Butterflies

[smokingboot]

The temporary butterfly house outside the Natural History museum is just wonderful. A few of us went to check it out, and we had our doubts. See, you have to go through the maze to get into it, and the maze is full of education. It is also inevitably full of children with deely boppers on their heads, doing caterpillar walks and butterfly dances; they fled the fearful raven and played table football with ants; they may even have learned something. All we learned is that we would not be great mums. We ran into the butterfly house to get away from their enthusiasm only to find ourselves suddenly transformed into 8 year olds cooing 'Oooohlookatthatoneisn'titbig/pretty/lookatthe colours/ ohlookhe'seatingbanana
throughhiscombything /there'soneonthegroundoooh/thatonesamothinnitcositshairy/there'sloadsofthem ooooooo!' There was a wardrobe with hundreds of different sized pupae hanging in it; the whole thing looked like some leprechaun cobbler's workshop. It was magical.It's a good thing they weren't offering face painting at the end of the experience, we'd have gone for it.

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/temporary-exhibitions/amazing-butterflies/index.html?cam=hp-promo

I found some tiny violets growing on a small plot of land inhabited principally by old cans. It's the first time I've ever seen them in the wild.* Sweet.

I've decided I like Spring:-)

*No, not the cans. We've all heard of feral can colonies.

Comments

[lucyas.livejournal.com]

I'd seen the adverts and been tempted - you have convinced me I have to go!

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

I would love to see that - just for the live butterflies (though London does have a large butterfly house already, I have not been there). Suzette can't stand them though - while I used to sit in fields (before I started suffering from terrible hay fever) and let butterflies settle on me, she tends to run from them as she hates creepy crawlies.

I must confess though that I liked the old style Natural History museum with its rows of cases of stuffed animals and butterflies mounted on boards far more than the new 'interactive' one. I liked being able to stop and examine a specimen at my leisure ( as an artist its incredibly valuable), and the pervading sense of morbid collectivity had a strange appeal to my darker side... oddly, by removing all the death they have made it rather lifeless and sterile for me.

[sixtine.livejournal.com]

Squeee. I had heard about it on R4 and we've been planning a sekrit (don't tell the relatives) London trip for, oooh, a millenium. We will definitely make it before mid Aug now.