The hedgehog house has now been installed

Alex demonstrates the hedgehog house: entrance at the bottom

The animal enters its covert home from the lower right "Way in" 

Clare seems curiously puzzled about the intended occupant. 

Sorry about the abrupt end of the clip - my Honor 6X phone has been behaving rather oddly (screen flickering rapidly off/on every ten seconds or so) since the recent upgrade to EMUI 5.0.1. Seems I turned the video camera off by mistake during such an episode. That will teach me to buy budget: Huawei's famous "80% of the functionality at 60% of the price".

I should mention that during our eight years in this house, we have never yet seen a hedgehog. There have been plenty of their special friends, the badgers, though.

---

What was I doing during all this frantic gardening? Continuing with David Reich's fascinating but tough-going book. I'm finishing the chapter on the First Americans (mysteries swirling around population Y .. and demoralising identity politics with the native american tribal organisations who refuse to allow their DNA to be sequenced). Next up, the East Asians and first Australians.

The Huawei Honor 6X

Alex shows off my new phone

Huawei make the Honor 6X, a pretty good Android phone. It was time to pass the Nexus 6 to Adrian and move on.

Alex's pose satirises both the name of the device and Huawei's phone-motto "For the Brave" which they helpfully printed on two sticky-backed labels (one of which is on Alex's head).

It seems the Chinese are still wrestling with western culture.

---

These days getting a new phone working isn't so hard - the process is pretty automatic. What takes the time is having to reinstall half the apps and then relog into almost all of them. Much hunting for passwords and other credentials.

Usefully the Honor 6X has a fingerprint pad on the back which saves re-entering the PIN all the time.

---

I wonder just how much real-time intelligence I am giving China's foreign intelligence service. I am aware, of course, that I already keep the Americans fully informed.

My only defence is to share all my secrets with you here, first.