't until much later that I realised we were on course to go past two more of our other West London offices) PAH! The whole outing was a fiasco, culminating in tears. Why can't they just do an internet ordering service? Dunno.

We got home and I wanted to have a bit of calm in my life so I set off with my camera, tripod and close-up lenses to find a pic of the day. The hens were in 'the swamp' - a particularly overgrown corner of the garden that once housed a pond that has long-since sprung a leak and turned into a muddy bog. They eyed me suspiciously and then got on with their business of scratching around, dirtbathing their feathers and generally living the life of 'old riley'. I suddenly realised the reason for their happy, contented lounging around......a very full lunch of spinach - all of my spinach plants have been completely decimated - only stalks and a tiny bit of leaf left. GGGggggggrrrrrrr.

I do hope this means that at the first sign of evil they will swell up, get muscles like turkeys and frighten away all danger in the future.

I now have a new 'life's learning' - don't let the hens in the spinach patch or you won't have a spinach patch!