Leicester Square and Covent Garden, 8 June 2013
© 2012-2021 Jacqueline Lau
Category: General
On my recent hikes, navigation is a job made much easier thanks to a splendid (iOS) app: MotionX GPS. Many national and country parks have well-demarcated walking trails that make it possible to not get lost even without a map and a compass or a GPS device (not that going without is ever recommended!), but other areas – like the peaks, or even the tame Chilterns where I was over the weekend – are slightly trickier. Very often, rather than a designated route from point A to B, ramblers have to devise their own original challenges and find their own…
Scientifically, technically, it’s nothing more than a suspected Eudocima phalonia, a fruit-piercing moth of the noctuid family. Superstitiously, well, I shun superstitiously, but it could be an ill omen, or it might bear the soul of a deceased relative or a close friend. That’s what the Chinese, and the people of many other cultures, believe of large moths at the doorstep. It was with a deeply unsettling realisation of the coincidental timing of the moth’s visit that I read the terrible news that reached me the next afternoon. That moths embody the otherworldly has always been regarded by me as…