The day was done. Wednesday was over. The glass was drained. The television was off. The sudoku put aside - two nines in the last 3x3 grid. Dismal failure. Time for bed.

As I wearily brushed my teeth, there was a loud crash at the bathroom window. Nothing there, but the light flooding out of the window into the darkness picked up a winged thing, buzzing crazily, flying madly, regrouping for another assault on the pane.

Crash! It slumped to the sill, gathered its composure, took to the air and came buzzing back for another attack.

After its fifth bash, it lacked the stomach for any more violence. It lay there, stunned, staring at me through a shiny black, teddy bear eye. It was about four centimetres long, quite beautiful in a creeply-crawly way. A reddy-brown shell, and a bat-like mouth, almost smiling - I could have aquafreshed its teeth if I'd opened the window.

It was a Maybug, a cockchafer - the sort of word you put with some trepidation into the Internet for fear of what might come back. But the derivation turned out to be entirely innocent: chafer is an old English word meaning "to gnaw" and cock seems to be nothing more offensive than a term of endearment.

A cockchafer has a surprisingly long life. It begins as a "rookworm" - a C-shaped white grub that lives for three years under the soil, gnawing away at plant roots. Rooks are particularly fond of such grubs and, in centuries gone by when cockchafers were very common, so were French peasants. They'd follow the plough, collecting the delicacies as they were tossed up, and then roll them in salt and pepper and flour and breadcrumbs before wrapping them in parchment and roasting them in the ashes of a fire. Very tasty.

Should a rookworm avoid such a fate, after three years it pupates into a cockchafer and then waits until May before emerging from the ground and buzzing badly about for a few weeks in search of a mate. The female then lays up to 20 eggs in the ground and 'ere the summer is out, both sexes are dead.

I looked at it lying there, flummoxed by the windowpane like a drunk by the alcohol. Just like a drunk, it casually cocked one leg against the glass just to show how normal things were.

I said goodnight and turned off the light. Next morning it was gone. With only weeks to live, I hope it wasn't led astray by many more lightbulbs. Time is extremely short when you're a cockchafer.

SIGN of imminent economic downturn. Darlington town centre's only cast iron building in Tubwell Row used to be a travel agents selling dream holidays. Then it fell empty.

Now it's re-opened as a pawnbrokers, sweeping up what's left of broken dreams.

THANK-YOU very much to everyone who entered last week's trial sudoku. There was such an inundation that the puzzle now appears daily on Page 2 - today's, as you've probably seen, features a small prize. The winner, drawn from the postbag, of the bottle of wine is Ken Orton of Ferryhill Station.

Published: 21/06/05