Butterfly Wings

So, I was in Dunstable in Bedfordshire recently. I stayed opposite the Priory where Archbishop Cranmer nullified the marriage between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, thereby cutting off ties with the Papacy and establishing the Church of England. It led me to wonder about all the small decisions we make which have much greater ramifications and consequences than we could ever imagine. How many apparently inconsequential things have you or I done which have resulted in potentially great or terrible things, and we’ve just moved on, completely unaware. Terrifying, no? It’s the week of the great fire of London, which started as a small fire in a bakery. If someone had told the baker 24 hours earlier that a fire in his bakery would burn London down, would he have believed it?

So, Henry divorced Catherine to marry Anne in his desperate quest for a son, and the course of history changed in a way that is still reverberating now. Of course, he never did get a surviving son, and rightly too; selfishness and wickedness should be requited once in a while as long as it’s not mine! Who knows what monster of a son the blood-soaked Henry would have raised? Instead, Britain got Elizabeth I and the Reformation, for good or ill depending on your viewpoint. She was no slouch in the murder sweepstakes, or statecraft as the diplomats prefer to call it. And so the wheels turn. The Bible says we will be judged on every word, deed and thought. I can believe it, deeds and words have power and we can understand being judged on them, but they are always preceded by thought. The perfect encapsulation of chaos theory — if a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, is there a resultant thunderstorm in Belgium –only magnified. What a concept. It’s enough to give you nightmares.

Favourite stories of the week:

The Natural History Museum thought it was a good idea to give out an insect set in resin with each copy of its new magazine in a bid to capture the interest of children. Thousands of crickets, spiders and scorpions gave their lives involuntarily. How do you think this wholesale slaughter went down? Exactly 🙂

A female inmate who escaped from an Australian detention centre was so dismayed by the picture the police used for her ‘wanted’ poster, she uploaded a glamorous selfie to them and asked for that to be used instead. She is now back in custody, but she sure looked better in the selfie. A small price to pay, I think we can agree.

I leave you with this cheery poem by Dixon Lanier Merritt:

A wonderful bird is the pelican
His bill can hold more than his belican
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week
But I’m damned if I see how the helican

Let’s hope the Natural History Museum doesn’t start sending out resinated pelicans. Have a great week.

(Photos: from London Design Week – Lights by BTC; EY-Products sets, Shanghai; Constellation sideboard; Haostyle, Shanghai chair)

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