Beetles

A.A. Milne is famous for creating Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends, that are now a huge franchise thanks to Disney.

Lately, I have been spotting beetles everywhere. Thanks to Google Lens I have been learning their names and my favourite so far has been the 'picnic bug'. Although, as I live in Europe, the variety of Glischrochilus I spotted is bigger than the North American picnic bug, so is the European bark bug, a less fun name.

Beetles always bring to mind A.A. Milne's poem 'Forgiven' from his 1927 collection of poems 'Now We Are Six'. I love how the tone matches how infants, in my experience, process information: 'she said she didn't mean it, and I never said she did...', which to me implies the teller thought otherwise and is trying to believe that 'she didn't mean it' by repeating the nanny's words.

Read “Forgiven” by A.A. Milne on Genius