I have been meaning to go to the Hay Festival for the last few years, as the idea of a festival based around the written word and intellectual discussion has real appeal. Also two of my friends have stalls in the old town of Hay on Wye itself right in front of the castle. Gordon Elliott and his wife Elena have a fastfood stirfry stall selling such things as banana curry and home made mango chutney, the food is made from all fresh ingredients and feels incredibly healthy. Salim Patel and Barbra have a stall selling quality fossils and minerals plus art deco ceramics, the handmade jewellery consisting of fire opals set in silver and resin are a delight.

Elena introduced me to her spanish friends, the three of them had just completed an eight hundred km walk lasting a month in the Pyrenees called the Camino, an impressive achievement!

Recently I have been filming Daphnia sp or Water Fleas for various footage libraries and noticed that online articles about Daphnia morphology refer to the 'cyclopean eye'. These stills were taken from the high definition footage and appear to show that the eye is divided into two parts.

Jodie and Adam's visit

Jodie and Adam came for a weekend visit to sunny Newcastle Emlyn, lots of walking the dog Bonny, who kept us amused with her inane antics, such as jumping into every available patch of boggy water. The Iron Age village was good, where we learned that Misteltoe makes an interesting cocktail, being drunk in neolithic times for its psychotropic effects before being killed three times by first getting your head kicked in followed by strangulation and then the coup de grace of slitting the throat, a new idea for X-Factor perhaps?

Michael Foot

Fossil hunting in Carmarthenshire

I had heard rumours of large well preserved trilobites in the rocks near Llandeilo.So it was exciting to find some fragments of Nobiliasaphus tyrannus in a small quarry close to Dynevor park. My friend discovered the best find of the day which was the hypostome or mouthparts of this predatory trilobite which lived 460 million years ago during the Ordovician period.

Graptodytes sp

I have been sent some water beetles by Will Watson which are proving quite hard to photograph. They are only a few millimetres in length and are a member of the Dytiscidae which are diving beetles. The difficulty is that they will not keep still for more than a few seconds and seem to be constantly on the go.

Alpujarra holiday

A refreshing breeze blows through the olive groves at Alan and Tina's house at the western end of the Alpujarra valley near Orgive in Spain. I have just witnessed the weekly event of water cascading down the acequias which are irrigation channels built by the Romans. The temperature is 36 degees Centigrade and the Cicadas are singing their heads off. The water splits into smaller channels and ends up as pools of water in the vegetable garden or washing around the roots of mature trees.