No, it’s not a sardonic comment on the quite unseasonable ’spring’ weather we’ve been having - even though I woke this morning and, bleary eyed, stood at the window and marvelled at the snow being hurled horizontally from the north and sticking to the side of everything in its path that was vaguely vertical. Sun? Ha! No, we haven’t seen our friendly local exploding ball of gas for quite a few days now, sadly.

What I’m talking about is the collection of mashed paper and impermanent ink which goes by the name of ‘newspaper’ in this country.

We don’t actually have a newspaper delivered anymore. We used to have the Daily Mail, but dear old Dad was right, once they go tabloid, the slide downhill into magazine-dom is inevitable, and so we cancelled and couldn’t find a decent alternative.

So imagine my surprise when I was passing the front door and this thing came hurtling through the letterbox. Damn near dropped my morning cuppa, I can tell you, and then I’d have been doubly pissed.

As it is, I guess I’ll have to hide it in a bag and take it back to the Post Office, because I guess someone, somewhere, might actually want it.

Now, here’s a question: do I tag this with ‘The Home Front? Or Junk Mail?

Ah, let’s go for both.

Through my letterbox this morning came three pieces of junk mail. The first was addressed to ‘the occupier and over fifty’ which was not an encouraging start. Who the hell wants to be addressed like that? Is that going to sell me something? I think not. I was tempted to bin it unopened, but in the interests of education (and blog material) I succumbed to temptation and took the bait. It turned out to be a suggestion from SAGA that I might benefit from joining and taking advantage of their ‘over fifties’ car insurance offers. Ok, so the binning was delayed by five minutes. You had your chance, SAGA, and you blew it.

The second piece of junk mail was more interesting. Oh, it was just a routine charity begging letter - you know the sort: this is what we do, and it’s very worthy, now hand over your cash. This one was for Cancer Research UK, which is indeed a very worthy charity and from time to time they do in fact get their hands on a small wad of my cash, but I never respond to unsolicited charity mailshots on principle. Once you respond, you’re on their ’sucker’ list and they Won’t Stop Mailing You. But here’s the interesting thing. You know how they often include a cheapo biro so you have no excuse not to sit down there and then to fill in the direct debit form? Well, this one was no exception, but instead of providing you with a cheap and environmentally unfriendly plastic biro containing very little ink, they gave me this rather wonderful cut-down and rather greener version.

It’s a simple biro refill, sealed inside a piece of stiff paper. The paper is almost certainaly degradable, unlike a standard biro sleeve, and it’s perfectly usable - at least for long enough to write a cheque. It also fulfils the other avowed intention of the free biro being quite capable of spreading the word, because the advertising is there too.

Cancer Research UK, I applaud you.

The third piece of junk mail informed me that my local John Lewis department store is running a promotion for the next two weeks whereby I buy a couple of Clinique products and they give me a free goodie bag full of trial sized samples. Let me tell you that I’ve had these sample bags before and they are seriously good! If you travel, as I do, they’re the perfect size for packing for a week or so, and a good way to try out lines you might not normally buy. In fact, in order get my hands on this new goodie bag, I am going to buy full size versions of the samples I was given in the last one. I use Clinique products as part of my normal skincare routine (such as it is), so a piece of ‘junk mail’ telling me that my local store is running an offer is just the sort of junk mail I like.

You can order direct from the Clinique website too, by the way - and they also give away free trial-sized samples.

Like many people, I feel that a house is not complete without houseplants. I have somewhere between twenty and thirty, but they tend to die because I’m pretty hopeless about looking after them. My houseplants are so neglected that spiders live inside the pots and run out in surprise when I water them.

So I forget to care for them and they die of dehydration and I go to the garden centre for new ones and buy them fancy china planters as compensation for being brought home to live with me, but of course a pretty purple pot won’t actually protect them, and a pot, however pretty, containing a dead maidenhair fern … well, unless you aspire to have it shown at the Tate as a work of art, forget it. It’s sad and ugly and that’s that.

Actually, I’ve discovered that a dead maidenhair fern can be resurrected if you toss it out into the garden and forget about it. Provided the temperature isn’t too extreme and you get a decent amount of rain, eventually it will sprout new growth and you can marvel over it, brush off the dead stalks and bring it back inside and you’ll probably remember it long enough for it to look pretty good before the cycle of neglect begins all over again. My record with one maidenhair fern stands at four resurrections, the current unfortunate specimen being at the tentative frond among brown crispy leaves stage.

Most of my houseplants live - or should I say ‘exist’ - in the conservatory and over time I’ve learned that if a plant survives more than a month in a particular position, I’d better not move it. Thus my sweetheart vine, for instance, is permanently located in the righthand corner where the conservatory meets the house.

The sweetheart vine is interesting. Despite my history with houseplants, I have had this one in my possession for over twenty-seven years. Yes, that IS a long time, isn’t it? It was presented to me by my Other Half on the birth of our first son and it has consistently failed to die. I regard it with a lot of affection - possibly more for it’s survival attributes than for the occasion on which it was given to me. I’ve even re-potted it twice, which is usually the kiss of death when it’s me doing it, and I’m actually beginning to have a superstitious dread about the damn thing. It’s positively unnatural that it thrives in my house. Will I wake one morning and find it sickening, only to discover that my eldest born has been struck down with some nameless fever? I almost feel I need to touch wood every time I pass by.

So anyway. I now have a short-list - a VERY short list - of plants which can survive in my .. uh .. ‘care’, which I will share with you in the hope that anyone else out there with my extremely non-green fingers may benefit.

Prayer plants are tough little buggers. I’ve even pulled clumps of leaves out by accident, dropped them in the pot and had them grow roots. Wow. I didn’t know they did that!

Geraniums are very hard to kill, even by dehydration, so are spider plants and succulents like kalanchoes. I don’t much like kalanchoes, but I usually have one or two simply because I can.

Swiss cheese plants may sulk and throw out a ton of air roots to trip you up on your way past - possibly in desperate supplication - but they do survive a lot of abuse.

Yuccas are bloody-minded too. They’ll try to have your eye out on occasion, but they survive.

The humble tradescantia. It’s nothing short of amazing what these things put up with, from sporadic watering to being scorched by the sun and tortured by dogs* and they’re actually rather pretty.

I have also learned that if you put African violets on a north facing windowsill, they really DO rise from the dead and thrive! It’s quite stunning. My friends actually thought mine was an artificial plant because it looked so good - which was a great surprise to them since it was in my house!

But don’t bother with Lucky Bamboo. It’s enchantingly pretty when you first place it lovingly in the dining room, but neglect to keep the water topped up and it will soon turn into Unlucky Stick.

*Tradescantia is not terribly toxic but does produce an irritating sap. My dogs just knock bunches of leaves off and trample them, but if yours might chew or eat it, put it somewhere they can’t reach. Actually, quite a lot of houseplants are toxic to pets so it’s worth checking this page out to avoid trouble - Plants toxic to dogs.

A fellow Depp fan recently had to move house in a hurry and ended up in rented accommodation which was none too sparkly. She lives in the US so when she told me that her new place was crawling with some kind of biting insect which flew, buzzed and changed colour (ie, turned red when squished) I was interested to know what they were. She said both she and her cats were getting bitten but the landlady was uninterested in dealing with them, and she (the tenant) was panicking.

I asked her to take pictures but for some reason she wouldn’t do it. Now, wouldn’t you think that if you’re living in a place which is overrun with some kind of insect you’d want to know what it was?

I find insects endlessly fascinating, possibly because my late father was an amateur entomologist and I spent my childhood being dragged around on field trips and watching him mount tiny creatures on only slightly larger pieces of card which he wrote their names on with minute, crabby-yet-readable handwriting - and with a fountain pen, too. If that seems unethical, bear in mind that in my childhood, this was the way it was. If you had an interest in insects, you damn well went out, sucked them up a tube into a killing bottle containing ether and mounted them in display cabinets. But he learned. By the time he retired, he was a volunteer with the county naturalist group and instead of killing things, he captured them, examined them carefully, let them go and went home to write an index card and put a report in.

Anyway, I digress. If I find a strange insect in my house or garden, my natural impulse is to stick a glass over it, and run and get 1) the camera and 2) a handful of books from the reference shelf. For some reason a lot of people run away screaming or smack it with a heavy object. Tut tut… How are you going to learn anything like that?

Take silverfish, for instance. You know, those little silver wiggly things you find in damp places like bathrooms? Often you’ll only see them if you turn the light on in the night because they’re nocturnal and rather shy, bless ‘em. Anyway. Silverfish have survived unchanged since prehistoric times, and very successfully, too! You might spray them with poison and powder them (ditto) and smack them with rolled up newspapers, but you won’t get them all, and they’ll be back - unless you make it Not Damp and seal up any cracks with a filler which doesn’t contain starch, or they’ll just eat that. Oh, and they like to feed on shampoo residues so you’ll need to wipe down the shower EVERY TIME you use it. Ha! Didn’t think you’d like that - neither do I, but then, I don’t mind silverfish in the least.

I rather like woodlice too. And earwigs. And beetles have a special place in my affections, probably because coleoptery was my Dad’s speciality, and I remember particularly the cabinets full of the most gorgeous shiny beetles, each one slightly different from the rest. I suppose those walks with Dad where he’d be constantly picking insects off leaves or the ground to watch them for a few seconds, mutter some incomprehensible latin name and then let them go again gave me a fascination for them, too. As the only girl growing up in a house with two brothers (who naturally loved creepy crawlies) and a father like that, I suppose it was inevitable. And so I let the dinner burn and go and photograph things like the female bush cricket pictured above.

So I don’t poison or exterminate - although I will freely admit that if I had an infestation of something life-threatening I would certainly do so. I also freely admit that I might not be quite so blase about insects and spiders if I lived somewhere that had dangerous or aggressive examples of one or both. Like San Francisco, where my Depp friend is.

OK, point taken, Depp buddy! Squish those colour-changing bugs!

I’d still want to know what they were, though.