If you found this matchbox, clearly labelled, what would you think?
What would you do?
OK, a bit more information: this matchbox belongs to my Mum.
My Mum is a very talented artist; she's won medals, including gold, at the Royal Horticultural Society art shows in the past. She specialises in botanical art and produces gorgeous watercolours such as this one:
She also paints other things. She can't paint from photographs, only from live (or dead...) specimens. In fact, whilst in Tokyo I kept a dead cicada in a tub for her to paint on her next visit. A couple of years ago she had a collection of deceased dragonflies too. They were pretty.
To me, this is completely normal and not at all strange.
Admittedly I did have an unusual upbringing what with Dad's constantly changing, and often escaping, menagerie. Giant millipedes marched out of cupboards on occassion, the piranha that fascinated my school mates, endless escaped lizard hunts, and countless other creatures sharing our home. Not to mention the menagerie's food... we had crickets chirping night and day in the house, and many more frozen creatures to surprise the uniniated visitors who wanted something from the freezer. So, normailty for me is not the same for everyone.
I also knew that random matchboxes may not contain matches, even though they weren't labelled as clearly as this one. They may contain an interesting beetle or similar insect that dad was keeping in order to identify.
Back to this matchbox...
Rhiannon found it when we stayed at Mum's last year.
She read the label.
She opened the box.
She screamed and threw the box across the room.
Oh, how I laughed!
"But you read the label. Why did it make you jump and scream?"
"I didn't expect it to actually have a bee in there."
Huh???
She has much to learn about the Hallett family.
The bees were a little bit broken.
"Bumble Bees, Dead!" has become a family joke now.