THERE ARE REALLY NICE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!

It's true! Really! And I want to say a big public 'THANKYOU' to all those internet friends and magazine editors and competition organisers who have, on request, kindly furnished me with copies of my work that might otherwise have been lost due to the computer crash and hard drive failure reported below on this blog. Have still lost a lot, but getting something back that I thought was forever gone is just the sweetest thing. So, thankyou!

BACK UP!

Two weeks ago a catastrophic hard drive failure saw almost half a million of my words lost. Nothing backed up for almost a year. Felt like a piece of me ripped out. Been grieving since then. So take heed. Always back up your work!

Anyway, best thing to do in this situation is to get back to it. Creative spark feels like it's turned down low, and some of the joy in doing feels like pain, but I MUST do it and here three flashes on the subject of STINGERS have spilled out.

It's a start.

WASPS

Max had unwittingly disturbed a nest of wasps. It had once hung from the branch of a tree and weeks back, months maybe, the branches had been machine-stripped and left on the forest floor, the harvested wood taken away. He was planting trees in the cleared ground. It was Max's job for the summer. Only there was a wasps' nest under his foot and, as he bent to drop the tree plug into the hole he had made, he came face to face with what he had done.

They were confused at first, the wasps, which gave him time to back away. Not enough time, but some. Then one was flying towards his face, so close he could see its menace, the sting thrust forward, and the wasp suddenly on his cheek. He shrieked and brushed the wasp hard away. Then he was running and falling and running again across the uneven ground. Yelling and waving his arms in the air as though he was mad or possessed. Rolling head over heels and back to his feet and running some more until he had put distance between himself and the nest.

'They're nasty bastards,' Max told his boss later in the day. 'Fucking vicious. And they don't let up. Watched 'em from the edge of the trees, fizzing like fireworks all the morning. Couldn't go back to retrieve my stick and the box of tree plants that needed put in the ground.'

The boss shrugged. 'Maybe leave it a while,' he said. 'There's other jobs need doing. Tomorrow, when they've settled, you can go back. On tip toes, like a dancer so as not to wake them.'

Max dabbed cream at the red swelling under his eye. He could hear the sting of mocking in what the boss was saying. 'Fucking vicious,' Max said again.

HIS FATHER'S NEWSPAPER

There was a bee at his window. On the inside. It was trying to find a way through, withdrawing a short distance and then rushing at the glass, as if glass could be caught by surprise and the bee free then in the garden on the other side.

Adam opened the window and used his father's newspaper to guide it to where it wanted to be. He felt no fear. The bee flew off in a ragged line across the wall and into the next garden. Bees only sting when they have to, is what he had been taught. Only as a last resort. If they are threatened. And the reason for this is that when a bee stings, it dies. It has one shot at defence and it dies in the process. That is what Adam's parents had told him. He believed what they said and so he had no fear of bees.

Wasps were different. His mother shrieked whenever there was a wasp in the room, and his father swore. Adam bristled at just the thought of them. Wasps stung you for the fun of it. Like they had no other reason to be. That's what he thought. And they could sting you again and again and live to tell the tale. Indeed, he'd heard that an injured wasp sends off a chemical message to other wasps to come and fight. A dying wasp can do that too, with its last throe.

Adam shivered, his fear of wasps a tangible thing. That's why he swatted wasps with the rolled up baton of his father's newspaper. Swatted them fast and final, so they were afterwards nothing more than a sticky smear on the glass, too quickly dead for them to send a signal to the others.

Sometimes, Adam missed and the wasp turned on him.

MOTHER'S BEES

Irwin's mother kept bees. Always had. In a cedar wood hive at the far reach of the garden. Tending her bees was what she did when she needed to escape. That's how she put it, though Irwin was not always sure what she meant by that.

Irwin's father said that he'd understand one day.

She dressed in an all-over white suit with a grey gauze face. She had matchin white boots. Looked like a spaceman, he thought. Like Neil Armstrong far off and stepping funny on the moon. And she carried a stainless steel smoker with a lever she could press to send a gasp-cloud of grey smoke towards the bees. This made them sleepy and less likely to sting.

Irwin watched his mother from the window sometimes. Safe behind the glass. He didn't like bees. Didn't like anything about them, except the difference it made in her. His mother's movements were slow. Almost like she was dancing. No music playing. And afterwards, coming in from the back, her face was flushed pink and her voice all sing song and bright.

'You'll understand one day,' his father told him.

Irwin was there the day things changed, watching from his bedroom window. He saw the moon-walk dance, slow and familiar, the smoker ready in her grasp. Then her arms thrown up in sudden horror, like she was a ghost-fright, and then her hands falling to her sides and her shoulders slumped and the helmet pulled from her head.

All the bees in her hive were dead. A yellow brown crinkle like shop tissue paper when she ran her fingers through the hundreds and thousands of dead bees lying on the grass outside the entrance to the hive. Irwin ran out to see. There were tears streaking her cheeks and she could not speak.

It was in the news. Something about bees all over the country dying. No explanation. Thousands of hives all hit the same. Beekeepers marched on London dressed in white overalls and wearing veils and puffing smoke from their smokers only there were no bees. They spoke into the reporter's microphone, all their words fizz-angry, demanding that something be done.

Irwin's mother was different after that. Everything changed. Got to the stage where Irwin's father went out - 'To escape!' That's what he said and this time Irwin understood. Irwin stayed in his room with the door closed looking out of the window at nothing.