These supposedly serious cetaceans have been spotted massaging each other with kelp stalks. This is the sort of performative nonsense you’d expect from dolphins

I’ve thought for a while that it would be nice to be an orca. Not because I hate boats and they sink them (though I get it – the briny depths are none of our human business). What actually appeals is the idea of being charismatic megafauna – I love that phrase – and also important as a post-menopausal female. Orcas are one of very few species that go through menopause, living for decades after their reproductive years. These older matriarchs remain an integral part of the community, improving pod survival rates thanks to being “repositories of ecological knowledge”, caring for young and even, research suggests, keeping their giant adult sons safe from being attacked. The fact that they’re fashion-conscious is a bonus: the 80s orca trend for wearing jaunty salmon fascinators was revived, intriguingly, in some pods last December; other orcas have been observed draping themselves artistically in kelp.

But new research is giving me pause. Now orcas in the Salish Sea off the coast of Washington state have been filmed picking kelp stalks and “massaging” each other with them. In sightings of this behaviour, reported and dubbed “allokelping” by the Center for Whale Research, “the two whales then manoeuvre to keep the kelp between them while rolling it across their bodies … During contact, whales roll and twist their bodies, often adopting an exaggerated S-shaped posture.”

Can he really be that old? Was I ever that young? A trip to clear out his student flat has brought back so many memories

There’s an accurate, if snide, thing I’ve seen online that reads “No parent on Facebook can believe their child has turned any age”, and yes, OK, not the “on Facebook” bit, but there is a rote astonishment at time passing that I sometimes slip into, contemplating my adult sons. But, allow me, just this once, a Facebook parent moment. My elder son turned 23 last month and we’ve just been to London to collect his stuff at the end of his degree. On the way, I realised I was 23 when I moved there myself.

You can’t often pre-emptively pinpoint parenting “lasts”, but when you can, they’re strange and melancholy – even when they’re not, objectively, things a person would choose to do again. This trip involved (I hope) my last time standing, hips screaming from the drive, texting “We’re outside” as we waited for our son to wake up (my husband ended up throwing a ball at his bedroom window). It was definitely my last time removing my shoes amid the overflowing bins of that sticky-floored student house, and hovering over the Trainspotting-esque toilet then deciding against drying my hands on any of the towels. It ended with the last trip along the M1 squished between a salvaged chair, a duvet and an Ikea bag of pans threatening to decapitate me if we made an emergency stop. We were bringing his stuff “home” knowing that it won’t be home for him in the same way again: he’s moving to New York this summer. Maybe not for ever, but for years, not months.