So  asked someone I met on a bouncey castle what I should draw today they said a morose moose but drawing sad things makes me make sad faces and sad facingness is sad making so I decided it was probably just a bloated moose that would feel better as soon as it had let a bit of air out

When life is a bit rubbish just pretend you are a bear in a bath

I get confused…

So Mary Toft was a lady who looked nothing like this BUT in the early 1700s  became sort of infamous for giving birth to live rabbits, which is a much more interesting way of gaining fame than we have in the boring 2000s and ought to be replicated via reality TV as soon as possible – you saw it here first. She even managed to convince the Royal Surgeon himself that she was the real deal, which is pretty impressive.

And okay, after extensive investigation they eventually found a rather conveniently-placed rabbit hutch etc and everyone had a good laugh at the Stupid Doctors so Gullible Haha, but just how COOL is it to think of a time when Science is only just tottering around on baby feet trying to figure itself out, and everything looks so strange through this new lens of looking-at-stuff-objectively, and while you’re pretty sure humans generally give birth to humans, what with there being no rabbits in your immediate family tree at least,   no one has really studied this properly before and WHAT IF THEY DON’T and gosh those definitely ARE rabbits in her skirt, that is EVIDENCE right?

It’s an episode in history that is mostly a joke, but in its own way I think of it as a triumph of science; not the  result, not the boring ‘I told you so’ ending, but that openness to possibilities, the  willingness to question and investigate. What a tragedy it would have been to dismiss it out of hand, smug with dogma and ‘I know what I know’ – you’re back in the Middle Ages, Science stillborn, its questioning spirit miscarried. Instead, there it is, twitching its cheeky rabbit nose, legs tangled in some lady’s dress.

So congratulations,  Nathaniel St Andre, Royal Surgeon and author of A short narrative of an extraordinary delivery of rabbets. Hold your head up high and rise as an inspiration to scientists everywhere!

Just, maybe, you know, work on your fact-checking. Just a bit.

 

 

 

So I wanted to draw two elephants lovingly sharing a bar of chocolate; but it seems that elephants prefer ice creams. And don’t share.

Still, you learn something every day and all that…

I went up to the Downs to watch the sun set over Brighton today; it’s not the most romantic view in the world I suppose, but I enjoyed it. I like seeing all the greens and browns slowly wash out of the landscape while the sea turns a paler and paler, shining and more ethereal blue; and the seagulls all making their way back to the coast in their daily commute. And don’t talk to me about the light pollution from town, it’s great! All the city lights and street lamps start coming on and there’s this sudden-slow new palette of yellows and reds pulsing through the hills, while town switches from over from grey into a beacon of light. The world where you stand is dark and colourless and cold, but right ahead of you are humans and warmth and even the traffic turns into a sort of growling celebration, and there’s nothing for it but to follow it home and drink some cocoa.  What’s not to like?

So today I was asked to draw a Hipporhinocow – how could I possibly resist? Hipporhinocows are commonly found in ferret-infested English households; they enjoy steam trains, sheep and dancing in the rain.

So I have just learned that there is a kind of mouse that likes to wrestle scorpions in its spare time, and then it goes and howls at the moon, because clearly scorpion wrestling alone just wasn’t badass enough and Awesomemice know how to celebrate. Oh, and apparently it’s even more impressive than this one actually because the scorpions it fights are the same size as it, or bigger!

When I am rich and famous, and/or a supervillain, I am going to have an *army* of these and we will be unstoppable. Also immune to poisons.

BWHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAA