Kingfishers

Caroline and I were talking about Alannah Currie from the Thompson Twins; I had been trying to find her for the book but hadn't been able to. Alannah is really interesting- back in the day she had been making rap tracks based on Edith Sitwell's Dada poetry, and she got Debbie Harry to do one. Then she moved to the jungle in New Zealand, before moving back to England.
Anyway, there was an article about her and her roadkill upholstery in one of the Sunday papers, and we started to talk about stuffed animals. Caroline told me that when she was little she watched two Kingfishers having a huge fight outside the window. One of them won and drowned the other in the lake. Her uncle took it to a taxidermist and had it stuffed; recently she found out that it's really common for Kingfishers to fight- they are really aggressive.
I'd always thought of them as fairylike creatures, on a par with unicorns and frog princes, but I was obviously wrong.

On the Typical Girls web forum, people are talking about Joly and Better Badges.
I worked there when I was in The Chefs. Joly printed some of my weird comics back in the late 1970s and when I came to London he gave me part-time work. There were always lots of interesting visitors, giant dreads coming in to get their reggae bands' badges, skinny punks, and a big mail order business. I loved the artwork, repeat images of Josef K badges like miniature Warhols.
For some reason we once had a conversation about rabbits, and he told me that miniature rabbits are really vicious. I've never forgotten that, and wish I could, because I am sure it's taking up brainspace that could be more usefully deployed.