WHY DID THE BUTTERFLY FLUTTER BY?

Hah, Gabby. I can see you're a philosopher.

Of course you would ask one of the age-old questions of yore.

For centuries, mathematicians, biologists and entomologists have studied why butterflies, as you so eloquently put it, 'flutter by'. But we still don't know.

So, instead of actually answering your question - i'm going to just throw something in from left field for a second - i'm not even sure that butterflies exist.

The only butterfly i've ever actually seen in real life

Cabbage butterflies exist - i'll give you that, but in reality these are basically just less disgusting moths. They're not as hairy and they don't make a 'thwack' sound when they heavily land on your curtain in the middle of the night, causing you to wake up with the terrible realisation that you're not alone, and that you're now sharing your room with a deeply evil demon.

But you know you see those pictures of butterflies that have fucking geometric patterns or faces on their wings? Who has actually seen one of those in real life? I think this is a conspiracy theory, created by scientists, to stop people from rising up and demanding that we wipe out all insects and arachnids and other horrific crawlers and creepers.

Sorry but I just don't believe it for a second

Butterflies don't just come with H&M style prints casually decorated on their wings, surely? I've seen so called 'photographs' of a butterfly with a distinct resemblance to a certain 2001 Matthew Williamson collection. It made me think that somewhere, somehow, hoards of graphic designers are chained to Macs, being forced to create more and more elaborate 'photographs' of exotic butterflies on Photoshop. They were probably originally just snaps of grimy old moths, settling on a dying leaf. Amazing what a bit of colour saturation can do.

Another example of clever photoshopping to convince us that elephant butterflies exist

Actually, let's get really granular with this for a second. What does fluttering even mean? Aside from these so called 'butterflies' - what else actually flutters? The only example I can think of is eyelashes, but their fluttering is kind of static. You don't 'flutter by' with your eyelashes - that makes me think of walking past someone, back and forth, quite quickly, while blinking very fast - which is not very alluring. You just flutter them, probably while standing pretty close to them. And you don't flutter them for too long otherwise the other person goes 'Oh no, do you have something in your eye?' and then you have to pretend that you do, because it's too embarrassing to explain that you were purposefully fluttering your eyelashes at them.

Well, I think i've answered your question, anyway, Gabby. Yeah? When it boils down to the facts, it turns out that butterflies don't exist, and even if they did (moths) they wouldn't flutter anyway, because they're not a pair of eyelashes.

Hope that's helped with your dilemma.

This has been Hannah.