Animal / nature-themed greetings cards, anyone? There are some over here. 🙂 www.instagram.com/sabinecards?...

Is this the happiest-looking flower ever? 😀 #beeorchid

Fascinated by this giant peacock moth found outside the front door - a wingspan of 14cm!

Saw quite a few of this lovely orchis purpurea (Lady Orchid) on the side of the road today.

Took the boys for a walk today. Inquisitive cows and calves came trotting up to us, and the light on this path and blooming tree was just lovely. 🫏🫏

À la boulangerie, la vendeuse donne une chouquette aux enfants dans la queue devant moi. En achetant ma baguette, je lui dis que je me souviens encore, 45 ans plus tard, de mon boulanger de quartier qui faisait de même pour moi. Je paie, m’apprête à partir, et elle me donne une chouquette!🥲

Accusing your opponents of exactly what you are doing yourself is just how these people roll, isn’t it?

Camelia and Sacré-Cœur

On the Eurostar, four mins after leaving St Pancras, the group of young women who have come to London for a day trip declare we are in the Chunnel. They are now convinced we are in France when in fact we have emerged in Essex.

How is everyone else dealing with it? He’s just breaking everything faster than I can react / process / grieve.

Hearing a Trump tweet read out very seriously by Sarah Montague on #wato brings out the madness and absurdity of its contents even more.

The emails I get from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are the very best emails.

The guy on Deutschlandfunk reporting from the G7 in France was calling it the ‘G6 + the US’, which seems an apt way of reflecting the rift.

Best news anyone’s sent me in a while. ‘Director of Integrity’! On a FIFA-organised event! In Trump’s America! Perfect. #W1A

The newly elected Paris mayor cycling over to the Hôtel de Ville and giving an interview from a bicycle is 👌😊.

Oh thank goodness!! Paris stays on the left. Phew.

Such a good boy!

No idea why this isn’t flying off the shelves

What is WRONG with you? This is what you’ve wanted for years, for us to get out, to stop coming, and NOW you realise it’s making you poorer?! FFS.

The camera roll in spring

Baffled by people saying Trump’s popularity ratings are awful when 37% of Americans apparently think he’s ok. 37% - that’s (shockingly) not a disastrous rating at all! Macron’s at 18%.

‘We knew she was landing from the moment she took off.’ BBC ski jumping commentary is top-notch.

‘Stop the count!’ (It’s lovely how unpleasant things go away when you stop quantifying them.)

If buying a hyacinth, make sure it matches the colour of your tiny feathered visitor. #birdoftheday #birds

Booking tickets to @jonathanpienews.bsky.social 274 days in advance. If that’s not confidence in the future, I don’t know what is.

Four baguettes like this for €3.15 - enough to keep me happy for days!

Mood

Completely horrified at all that’s going on, so here’s a fluffy blue tit in a tree from today.

A special kind of wrap just for cellos! 🎻

It’s Budget Day! The OBR publishes its latest outlook once the Chancellor has completed her statement in Parliament. My all-time favourite cartoon on the subject, by @mooseallain.bsky.social:

Just look at this beauty we see on one of our walks! We always stop for a chat.

What the internet was made for. Delightful.

First try at madeleines turned out well! Flavoured with orange blossom water.

@katebevan.com Hi Kate, wondering if you or any of your techy friends have any tips re home printers that will work with an ASUS laptop running Windows 11 on Snapdragon? Having problems finding ARM compatible machines (for my dad). Thank you!

‘Have you heard of Zohran Mamdani?, asks my dad. ‘Of course!’ ‘I knew his dad, met him a few times in Dar es Salaam’, he says, and pulls this book off a shelf.

Summary of French PM Lecornu’s post-resignation address just now: ‘I can’t work with these clowns’.

Reading Atwood’s The Testaments. Check in on Bluesky and see someone’s posted a State Dpt tweet about moral virtue and steadfast faith in God being necessary preconditions of freedom. The book has seeped into real life.

Chanced upon an exhibition of Quentin Blake drawings at the weekend. This one is ‘Balancing with the Birds’.

It’s like we‘re living in an Armando Iannucci script.

Zohran Mamdani saw a cat do a big stretch without saying “big stretch” on at least four occasions: source

Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille

Heard on Radio 4: ‘A man has been jailed for three years for robbing a post office in Bradford, armed with a banana.’😳🧐

Halfway through this, on how Western leaders need to call out Trump’s authoritarianism, there was an ad with a clip of a nice lady making berry pavlova. I admit to clicking on it, as a brief escape from a terrifying reality. Excellent as ever by @rafaelbehr.bsky.social.

Probably thinking they’d come up with a clever pun, the Austrian rail company chooses ‘Railaxed’ as the name of their magazine…🧐 Always run it past a native speaker! 🚅🪓

How do I find the entrance to your flat? Got a little picture of a fox outside- you’ll know it when you see it. #foxoftheday

Still haunted by this snippet from ABC News during the recent floods in Queensland. 😳🕷️🕷️🕷️😱 (The apostrophe mistake is pretty unpleasant too.)

It’s been only four months. Four months! And we’re supposed to put up with four years of this? At this rate, that’s more than enough time to make the US completely unrecognisable. Just terrifying.

for @prospectmagazine.co.uk

Am no fan of this grass-coloured carpet the neighbours have put out, but the local fox seems to like it, so who am I to quibble? #foxoftheday

Loving the hardiness of these wild London poppies growing in an actual brick wall.