Paul Brownjohn @Paulos_the_fog@social.cleverlibre.org

Geese, species unknown, flying south for the winter just as the first hard frosts are forecast for this area (-4°C).

#altext
Five geese of indeterminate species are silhouetted in black against a greyish blue sky with their wings in various stages of a wingbeat.

This is astonishing! Are there really that many cretinous morons who actually believe that the Covid vaccines killed more people than Covid???

When I was seven or eight, I was given a copy of the “Ladybird Book of Butterflies & Moths”. The idea was to record seeing each one of the several dozen varieties of butterfly and moths illustrated in the book and when you had ticked off all the varieties in the book, you could send off for a badge or a certificate, or something like that.
The area where I lived was particularly blessed with species variety in the butterfly world as it encompassed chalk down land, salt marsh, ancient woodland on clay soil and a variety of other habitats. This meant that I had little difficulty finding most of the butterflies in the book, but one particular species evaded me: the European swallowtail, “Papilio machaon”. This was not surprising as it is found, to this day, in the UK only around the Norfolk Broads and even there it is rather rare.
I pestered my mother for months to take me to somewhere where we would see a swallow tail and no matter how often she explained that the only place we would be likely to see one was, back in those days, 3/4 of a day's journey on the train. I was distraught; inconsolable, even! I cried, I sobbed, I begged, but all to no avail; in the end, I just had to accept that my ladybird book of butterflies would never be complete!
I had almost completely forgotten about the ladybird book of butterflies until a few months back when a swallowedtail butterfly appeared in my garden. I have never seen one before, nor since. It took me right back to my childhood and the gamut of emotions that I endured due to that damned book of butterflies.
The only problem I have now is “what the hell did I do with that sodding book?”

#alttext
A yellow swallowtail butterfly feeding on the purple Buddleia blossom in my garden in Luxembourg. A rare species even over here!

Why does this seem uncannily familiar?

At school, I was taught that Marie Curie was French. Now, whilst she was married to a Frenchman, and may have acquired French citizenship later in life, by birth, she was Polish!

Were other people taught the half-truth that she was French?

Oh dear! I put a poll up on Twatter asking if people would be tempted to migrate elsewhere now that Trump has been re-admitted to Twatter and those heroic, valiant warriors for free speech, the Twatter moderators, appear to have deleted it!

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