What's real?
It would be fair to say that when I first saw a platypus I got rather excited. Spy satellite images would probably show me hoping from foot to foot and pointing. It’s not that I was getting great views, far from it in fact. It was just that I was seeing platypus. In the wild. In the flesh. I’d quickly learned to drop the “duck billed” part of the name in favour of the shorter and more accurate version. After all, there is no “eagle billed platypus” or whatever, so the duck billed bit can be shed without confusion. There’s just the platypus. And there they were, floating like slightly plump sticks on the surface of the water. With a humpbacked dive they would disappear, until they bobbed, flat backed, to the surface and into view again. I don’t doubt that the return of these living corks to the surface of the water was greeted with laughter and more pointing. And a good part of that laughter, that wonderfully positive fee...