I originally intended to write about how the Trumpled state of things recently got personal – his funding freeze last Wednesday postponed if not killed a three-month-long writing project we were counting on – but then last night at a newly French friend’s fête de nationalité I had a couple of three or four glasses of post-Dry January wine on an empty stomach, which temporarily altered my view of the world to such a degree that, now, here, I find myself writing instead about molluscs