In a room with a window in the corner

I have a window in my kitchen that faces east-north-east. It gets the morning sun and helps warm up the downstairs of the house on days like today. It also is quite good at catching and holding insects both on the internal and external faces.

Some insects must come into the house via the open patio doors and end up here whilst they try to escape. For one beetle species Anthocomus fasciatus, the only place I have recorded it has been on this window. And that has happened twice now, with both times in May. This one appearing last week.

Today, I was cooking dinner when I happened to glance outside and caught site of a dark smudge on the glass. A closer look and I saw it was actually a pair of moths having some fun on the outside of the glass. They were small and vaguely pug-like.

But when I went round and had a gander from the outside I saw they were in fact Small Dusty Waves Idaea seriata. The book says a first brood emerges in June-July, but I don't normally record these in the garden trap until August.

Whilst walking back in the house I plucked a beetle from the air as it flew into the house via the patio doors. Turned out to be the first Glischrochilus hortensis of the year. Must have liked the smell of my cooking. This is the only one of three species in this genus that I have seen. It often appears in pub gardens attracted to the boozy smells and I also get them turning up in late summer when I am pressing apples for cider. Attractive little things.

The post title inspiration is rather timely. Forty years ago today Ian Curtis committed suicide. I was too young at the time to have heard of Joy Division. It was probably another nine or ten years before I came across their music but it immediately hit a chord with me. There was something about their sound that encapsulated the atmosphere of walking through the streets of a northern city, in my case Hull. Something of the concrete and the metallic. All industrial, nothing organic. I still feel that way listening now...