Massive cock

Here, in a magical photo by John Robertson. It would be interesting to know which Morris group it belongs to. We’ve been thinking about cockerel costumes rather like a pantomime horse, large enough to be split into two, large enough to fit a river, a mountain and a wolf (or three children dressed as them)…

The storks of war

A fragment from Italo Calvino’s quasi-17th century folk romance, Il visconte dimezzato/The cloven viscount, uses storks as a portent of battle. Several unconnected 2nd century Greek accounts might appear to do the same, perhaps particularly if one’s a lazy sod and doesn’t read anything but scraps of stuff on Google Books.