I borrowed a camera to test it, and then returned it to the shop.

Now where? So I decided to walk up to Covent Garden, and at the station was a small crowd listening to poets – poets of the Underground. They were people who had had their poems published on tube trains and at tube stations.

I love the poems. Some I know, having seen and read them several times.

Luckily I had my Fuji X100F with me, and took these shots of the poets. In this first shot below, not the best of shots, the woman is describing how they have collaborated with London Regional Transport, now renamed Transport for London (TFL) and that the positivity throughout had been a delight.

The next two shots are of Valerie Bloom reading a poem from her book They Sent a Cat to Saturn.

Finally, I didn’t manage to take a shot of the woman who is standing behind the white-haired woman in the first shot. I heard her recite a poem and she was so nice I forgot to lift my camera.

Tamara and Madelaine and I went to London Zoo for a pre-booked capybara experience. That means we got to sit with them and stroke them (Gizmo, a male and Kiwi, a female) and just look at these big peaceful animals inches away from us.

Facts

Capybaras are rodents, the world’s largest rodent, and a big adult can weigh up to 65kg, which is the weight of a small adult human.

They are known as the most chilled-out animals on the planet, closely related to guinea pigs. They have four front toes and three back toes, just like guinea pigs, and they have a split upper lip like guinea pigs.

Just like guinea pigs, they excrete pale-coloured caecum pellets along with olive-coloured faecal pellets.

Caecum pellets are made in the caecum, which is a huge pouch between the small and large intestines. The pouch takes up three quarters of the whole intestine in a capybara and it is where microbes break down tough plant matter to be re-ingested because it is full of protein.

Capybaras stick close to water because that is their escape route if attacked by jaguars. On the downside, that makes them vulnerable to attack by caimans and anacondas. To combat attacks they live in groups of between ten to twenty animals and gather around to present a tougher target and keep the young in the middle of the group.

In the wild capybaras raise the hairs on their bodies so that small birds can groom them and remove insects. The capybaras we saw reacted the same way when we scratched their backs, with their hairs standing straight up while they chilled out with their eyes almost closed.

Their hair is really strong and tough, and down between the hairs we could see their ribbed, bobbled hide that, if anything, looks like elephant hide.

Life is more complicated than we used to think as children. Without the billions of microbes in their gut, capybaras wouldn’t be able to extract nutrients out of plant matter, and without birds to peck insects from their hide they would be attacked slowly by burrowing insects.

And that makes me think about where one animal starts and ends and exactly what it is. Of course, we see the big animal – but below the surface it is part of an ecosystem.

What do birds think when they land on a capybara and it opens channels down its hairs so the birds can eat? Are they friends? Or do they think capybaras are just giant dinner plates providing a dish of insects on command?

Two women talking in front of a Nicole Eisenman sculpture in the courtyard at the Royal Academy. The sculpture is of a bent figure with a stick supporting his aching bones, and on his back and tied to him is a barrel, and on that is large blob that could be the belly of a pig or a sack or anything at all, and on top of that is a bear, well it is probably a bear, and on top of that is a fat blue person with a flower vase on their head.

I read up about it and the shapeless object is a potato, the bear is not a bear but her cat Edie, and the blue figure is the sculptor Phyllida Barlow.

The Iroquois of North America have a tradition of a bird on a turtle supporting Sky woman.

In Indian mythology an elephant rides on a turtle’s back. In an Islamic tradition a fish supports a bull that supports a precious stone, and on that is an angel carrying the Earth.

What is it that attracts people to the idea of stacks and makes them meaningful?

Tubeworms live in the sea, some in shallow water and some deep on the seabed around hydrothermal vents.

When they are larvae they can move around, but once they are adults, with their tails anchored to the spot they have chosen, they are fixed to that spot for the rest of their lives.

It would be tiring to stand on end as a worm, waiting patiently with their feathery plumes to eat tiny plankton, bacteria, and organic detritus as it floats by.

So they construct a tube of minerals around their bodies so they can stand up supported rather than flopping down under their own weight. And they stand in little forests of tube worms with just their feathery plumes moving free at the top end to catch passing food, for they have no mouths or stomachs, and just stand in their tubes waiting patiently.

Deep sea tube worms that live near hydrothermal vents use their plumes to absorb oxygen, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide from the water around the vents.

Inside the worms are billions of bacteria and they absorb the oxygen, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide to produce sugars and amino acids to feed themselves.

That incidentally feeds the tube worms, and that is how tube worms can live without a stomach to process food.

When I was out with landscape photographer Matt Oliver a couple of days ago, we went to a disused quarry abandoned a century ago. Nature has come back to claim its own, and the black trunks of the birch trees in the quarry bottom reminded me of a forest of tube worms.

And when I think about it, trees truly are similar to the worms. First they are young spoors traveling in the wind and then they anchor themselves in the ground and grow upwards and become solidified in place, waiting patiently for the sun and the air and the ground to feed them.

The Quarry

When the market for millstones disappeared and the quarry was abandoned, the unwanted millstones were left behind. A century later they are dotted around the quarry bottom, and some – like here – in little graveyards of millstone grit millstones.

The Danish postal service began in 1624, and the post horn logo and the red and yellow postboxes are part of the Danish experience.

An exhibition at the Design Museum in Copenhagen highlights the changes to the typeface and layout of the current design to reflect the changing demands on the postal service. The photo above is from that exhibition.

And if you are a tourist and you visited the museum, you might never learn that a year ago the postal service abandoned stamps and post offices.

To send a letter now you have to find a DAO shop or go online to dao.as and get a code. Put that code on your envelope and either ask DAO (for an extra fee) to collect the letter from you, or go to a DAO shop and post your letter.

Dao is the abbreviation for Dansk Avis Omdeling A/S (Danish Newspaper Distribution) and the .as top-level country code domain belongs to American Samoa, an unincorporated territory of the United States in the South Pacific.

The service chose .as because in Denmark a public limited company is called an Aktiese/skab, which is abbreviated as A/S. And from there to .as is a small hop, but perhaps not a wise one if the United States and Denmark ever fell out over their arrangement for security in Greenland.

51% of Dao is owned by JP Politikens Hus, 32% by JFM, and 17% Berlingske Media, which are three Danish media groups that between them publish national and regional newspapers and financial websites.

Looked at from the UK experience, the idea of private enterprises owning the postal service should not seem so strange. After all, Royal Mail is owned by EP Group, controlled by through its parent company, International Distribution Services (IDS).

One difference is that EP Group ia controlled by Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský, rather than by homegrown owners as in the Danish arrangement.

Here is the letter I sent from Copenhagen to our home address in London, using the code I obtained from the online service. Look at the return address in the event that the letter is undeliverable. It reads

If undeliverable, please return to KD 22049367, P.O. Box 2450 5000 Salzburg. Austria

So this little letter sent from Copenhagen to an address in London, using the code (rather than a stamp) obtained from the Dao.as online service, left Denmark and arrived in the UK via Austria.

How strange.