The Ship Tavern, Holborn

and apparently, when she straight-faced, lifted her glass of chardonnay to her ear and swirled it, she baffled the other winery-goers so much that they all instinctively did exactly the same thing. that sort of crowd-think, that you aren’t quite sure what’s right but you’ll be damned if you’re mistaken for the plebian that you are

but watching that was enough for my mom to lose her composure, laugh so hard she cried, and spill the entire glass all over herself, in the process getting kicked out of the winery

Because the moths themselves don’t eat and only live long enough to mate and then starve to death, the entire culture is made up of children and adolescents. The older children raise the younger ones, with families being made up of hatchmates from different years.

Because molts and eventual transformation into a short lived adult happen on a set schedule, families have a cycle— when your oldest set of siblings cocoon to become adults, you wait at the mating grounds and try to adopt their newborns after they pass. If that fails, you take any ‘orphans’ you can find.

Because death and birth are nearly simultaneous, they have a religion based around reincarnation, and infants with markings similar to a parent are often given their name. Claiming the offspring of a beloved family member is vitally important, because you want to be able to protect their soul and keep them close.

Because it’s hard to track the offspring of your male family members, there are sometimes major fights when a family sees an infant with familiar markings in another family’s clutch.