Men are from York. Women are from Swindon. (Not really.)
I hear they're trying to bring back the Great Auk . I was not, it turns out, a child when the Great Auk became extinct, but I might as well have been. I mean, even if I had been a child in 1844, I wouldn't have actually seen one, probably. But as it is, I spent many, many hours in my childhood thinking about them. I liked, more than words could say, the fact that they were called "garefowl", and lived in a place called Funk Island. Auks were truly part of my goldenest infancy. So bringing them back seemed, to me, the other day when I read about it, like a good idea, for a kick-off: that's until I thought it through a bit more. Imagine a world where Great Auks were a bit bigger, and a bit niftier, and humans were a bit smaller, and less skilled at shooting and strangling things. In such a world, one might expect Great Auks to be the dominant species, and humans to have been hunted to extinction by these remorseless, harpoon-happy, penguin-like seabirds. Finally...