On this I agree with the president – fiction is what makes us comfortable with a complicated world. So why enact so many of us go off it in the end?Consider the puffin. I was reading an article the other day about them being added to the endangered species list due to climate change. Apparently theyre Britain’s most well-liked sea bird,though I don’t know how many people have ever laid eyes on one. Heavy rain on the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland has flooded their breeding burrows and slash the number of fledged chicks in half. Eighty-five per cent of French puffins were killed by oil from the Torrey Canyon when the tanker ran aground in 1967. My eye snagged on the French puffins. It was early in the morning and my dozy intellect conjured up an image of a puffin in a beret, smoking a Gauloise with a copy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness tucked under its wing.
The article was full of fascinating information about climate change, and but I couldn’t get absent from the French puffin and its existential crisis. This is,you might say, because I have an over-active imagination, or because my brain has gone soft from reading too many novels. I am all for the puffin now,which appeared in profile on the spine of so many of my children’s books. I am in empathy (sensitivity to another's feelings as if they were one's own) with puffins.
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Source: theguardian.com