Happy Easter

I thought this pink duck looked like something for the bath!

So, purely in the interests of scientific research, I thought I should find out 

whether it was pink all the way through.

It was. The things I do for science....!

F for spurious creativity

Questions are highly unlikely (what are 2 and 3 doing in the same paper?); Napoleon didn't die in battle; River Ravi doesn't flow in a single state; Blue Sea doesn't exist (should be Red Sea!); plus this has been (re)typed incorrectly, cf. Q3 - and teacher's handwriting seems strangely similar to pupil's! 

I'm an alien (or am I?)

"He knew he was a foreigner but had lost the notion that he was anything but an Indian foreigner..." So Kiran Desai, in "The Inheritance of Loss", describes the situation of a Swiss priest who had spent 45 years in India. She also makes an Indian immigrant in America, accosted by a Lithuanian Hare Krishna, wonder, "What was India to these people? How many lived in the fake versions of their countries, in fake versions of other people's countries? Did their lives feel as unreal to them as his own did to him?"

I think I know what she means, but having lived for more than half my life in Belgium, am I living in a fake version of the UK, or a fake version of Belgium?! Is there even a (single) "real" version of any country, which only someone born and/or bred there can define? Especially a country like Belgium, whose citizens don't necessarily think of it as a "homeland", and will tell you they feel "Belgian" only when abroad, or perhaps when the Belgian football team is playing, and otherwise identify themselves by language community - French-/Dutch-/German-speaking - and/or Region of origin - Flanders, Wallonia, Brussels. They will also tell you that the only true "Belgians" are naturalised foreigners!

Anyway, the Algeria-born French writer Albert Camus wrote, "ma patrie c'est la langue française" (my homeland is the French language). Similarly, I am at home in English, even if also comfortable in French. And as a long-term expatriate, I'm at home not being "at home"! 

Several centuries later....

I was just "filing" some papers that have accumulated from recent trips and came across this receipt from a souvenir shop in Madrid. It was selling items such as imitation swords, armour and so on, and the receipt says (after "Refund possible within 15 days of purchase"), "No refund for medieval products"!