I liberated a confused and angry bee that we found buzzing loudly in the relative warmth above the landing light. (It’s only an LED bulb, but still probably the warmest place it could find.) After trying various contraptions, I eventually succeeded in capturing it in a tall plastic food container attached onto a wooden beam with rubber bands. I was then able to safely relocate it outside the house, and we were able to sleep in peace.

I don’t know whether bees are actually sentient, but it’s nice to be nice.

I spent most of my work week laboriously updating some payment integration code to use a newer version of the Stripe API. It’s hard because it’s very tightly integrated throughout the codebase. It’s tedious and annoying because all these API changes seem unnecessary and frivolous. It’s also a bit traumatic: I briefly worked at Stripe ten years ago, I quit because I didn’t enjoy working there, and it turns out that I don’t enjoy working with it from either end.

My finger is now healed enough to be waterproof, which has made a huge improvement to my daily life. It’s been a fortnight since I injured it, and it’s still a little tender and more than a little ugly, but it’s all going in the right direction.

Royal Mail seems to be in a bad way. We’ve had only one delivery in nine or ten days, and things that should have arrived a week ago are still somewhere in transit. In return, they’ve put up the price of a stamp to over £1.

To be perfectly honest, between this, rivers and beaches full of effluent, electricity prices, and the price I just paid for some train tickets, I’m not entirely sure that privatisation is delivering the level of efficiency we were promised.