You will need to know the difference between a Friday and a fried egg. It’s quite a simple difference but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a hen. Like most things, of course, it isn’t quite that simple. The fried egg isn’t properly a fried egg till it’s been put in a frying pan and fried. This isn’t something you’d want to do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It’s all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.
It’s also good to know the difference between a lizard and a blizzard. This is quite an easy one. Though the two things sound very much alike, you find them in such different parts of the world that it is a very simple matter to tell them apart. If you are somewhere inside the Arctic circle then what you are looking for is probably a blizzard, whereas if you are in a hot an dry place like Madagascar or Mexico, it’s more likely to be a lizard.
This animal is a lemur. There are lots of different kinds of lemurs, and they nearly all live in Madagascar. Madagascar is an island– a very large island: much, much larger than your hat, but not as large as the moon.
The moon is much larger than it appears to be. This is worth remembering because next time you are looking at the moon you can say in a deep and mysterious voice, “The moon is much larger than it appears to be,†and people will know that you are a wise person who has thought about this a lot.
This particular kind of lemur is called a ring-tailed lemur. Nobody knows why it is called this, and generations of scientists have been baffled by it. One day a very wise person indeed will probably work out why it is called a ring-tailed lemur. If this person is exceedingly wise, then he or she will only tell very close friends, in secret, because otherwise everybody will know it, and then nobody will realise how wise the first person to know it really was.
Here are two more things you should know the difference between: road and woad. One is a thing that you drive along in a car, or on a bicycle, and the other is a kind of blue body paint that British people used to wear thousands of years ago instead of clothes. Usually it’s quite easy to tell these two apart, but if you find it at all difficult to say your r’s properly, it can lead to terrible confusion: imagine trying to ride a bicycle on a small patch of blue paint, or having to dig up an entire street just to have something to wear if you fancy spending the evening with some Druids.
Druids used to live thousands of years ago. They wore long white robes and had very strong opinions about what a wonderful thing the sun was. Do you know what an opinion is? I expect someone in your family has probably got one, so you could ask them to tell you about it. Asking people about their opinions is a very good way of making friends. Telling them about your own opinions can also work, but not always quite as well.
Nowadays people know what a wonderful thing the sun is, so there aren’t many Druids around anymore, but there are still a few in case it slips our mind from time to time. If you find someone who has a long white robe and talks about the sun a lot, then you might have found a Druid. If he turns out to be about two thousand years old, then that’s a sure sign.
If the person you’ve found has got a slightly shorter white coat, with buttons up the front, then it may be that he is an astronomer and not a Druid. If he is an astronomer, then one of the things you could ask him is how far away the sun is. The answer will probably startle you a lot. If it doesn’t, then tell him from me that he hasn’t explained it very well. After he’s told you how far away the sun is, ask him how far away some of the stars are. That will really surprise you. If you can’t find an astronomer yourself, then ask your parents to find one for you. They don’t all wear white coats, which is one of the things that sometimes makes hem hard to spot. Some of them wear jeans or even suits.
When we say something is startling, we mean that it surprises us a very great deal. When we say that something is a starling, we mean that it is a type of migratory bird. “Bird†is a word we use quite often, which is why it’s such an easy word to say. Most of the words we use often, like house and car and tree, are easy to say. Migratory is a word we don’t use nearly so much, and saying it can sometimes make you feel as if your teeth are stuck together with toffee. If birds were called “migratories†rather than “birds,†we probably wouldn’t talk about them nearly so much. We’d all say “Look, there’s a dog!†or “There’s a cat!†but if a migratory went by, we’d probably just say “Is it teatime yet?†and not mention it, however nifty it looked.
But migratory doesn’t mean that sometimes is stuck together with toffee, however much is sounds like it. It means that something spends part of the year in one country and part of it in another.
