Hugh Dixon's blog: The Mark of Zorro

The alien from planet Ogle

2012-01-19T10:31:00.000Z

Thought-provoking stuff on the telly this week. And not just the puzzle about how Sherlock apparently fell to his death from a roof, only to reappear, large as life and twice as natural, snooping on the mourners at his own graveside.

No,what we’re talking about here is Stargazing Live, in which the BBC gathers the talents of a Brian (Cox) and a Briain (Dara O) and rambles on engagingly for an hour or two about black holes, white dwarfs, red giants and purple haze.

And exoplanets. Which, in case you didn’t know, are planets that orbit suns other than our own. They’re being discovered by the bucketload and the hope is that eventually we’ll find one capable of supporting life.

Once we find it, though, the question is how would we communicate with it? And how would it communicate with us?

Picture the scene. After aeons roaming the interstellar void, a mission from planet OGLE-2-TR-L9b (Ogle to the natives) reaches Earth, mistakes Bath for a landing site and touches down in the Circus, singeing the plane trees and rattling the windows of the great and good.

A delegation of dignitaries is dispatched from the Guildhall to greet the alien visitors.

Resplendent in the chains trappings of office, they huff and puff their way up Gay Street, at the top of which a small crowd has gathered in search of what passes for excitement in that part of Bath.

As the wheezing worthies crest the hill, an aperture opens in the side of the Oglian vessel and a jelly-like heptapod steps forth.

The chief dignitary greets it (or him, or her) through the mayoral megaphone: “Greetings, traveller, and welcome to the fair city of Bath, where we hope...”

“Kraark! Snerp! Whopple!” interjects the Oglian, its upper sensory organ glowing a nasty shade of magenta. “Fargle bork nootpad! Engle frickly!”

The creature seems angry. But how, not speaking Oglian, can the ermined dignitary make it realise that we earthlings are friendly?

Suddenly, a little girl rushes forward from the crowd, a daffodil in her hand. “Pingle neep ferossle noobly,” she pipes. “Nimmy nom flibble, mar lar par!”

At once the alien’s demeanour softens. The hideous magenta glow fades to neutral blue, the alien says “Flork” and a new era of interstellar friendship is born.

So how did the girl speak Oglian? Well, she didn’t. She was, in fact, revising for Year One phonics.

Which involves six-year-old children reading out 20 invented “pseudo-words”, like “Bribble” and “Glink” and “Bleck”, in order to assess their reading skills.

Sounds bonkers? As bonkers as a state-funded King James Bible for every pupil? As bonkers as an equally state-funded Royal Yacht?

When education secretary Michael Gove has a hand in all three projects, you can never be sure.

But if it saves us from alien invasion, then it’s just possible he’s on to something. So grarp nally froop, as they say on Ogle. You know it makes sense.

Rhubarb growers face crisis

2012-01-12T09:31:00.000Z

Disturbing news from the pages of i, the cut-down version of The Independent, published especially for readers with little time and less money. (Here at Dixon Towers we are so part of that demographic).

Steady your nerves before reading on. For it would appear that the UK rhubarb harvest is under threat, and likely to be a poor one this year.

Not because of a plague of rhubarb weevils, much less from a virulent infestation of the dreaded stalk mould. Because those are both made up diseases.

No, it’s the mild British winter that’s to blame. The noble rhubarb originally hails from Russia (heaven alone knows how it ended up here) and needs a short, sharp shock of Siberian-style frost to energise its roots and bring its stems to peak, pink perfection ready for scrunching in the spring.

Specialist Yorkshire rhubarb growers are already predicting shortages, and this is reflected at our allotment, where Mrs D’s single specimen has never really got going.

(Although this may be connected with the fact that said specimen took more than a year to reach us, and looked decidedly limp and sorry for itself when it did eventually flop through the letterbox. Britain’s mail order rhubarb industry still has much to learn.)

Rhubarb’s a funny sort of food, though. It has an identity crisis about whether it’s a fruit or a vegetable: a bit like the tomato only the other way round. It has a close affinity with pizza (they’re both one of your five a day), and of course everyone knows that the stalks are edible but the leaves are poisonous.

But how do we know that, exactly? In the dim and distant imperial Russian past, did some poor peasant from the banks of the Volga sit down to a salad of tasty-looking rhubarb leaves, only to succumb in agony?

Did Peter the Great’s food taster nervously sample a chunk of boiled pink stem and live to tell the tale?

And did some predecessor of today’s oligarchs establish the first rhubarb trade between Russia and England, later buying up a football team here, a newspaper there?

Probably not, but it does bring us back – more by coincidence than design – to The Independent.

According to i, growers in the Netherlands have come up with a solution to original horticultural problem – lack of cold – that involves shocking the rhubarb roots into action by treating them with a liberal dose of acid.

Now, it’s undoubtedly the case that the Dutch have a much more relaxed attitude to recreational drugs than we do on this side of the North Sea, but this is taking things a bit too far.

All right, it’s not that kind of acid, and rhubarb produced using these dodgy foreign tricks certainly doesn’t come out psychedelic. It actually comes out paler and with less flavour than the traditionally grown stuff from the candle-lit forcing sheds of the Yorkshire Rhubarb Triangle. (Not made up).

So, if you want a proper stick of tangy, vibrant pink British rhubarb to whisk into a fool or bake in a crumble over the next few months, then you may find yourself paying a little a bit extra for it.

But it’ll be worth every penny.

The ultimate last-minute Christmas survival guide

2011-12-22T10:04:00.000Z

Ultimate. A much-misused word. A word that doesn’t mean “best”, or “finest”, or “taste the difference”, or any of those other tempting phrases the supermarkets use to package fancy-looking ham or overpriced chicken gizzards.

No, “ultimate” means “last”. It means “final”. It means “done”. And it means “dusted”.

So, if you’re one of those people who idly leafed through the so-called Last-Minute Gift Guides that fell out of the posher daily papers a couple of weeks ago...

And if you’re one of those people who laughed slyly, used the supplement to line the hamster cage and said to yourself “Ha! There’s tons of time left till Christmas...”

And if you’re one of those people who really does wake up on Christmas Eve and realise you haven’t bought a turkey – then this one’s for you: the Ultimate, Final, Left-It-Too-Late Guide To Those Last-Minute Christmas Conundrums.

Q: When I look in the window of a jewellers’ shop, why are all the price tags always face-down so I can’t read them?

A: Because if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. There are, even here in Bath, some lesser jewellers who do show the prices of the trinkets in their displays. But you probably can’t afford them either.

Q: What is the point of Brussels sprouts? Be honest, I can take it.

A: The Brussels sprout is a symbol of seasonal regeneration, a green shoot amid the murk and mire of darkest December, a token of Dame Nature’s infinite bounty...

Q: You’re making this up as you go along, aren’t you?

A: No. Oh all right, yes. Ask me an easier one.

Q: Why do they make blue Quality Streets when no one eats them?

A: To fill in the spaces between the purple ones.

Q: All, right, I’ll come clean. It’s Christmas Eve, I haven’t bought a turkey, and the whole family, including rich Auntie Agnes, is descending en masse for lunch tomorrow. What’s my next move?

A: Run for your life. Alternatively, invest in one of those four-bird roast things that are all the rage this year. As an added bonus, you’ll have enough unidentified avian leftovers for at least three weeks’ worth of sandwiches.

Q: Right, I need to get back to the shops. Most of them have double doors, don’t they? So why do the people who are trying to get in always use the same door as the people going out?

A: What’s that got to do with Christmas?

Q: Not a lot really, just idle curiosity. And how come you’ve started asking the questions and I’ve started answering them?

A: Good point. Ask me another one before anybody notices.

Q: What should I buy for the man who has everything?

A: Nothing. But he won’t thank you for it.

So there you are. The gold mines may be empty, the frankincense trees may be wilting and the myrrh bushes may be down with the blight, but for you, Christmas is ultimately sorted. Have a good one!

The day they found the Higgs boson

2011-12-15T12:41:00.001Z

What’s the best present you could get this Christmas? A diamond as big as the Ritz? World peace? Financial stability in the Eurozone? An XBox 360?

Well, for this writer the ultimate festive treat is a bit of unexpected good news, and this year it arrived a couple of weeks early.

“What good news?” we hear you ask. “The world is falling apart at the seams, the weather outside is frightful and the we can’t remember where we put the spare bulbs for the Christmas lights.”

Fret not, dear reader. These things are indeed bad, but there is nevertheless a light on the horizon, a tiny crumb of good news in the stale bad news baguette.

Because a couple of days ago it was announced that our favourite particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, had at last detected the elusive “God Particle”, known to its friends as the Higgs Boson.

Or had it? The physicists who run the LHC aren’t committing themselves just yet.

“We need more data before we can reach any firm conclusions,” said top boffin Fabiola Gianotti, hedging as many scientific bets as it’s possible to hedge in one short sentence.

What it boils down to, apparently, is that they think they’ve found the place where the Higgs boson might be hiding, but they haven’t quite found the boson itself.

Which is probably rather like finding a small piece of hay in a very large haystack when you’re looking for a minuscule needle. And may have something to do with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Or may not. No-one’s really sure.

Not that it matters, though. When news of the discovery hit the media, it was greeted with the sort of uncomprehending joy normally associated with royal weddings and England winning the World Cup.

The graphic artists sharpened up their pencils along with their imaginations, and produced hundreds of diagrams explaining what the Higgs Boson might look like – if you could actually see it.

The finest example of what might be called speculative illustration was on the front page of Wednesday’s Guardian. It depicted an orange swirly thing wrapped in a light grey tube thing with a thick red line thing going through it. Plus a few speckly bits round the outside.

(That sound you hear is Piet Mondrian spinning in his grave.)

Despite all the excitement, though, the big question remains: what will the Large Hadron Collider actually do after it’s tracked down that pesky boson?

Well, one test of its powers would be to come round to Dixon Towers and sort out the trumpet-like racket that shakes the entire house every time anyone flushes the loo.

Last week’s DIY crisis with the smoke alarm (keep up at the back there) has been averted, but the grinding from the piping is a much tougher nut to crack.

And if the LHC is smart enough to detect the particle that underpins the big bang theory, then fixing our plumbing should be a piece of cake.

Some time before Christmas would be nice.

Chirpy chirpy beep beep

2011-12-08T14:14:00.001Z

Beep.

Beep beep.Beep beep beep.

Beep beep beep. Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep. Beep beep.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Beep.

Not the type of noise you want to hear from just outside your bedroom door. Especially at three o’clock in the morning.

But that was the sound that greeted the slumbering denizens of Dixon Towers last Monday.

What could it have been, you ask? A faulty alarm clock? A badly programmed reminder on a mobile phone? A long-abandoned child’s toy announcing its presence from the dusty recesses of the wardrobe?

No, dear reader, it was none of those. It was of course the sound of the rechargeable backup battery in a mains-powered smoke detector, finally losing the will to live.

And this particular smoke detector (beep) just happened to be situated right at the top of our stairs.

After a short and enlightening discussion (beep) about which gender is best at doing electrical things even though they have a bit of a bad back, yours truly was volunteered to make it stop.

Easier said than done. First, retrieve steps from kitchen (beep) and lug them upstairs.

Clamber up steps for initial inspection and realise that you need a screwdriver to get the thing off the ceiling (beep).

Down steps, find screwdriver, back up steps. Detach offending alarm from ceiling, breaking small plastic bit (beep) in process.

Take alarm downstairs (beep) out of earshot of no-longer-slumbering family, wondering if plastic bit (beep) is essential for continued safe operation of alarm (beep beep beep).

Read label underneath . “This is a sealed unit (beep) – no replaceable parts inside.”

Leave sealed unit in kitchen, retire to bed and to a fitful sleep.

Return at 6am. Alarm is still protesting about unfair treatment (beep). So is the cat, which has had to put up with the (beep) for the last three hours (miaow). Sorry, cat.

Read label again (beep). “To deactivate, insert screwdriver HERE and cut red wire HERE.”

Done and done. No more (beeps).

But now the race is on to find a new one, before the family seat succumbs to a pre-Christmas conflagration.

Not an unlikely prospect, given the quantities of festive candles Mrs D has left dotted around the place.

So off we go to the internet. Where we soon discover that the sealed unit is not only defunct, but also discontinued.

And where we also find that the manufacturers aren’t exactly fast to respond to inquiries posted on their website by potential customers.

Well, faint heart never won fire protection. Scrabble around the good old internet once again. Oh joy, replacement models are available.

But whether or not they can be fitted without the intervention of a qualified electrician (as opposed to a hubristic homeowner who thinks he can do it himself and is never averse to a challenge) we shall just have to wait and see.

Sparks may fly...

LIttlewoods have messed with my memories

2011-12-01T10:09:00.001Z

What goes around comes around, they say. And the run-up to Christmas, apart from anything else, is a good time for dredging up ancient memories. And shuddering.

Readers of a seriously middle-aged persuasion may recall spending Saturday and Sunday mornings listening to the dulcet tones of Ed Stewpot Stewart as he presented kids’ request show Junior Choice.

It was that magical time before teenage lie-ins, when you still woke up at a sensible hour to go to the shops and spend your pocket money.

(Or you did on the Saturday – Sunday shopping wasn’t even a glint in Tesco's eye in those days, and anyway, one-and-sixpence a week didn’t stretch far beyond Saturday lunchtime.)

One of the regular favourites on Junior Choice was a song/monologue by Terry Scott called My Brother. It’s quite hard to track it down these days – the original isn’t even on iTunes, which is one in the eye for anyone who might be tempted to argue that Apple and all its works are perfect in every way.

But you can find My Brother on YouTube. And the lyrics, if you look hard enough. Google is your friend.

Big Tel sings/monologises at length about his naughty little brother, thuswise: “Who put salt in the sugar bowl? Who put fireworks in the coal? Who put a real live toad-in-the-’ole? My brother!”

Terry goes on to cast aspersions on their mum’s parenting skills – “Every night when we’re wide awake, she makes us go to bed. And then in the morning when we’re fast asleep, she makes us get up!” – before getting back to more of his brother’s crimes and misdemeanours: “Who keeps maggots in a tin? Plays the Twist on ’is violin? Who's been gettin’ at the gin?... My brother!”

All of which was pretty damn chucklesome, especially if you really did have a little brother who really did play the violin. At least, he tried to. But he never got as far as the Watusi, let alone the Twist.

They were happy and (relatively) innocent days, days of bike rides and bruised knees and fishing for tiddlers in the canal and all that stuff that made growing up fun.

And now Littlewoods have come along and spoiled it.

“Who put an XBox under the tree? Who got a Fijit just for me? And who put a laptop on Grandpa’s knee? My mother!”

To the very same jaunty tune as My Brother.

Apparently this paean to buying far too many expensive Christmas presents and then “spreading the cost” (£1,500 at a rough guess) has already prompted several hundred parents to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority that Littlewoods has blown the gaff on Father Christmas.

And the ASA is already trying to wriggle its way out of a very tight corner by claiming that the existence or otherwise of him in the red coat is “not capable of objective substantiation”.

But that nauseatingly coy advert has done more damage than that.

It’s taken one jolly item of nostalgia, mangled it into a TV ad and – before you can say “June Whitfield” – one blogger’s memories are ruined forever.

Frankenstein and the Four Bird Roast

2011-11-25T12:34:00.001Z

We were sitting around idly the other night watching a Bushtucker Trial on I’m a Celebrity... and waiting for the adverts to come on, when all of a sudden the parallel paths of fantasy and reality took a ghastly wrong turning and became inextricably linked.

One minute a D-list celebrity was chomping on some of the less savoury parts of a camel.

The next moment, one of the supermarkets was trying to persuade us of the virtues of something called a Four-Bird Roast.

Now the Four-Bird Roast, it would appear, is going be the Big Thing this Christmas.

Imagine if you will (or even if you won’t) a tightly pressed sandwich of four different species of avian flesh; a Frankensteinian layer cake of formerly feathered protein.

Never mind the common-or-garden three-bird jobby offered by other supermarkets. This, we are asked to believe, is true celebrity fare: neatly packaged and ready to take pride of place on your very own festive table.

We aren’t told which particular birds have been sacrificed: turkey and chicken are natural shoe-ins, but what then? Duck, maybe, or goose? Swan hardly seems likely: auk, puffin, grebe or avocet even less so.

Sir David Attenborough would have a thing or two to say about that.

They’ve done a similar thing with razors, incidentally. There was a time you could only buy single blades. Then it was twin blades, then three, then four.

And these days no self-respecting fella would scrape his cheeks with anything less than a five-blader.

The logical conclusion will be a razor with so many blades that you’d have to be an Olympic weightlifter to get it anywhere near your face.

But once you got it up there, it would only take one delicate stroke to remove every last bit of stubble.

Back to those food ads, though. Because hot on the heels of the four-bird roast comes a new and rather disturbing promotion for Colman’s gravy paste.

In which a glossy brown, animated ox is squeezed from a tube, boogies around a kitchen table to the strains of I Like The Way (You Moo) and then leaps in to a gravy boat. From which it is promptly poured out on to a plate of meat and two veg.

Dear advertisers, please take note. We Brits don’t actually like to think to carefully about where our food comes from. Just as the Victorians covered up furniture legs with drapes to preserve their modesty, we like our comestibles to be presented attractively, but demurely.

And while we're at it, we'd rather our mince pies tasted like mince pies. And not like Christmas trees, whatever fancy-flavoured icing sugar Heston Blumenthal may be promoting this festive season.

That’s why we cringe at the thought of a Bushtucker Trial. That’s why the Four Bird Roast tweaks and pulls at the dust sheets that normally cover the murkier corners of our imaginations.

And that’s why – although you can find a statue of a merry-looking pig dressed as a chef outside every self-respecting pork butchers in France – when a bull starts dancing around on a British TV screen persuading us to eat it in the form of gravy, we get all rather squeamish and have to go for a little lie-down.

Guaranteed trouble

2011-11-17T11:26:00.001Z

Sometimes it seems like the world in general, and your bit of it in particular, is out to get you.

This week is a prime example. So if you’ve started reading this blog in expectation of the usual frothy blend of dry humour, barbed witticisms and perceptive insights into 20th-century life then you are seriously advised to swallow your disappointment and stop reading right now.

Because sometimes one just has to have a bit of a grumble. And this is one of those times.

First off, Dixon Junior’s mobile phone wouldn’t turn on. We only bought it in March, so muggins here naïvely assumed that the first step might be to take it back to the Orange shop for repairs or replacement.

But shop assistant number one is having none of this. “Plug it into your computer, mate, and run the setup wizard.” What, even if the computer is an Apple Mac? “Yeah, it works for my sister.”

Maybe it does. But not for us. The phone stays resolutely stuck on the Orange logo.

Back to the Orange shop. Assistant number one lurks around looking guilty, while assistant number two does at least examine the phone, ascertains that it isn’t working, and directs us to the Orange helpdesk.

Who explain that because we bought the phone from that very same Orange shop more than six months ago, it is no longer covered by the Orange guarantee. Notwithstanding the fact that it’s an Orange-branded handset on an Orange contract.

All we can do, say the helpdesk, is send it back to the manufacturer. And here’s their phone number. At the other end of which, a dithery lady says go to our website.

This counts as progress, of sorts. Fill in an online form, pay £15, wait a few days, and a pre-paid Royal Mail special delivery envelope arrives to send the phone back in.

After ten minutes of merriment with bubble wrap and sticky tape, the phone is securely packed and ready for a round-trip to Scotland.

Meanwhile, the postie delivers a little red card explaining that they couldn’t squeeze a parcel (unconnected to the phone saga) through the letter box, and would you kindly present yourself at the sorting office at the bottom end of town to pick it up.

A-ha, you think. Let’s kill two birds with one stone. Pick up one parcel, drop off the other.

So you negotiate SouthGate (aka Death Race 2011) without damage to self or suicidal pedestrians. Past the forlorn row of blue bikes and astonishingly – the only bit of good news in this sorry tale – find a parking space by the sorting office.

Collecting the undelivered parcel is a breeze. But dropping off the mobile? Forget it.

The Royal Mail office is quite happy to take the parcel, but they can’t provide a proof of posting. For that, you have to go to the Post Office in the middle of town.

Where you go. And you take a number. And you queue. And a nice Post Office lady tells you that you should have taken a different number.

And you lose... the will... to live...

To BT Infinity and beyond

2011-11-10T13:15:00.001Z

It’s been high-tech à gogo at Dixon Towers.

Not just because of the long-promised arrival in our street of BT Infinity.

Which we will of course be getting as soon as possible, if only to stop the continuing battle over internet bandwidth between the four of us: Dixon Junior smiting sundry zombies, Viet Cong and Chechen terrorists on the Xbox 360; young Miss Dixon conducting an in-depth study of Japanese cartoon cuteness on YouTube; Mrs D downloading the complete works of Monteverdi; and self emailing the bank explaining how we intend to pay for all this technology.

It’s a bit mystifying why some people from bosky Fairfield Park have complained about the arrival of the dark green BT street cabinets in their own area.

They’re pretty unobtrusive, they don’t make a noise and they don’t frighten the birds. Even better, with their promised 33Mbps download speeds, they look as though they’ll finally put an end to our incessant broadband bickering. Job done.

But the real technological revolution chez Dixon isn’t anything to do with the internet. It’s all about in-car entertainment.

In the good old days (if they ever actually existed – the memories are fading), we used to pass long car journeys with a friendly game of Pub Cricket.

We split the kids into two teams of one each, and got them to count the legs associated with the name of each pub we went past on their side of the road. Each leg scored one run.

Thus The Duke of York scored two runs. The Black Horse scored four. The George and Dragon scored six (assuming of course that dragons have four legs – there was some debate about that one).

The rules became more and more arcane. The Fox and Hounds scored an innings victory. The King’s Arms scored no runs at all because arms aren’t legs. And The Drunken Sailor scored a big fat duck because he was legless. Oh, the fun we had.

Sadly, as more and more roadside pubs closed and the children got older and cannier, Pub Cricket went the way of Musical Chairs and Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

But now we have an even better game: iPod Anagrams.

Last week we got a wonderful new gadget. You plug one end into your iPod and the other into the lighter socket and somehow it lets you play your tunes on the car radio.

As an added bonus, though, it also flashes up the track title and artist in the radio display.

Or at least it does for a couple of minutes. Then it gives up the unequal struggle and jumbles up all the letters, to the great hilarity of passengers and driver alike.

Thus is was that on a recent trip, Love Hangover by Diana Ross became Roana Loss singing Have Dingover. Motorway favourite Autobahn by electro-wizards Kraftwerk somehow transmogrified into Krautwahn by Aftoberk.

As for Rikki Don’t Lose That Number by Steely Dan? Well, let’s just say that it will shortly be appearing as a clue in The Times crossword.

Give me a home where the wallabies roam

2011-10-27T11:05:00.000+01:00

Apologies again to any readers who headed down to Avon Street car park to see for themselves the evidence – in the shape of a large poster – that Tesco was transporting the city of Bath 100 miles east to London.

Unfortunately events moved on: almost overnight, it seemed, a new poster advertising oven chips had gone up on the same site.

More grist to the conspiracy theorists’ mill, you may think. And you’d probably be right.

For now, though, Bath is still comfortably ensconced in its niche in the heart of North East Somerset.

Where, it appears, even stranger things are afoot. For reports have reached the Bath Chronicle newsroom from an impeccable source (one of the chaps in advertising) that wallabies have been seen roaming the rolling hills of Saltford.

Yes, you read that right. Wallabies. Australian marsupials. With pouches. Quite good at boxing. But not as good as kangaroos.

There should be a joke about that. “What’s the difference between a wallaby and a kangaroo?”

But there isn’t.

A joke, that is. Not a difference.

Funny, though. You can drive the winding lanes of B&NES for weeks on end without seeing anything more exotic than the occasional dead badger, and then all of a sudden, out hops an antipodean anomaly.

Start to do some research and you’ll soon wish you hadn’t. There are at least 44 species of wallaby, ranging in alphabetical order from the Agile Wallaby to the Yellow-Footed Rock-Wallaby by way of the Dusky Pademelon and the Gray Dorcopsis. Although those last two sound more like impostors than proper macropods.

You couldn’t make this sort of thing up. Well you could, actually, and no-one would be any the wiser.

But it’s true, all true. Small mobs* of wallabies do indeed roam this green and pleasant land. They’ve been reported from as far afield as Loch Lomond, the Peak District and even the fields around Gatwick Airport.

They escape from zoos or are released from private collections, and have no trouble surviving in a climate very similar to that of their native Tasmania.

Dig deeper into the world of the wallaby and you’ll find companies that sell them as pets or as self-propelled lawnmowers.

One such firm will even supply a trained reindeer (£1250, no VAT), with its own harness and sledge. But before you can buy one, you need to get a certificate from DEFRA confirming that you have far more money than sense.

The mind begins to boggle. How long can it be before clusters* of antelopes churn the hallowed turf below the Royal Crescent? How long before stands* of flamingoes circle the skies above the Pump Room before alighting pinkly and gracefully beside the Roman Baths?

Surely it can only be a matter of time before Bath becomes one gigantic wildlife park.

Then again, maybe it already is.

* All collective nouns have been checked by the management.

The Avon Street conspiracy

2011-10-20T10:19:00.002+01:00

Sooner or later, like it or not, you have to go to Bristol.

Maybe you develop an uncontrollable urge to queue for half an hour or more to buy Swedish flat-pack furniture in a low-ceilinged warehouse that reeks of meatballs.

Maybe you want to test your cultural credentials by trying to spot a Banksy among all the other graffiti.

Or maybe you just took a wrong turning at the Hicks Gate roundabout and found yourself inexorably sucked in.

No matter. Whether it’s fate or fortune that draws you to the sprawling metropolis on Bath’s doorstep, once you’re there you know you’re there.

Because on every other billboard, it seems, is a poster advertising a well-known supermarket chain that doesn’t have a major outlet in Bath.

An advert which states, in no uncertain terms: “The Big Price Drop on Bristol’s Shopping List.”

For better or worse, for richer or poorer, when you see a poster like that you can be pretty much certain that you are. Indeed. In Bristol.

Struggle back to Bath with your Nordic kitchen units or your shattered dreams – or both – and all those certainties crumble to dust.

Because - or at least until yesterday - right next to the exit from Avon Street multi-storey car park was a similar poster advertising the same supermarket. But there’s one subtle difference. Because this poster said: “The Big Price Drop on London’s Shopping List.”

Tesco advert, October 19 2011

Now hang on a cotton-picking minute. London? London? What’s going on here?

Well, Tesco (oops) is certainly a powerful organisation.

But surely even Tesco (oops again) can’t have got its hands on some transdimensional wormhole generator that rips Avon Street car park, the jewel in Bath’s architectural crown, from its noble setting between a neglected river and a dreary coach park and drops it 100 miles east in The Big Smoke?

No, there’s more to it than that.

That poster was the visible tip of the iceberg, a deep and insidious conspiracy created by big business, the council and the powerful Heritage Lobby to confuse Bathonians, tourists and taxi drivers alike into believing that they’re not in Bath any more.

And why would they want to do that, you might ask? Well any number of reasons, really. But to go into them here would be to expose oneself to unwanted attention from the conspirators themselves.

Suffice to say that there’s more to that drilling project next to Thermae Bath Spa than meets the eye.

Chip advert, October 20 2011. Spooky.

Plus the fact that the original poster was replaced by an advert for chips on the very day this article originally appeared in the The Bath Chronicle.

Enough said: a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat.

If anyone has the slightest idea what’s going on down there at Avon Street, please keep it to yourself. Don’t write in, don’t email, don’t call. Because the less we know about it, the safer we’ll all be.

And if you’re one of those people who prefers to believe in cock-up rather than conspiracy (perhaps you think the poster is just a mistake), then sleep easily while you can.

But remember: truth will out.

Serious one. NAS want to start B&NES autism group

2011-10-13T17:34:00.000+01:00

Email received from the National Autistic Society, slightly edited. I've left out email addresses to deter spammers:

The BANES Link and The National Autistic Society (NAS) have worked together to arrange an Autism Meeting for B&NES on 24th October 2011 at The Guildhall, Bath. The meeting will be held between 2pm and 4pm and you are free to come and go within this time
We want to listen to and gather the views and experiences of adults with Asperger/Autism Spectrum conditions, and their families and carers, who live in and/or use Health and Social Care Services in Bath and North East Somerset (B&NES).

The information will be recorded by NAS and put into a report and sent to the B&NES Adult Autism Partnership Group. The information that you give will be used to provide feedback to the professionals and people who make decisions on planning for future services for people with Autism.
Alternatively, please write to:

Marina Parrett, The National Autistic Society, Church House, Church Road, Filton, Bristol BS34 7BD

NAS would also like to facilitate the setting up of a B&NES Autism Group to continue the work started at the October 24th Autism Meeting.
The aim of the group would be to discuss the views and experiences of people with Autism/Asperger syndrome and their families, living in the area, in order to develop appropriate Health and Adult Social Care services in response.
If you are interested in being part of an ongoing group, please speak to Diana Elliott or Marina Parrett at the meeting or contact Diana Elliott on Tel: 07825 227026 or Marina Parrett on Tel: 01179 748425 or 07770 687009

Sunday, sweary Sunday

2011-10-13T10:57:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago in his blog and in the Bath Chronicle, editor Sam Holliday asked a very pertinent question: Are you a Downton or a Spook?

Do you devote your Sunday evening TV viewing to the trials and tribulations of a family of English aristocrats as they tough it out through the First World War without mussing up their make-up; or do you settle down with a nice cup of cocoa and a spy-related plotline so complicated it makes Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy look like Janet and John – The Early Years?

Or indeed, are you one of those people who recognises that the whole toffs v spies debate represents a false dichotomy, and decides to watch Fry’s Planet Word instead?

If you plumped for Stephen Fry last Sunday, you could well have ended up spluttering into your Horlicks. Because the programme was all about swearing.

Why we do it (if we do it), what effect it has on us, and whether it actually works.

There was some funny footage of Brian Blessed, swearmeister par excellence, sticking his hand in a tank full of iced water and turning the air blue.

And a clip of Malcolm Tucker from The Thick Of It going into four-letter meltdown at least showed that the BBC has its finger on the pulse of 21st-century discourse.

But Stephen Fry’s point, and it was a good one, was that the more you swear the less effective it becomes: the very occasional “Gadzooks” or “Odds Kittikins” dropped into one’s conversation is a heck of a lot more effective than an endless stream of filth if you really want to get your point across.

It’s all about communication, of course, and one problem today is choosing how to communicate, even with our nearest and dearest.

Picture if you will a blissful domestic scene: Mrs D is upstairs, doing something important on the computer.

Yours truly is in the kitchen, rustling up a light supper of toad in the hole with onion gravy.

Mrs D is starting to get hungry. But how should she best inquire about the arrival time of the sausage-and-battery comestibles?

By email, of course. The message is sent quickly and efficiently from the computer upstairs along BT’s sturdy copper wires (as long as no one’s nicked them), off to a mail server somewhere in Arizona, then via satellite to a second mail server in downtown Buenos Aires, and back via undersea cable and fibre optic switchgear to its final destination: the mobile device in the Dixon kitchen.

No need for shouting: the internet can take the strain. And anyway, you can’t hurry a toad in the hole.

Similarly when it’s time to call the kids to lay the table: rather than yelling up at them through a couple of floors, texting them in their bedrooms is so much more effective.

Soon there will come a time when all communication is electronic: we’ll have iPhones surgically implanted into our brains, and no one will speak face-to-face any more.

A nice thought, perhaps. But it won’t stop the swearing when you burn the toad in the hole.

How I updated my iPad to iOS 5

2011-10-13T00:02:00.003+01:00

This is how I updated my iPad (original 32Gb wifi 3G) to iOS 5 with an iMac 24" early 2008.

It took quite a long time.

First I backed up my Mac to an external drive.

Then I updated iTunes to 10.5. I did the Lion updates to 10.7.2 at the same time, just to keep things tidy.

Then I connected the iPad to the iMac.

Then I launched iTunes and started the update. Depending on your broadband connection, just the download could take an hour or more. If you're on cable or fibre optic, lucky you.

Next, the iPad backs up to your Mac. Depending on how much you have in the way of music, videos, apps and pictures on your iPad, it could take 15 minutes or more.

Then, the iPad verifies the backup with Apple. This is where things seem to have been failing for a lot of people: Apple's servers are being hammered by everyone from night owls in the UK to bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Californians.

If it fails here, you have to backup again. Every time it fails with an "Internal error", you have to back up again and verify the restore.

Patience is a virtue: eventually you'll get the connection. A progress bar will show on your iPad and the software will extract and update. Then the firmware will update. Then you'll be able to set up the iPad for wifi, location services etc. It'll even ask if you want to set it up for iCloud. (I'd hang on.)

That took another 20 minutes or so.

But don't disconnect the iPad. Because it'll still be copying over your apps. And then your music. And then it'll resync your photos.

From successful verification of the iPad backup to a fully restored iPad running iOS5 took the best part of an hour and a half.

Now, what does this puppy do?

The facts about wife-carrying races (well, some of them)

2011-10-06T10:20:00.000+01:00

Uplifting news reaches Chronicle Towers from the rolling heights of Lansdown: Bath Racecourse is to organise a wife-carrying contest.

It all sounds quite simple: you grab your spouse using any one of a number of grips or handholds, lug her bodily over a 100-yard course (that’s a couple of lengths less than half a furlong if you’re a horse) and, assuming you win, claim the top prize of you and your partner’s combined weight in beer.

Actually, the rider doesn’t even have to be your wife: it can be anyone who’s female, over 17, and willing to climb onto your back and into the starting gate.

And there are no particularly strict rules about riding styles, either: piggybacks and fireman’s lifts are fine, and more adventurous competitors can even try the Estonian Technique, which sees the jockey/wife dangling upside-down with her legs wrapped around her steed/husband’s neck and her face squashed into the small of his back.

But despite looking like a rather advanced illustration from a very naughty book, the Estonian position does have one big advantage: it doesn’t get the jockey pregnant.

The event originates in Finland, a country otherwise known for having a language related to Hungarian, despite the two countries being separated by the best part of 1,000 miles.

(They have about 200 words in common, 55 of them to do with fishing. Now, where were we?)

According to one theory, a Finnish bandit called Herkko Rosvo-Ronkainen and his band of merry men used to descend on unsuspecting villages and relieve them not just of their wealth but of their womenfolk as well.

Over the course of time, this unsavoury practice turned into an official sport with its own peculiar code of conduct, just like football turned into rugby in 19th-century England.

The official rules of eukonkanto, as the Finns call it, boggle the mind: “The wife may be your own, the neighbour’s, or you may have found her further afield”; “If she is less than 49 kg, she will be burdened with additional weight”; “The most entertaining couple, the best costume and the strongest carrier will win a special prize.”

Say what you like about the Finns, but they sure know how to have fun.

The politically correct brigade are up in arms: surely, they say, in the interests of equality we ought to have a husband-carrying event too.

A moment’s reflection will reveal the logical flaw here. Based on personal experience, the few times when Mrs D has tried to lift your sturdy columnist have ended up with her going purple in the face and collapsing underneath him in an undignified heap.

No, husbands are too big even to be picked by wives, let alone to be carried by them half a furlong over the sticks at Bath Racecourse.

The big race starts at 3.45pm on Sunday, October 16. And where it will end is anyone’s guess.

Why flares are back in style

2011-09-29T10:44:00.000+01:00

Fashion’s a funny business. Two years ago, if anyone had told you that in September 2011 it would be cool and trendy to walk around town wearing headphones the size of baked bean tins, you’d have treated them with the scorn you’d normally reserve for someone who claimed the world was flat, or that England would win the next World Cup.

But here we are in September 2011. Designer cans cost upwards of £120. They make the wearer look like Phones, the submarinating marionette from Stingray, and they annoy the hell out of anyone standing within 200 yards. They might look OK plugged into your hi-fi, but on the street they just make you look daft.

Flares are back in the news too. But not, as the headline might have mischievously suggested, flares of the long-leggedy hippyish trouser-type variety. If you thought you were getting the go-ahead to squeeze yourself into a pair of loon pants, then you’re out there with the flat-earthers and the England fans.

No, what we’re talking about here are solar flares. The kind that for the last few days have been shooting out of the Sun in the general direction of our innocent little planet, causing auroras both boreal and austral, knocking satellites out of whack and giving mobile phone companies a perfect excuse for those irritating drop-outs in G3 signal any time you venture more than half a mile from a built-up area.

Solar flares emanate from sunspots, in this case the 100,000km-long Active Region 1302, which has been described by normally sober sources such as NASA as a “behemoth”.

And that’s not a word you hear too often in the context of coronal mass ejections. It’s not a word you hear much in any context, come to that.

Solar flares, it says on the internet, are divided by intensity into five categories: A, B, C, M and X. There’s something rather disturbing about that apparent lack of a logical naming convention. A, B, and C are pretty ordinary. Then things get so bad, so fast, that the space boffins don’t even bother with D to L.

And as for N to W, well don't stop to think about them. Just head for the shelters, 'cos here comes a category X1.9 and it’s got our name on it.

It would be tempting to suggest that all this cosmic assault and battery is the Sun’s warning to scientists at CERN who recently reported that they might, just might, have detected a particle in the course of breaking the ultimate speed limit: the speed of light.

“Ho,” says the Sun. “I’m the top light source around here. Taste my flares.”

Tempting, but preposterous.

In the short term, the mighty AR1302 isn’t even pointing straight at the Earth yet, so we may not yet have felt the full effect of its toasty plasma eruptions.

And over the next couple of years solar activity is predicted to increase, which means there could be more sunspots, more geomagnetic storms, and more people going around wearing tin-foil hats to ward off the ill effects.

Which might look a bit silly. But not half as silly as the twits in the big headphones.

Secrets from the Man Drawer

2011-09-22T10:33:00.000+01:00

It’s funny how you can walk around Bath and get the feeling you’re in a parallel universe.

Whenever you step outside your front door, a bizarre distortion field catches you unawares and makes you start to question what is real and what isn’t.

Hordes of Jane Austen fans stroll elegantly down Milsom Street in their Regency costumes, making the casual visitor think for a moment that they’ve been spirited back 200 years to a simpler and more graceful age.

The illusion is broken, though, when the assembled Janeites start glugging bottled water and nattering into mobile phones.

“I have missed the post chaise and shall not be home for luncheon,” they say to whoever it is they’re talking to. “Pray keep the roast goose a-warming until my return.”

Things get even weirder as you go further out from the city centre. For reasons too complicated to go into here, you’re waiting to get into town from the far pavilions of Kelston Road when a ghastly realisation creeps up on you – you’ve entered an alternative reality in which they’ve invented bus stops, but not the buses to stop at them. No wonder everyone else is driving.

And even in the safety of your own home, things are not quite what they seem. Instead of birthday presents, you get cards from DHL telling you to collect your goodies from an industrial estate on the other side of Almondsbury.

Is Almondsbury even a real place? Given its close proximity to another purportedly real place called Catbrain, we venture to suggest not.

At the centre of this whirlpool of unreality, though, is a force of nature so disruptive to the peace and tranquility of normal life that we shudder to mention it within the pages of a family newspaper.

Yes, dear reader, we are talking about the Man Drawer.

What, you may ask, is one of them? Well, in a bygone age, young ladies had Bottom Drawers in which to collect necessities for their future married life. Maybe they still do.

In a similar way, us middle-aged chaps have Man Drawers, in which we gather all we need to cope with our current life.

The trouble is, though, that Man Drawers tend to be affected by the reality distortion field we were discussing earlier. Yes, we were.

When you consider things from a rational perspective, you do not actually need a diary (unused) from 2010. Or one from 2009. Or indeed one from 2007. But there they are, clogging up the Man Drawer.

Even less do you need the headphones from a mobile phone you recycled two years ago. But there they are in the Man Drawer, entwined with the USB cable from the iPod that stopped working just before you happened to buy a brand new one (convenient or what?)

Clamps from the garage; old bars of chocolate; six kinds of propelling pencil lead; a bulging tube of glue: all are there because you thought they Might Come In Useful.

None of them ever will. But the Man Drawer takes them and twists them into a new and frightening reality. Ignore it at your peril.

Bike in Bath website updated

2011-09-16T17:19:00.000+01:00

Well, some of my criticisms in yesterday's blog about the Bike in Bath website have been addressed fairly quickly.

They've re-worded the subscription instructions to make it clear where you have to click. (Although I think you should just be able to click the word "Register" in the instructions to take you to the registration page. There, I just did it!)

And you can now type a full UK postcode into the box on the registration page. (Even if they do still call it a ZIP code for some reason.)

But on the registration page there are THREE fields for "State". One is an empty text entry field, the other two are pull-downs listing countries. Plus there are TWO pull-downs for "Country", neither of which is usable because they're empty.

A lot of the typos I mentioned are still there - four instances of "avabile" on the Stations page; "RECHARG" on the home page; "Holburne" still incorrectly spelled "Holbourne" on the home page graphic; a page called "SUBSCIBE". And the grey text is still jumping back and forth.

One typo I didn't notice before:

It should be "bicycles". In fact it should be "7 free bicycles out of 15", but let's not be too picky.

Sorry, guys. You're getting there, but you've still got a way to go.

Early breakfast on a planet made of diamond

2011-09-15T12:08:00.000+01:00

The Large Hadron Collider has been at it again.

Yes, the world’s biggest, baddest particle accelerator, which has always held an unnatural fascination for this writer, has only gone and created the Densest Matter Ever Observed.

Denser than lead, denser than a neutron star, denser than last Sunday’s collapsed sponge pudding, denser even than Denny Denson, Professor of Density at St Dennis’s College, Densebridge, quark-gluon plasma is so downright stodgy that if you had a matchbox full, it would weigh more than the entire universe.

(All right, that may be something of an exaggeration, but you get the general idea.)

Quark-gluon plasma, as its name suggests, is made out of a combination of quarks and gluons. And now that’s sorted out, we can move on.

Because dense things aren’t confined to the coils of the LHC. Spinning round a pulsar the size of Cologne, just 4,000 light years from Earth, is a planet made of diamond.

How it got that way is a matter of conjecture, but to put it into layman’s terms, a big star full of carbon bumped into a little star full of pulses, one thing led to another and you can guess the rest.

Now all that remains is to find a name for this new wonder of nature.

Suggestions have ranged from the romantic – Planet Tiffany – to the commercial – Planet Ernest Jones.

One thing’s for sure though: you’re not going to make a fortune by heading out there in a rocket and digging up some diamonds. You’d either be frazzled by the radio waves kicked out by Pulsar J1719-1438 as it spins through the firmament at 10,000 rpm, or squished by the gravity of Planet Bling.

Speaking of radio waves (and coming back down to Earth with a bang), the BBC has seriously messed up Radio 3 in the mornings.

Until this week, the start to the Dixon day ran as smoothly as a well-oiled machine. Alarm at 5.42 precisely. Leap up. Empty dishwasher. Make Mrs D’s tea. Back to bed to doze for an hour to the soothing strains of Through the Night. Up, shave and dress just in time for the news headlines at 7am. Three Breakfast with the muesli.

Not any more. As of last Monday, Radio 3’s breakfast show has moved to 6.30, when all right-thinking people are still dozing. The format’s changed, too. The news headlines at 6.30 are followed by the presenter (Petroc Trelawny at his far-too-cheeriest) reading them again at 6.45, followed by the newsreader again at 7am. Followed by Trelawny reading the weather.

Instead of gentle music, we’ve got the aural equivalent of Spongebob Squarepants.

There’s not much alternative, either. Radio 4 is too depressing. Classic FM is too full of adverts. Radio 2 has too much Chris Evans. Radio 1 has too much Chris Moyles.

All right, Radio 3 listeners are notoriously resistant to change, and that bit about Spongebob is the second exaggeration in 500 words.

But if you detect increased levels of grumpiness from Dixon Towers over the coming weeks, you’ll have a pretty good idea why.

Bike in Bath: great idea, flaky website

2011-09-15T10:26:00.000+01:00

So, at last Bath has its own Boris Bikes. Bike in Bath is open for testing today, and gets its official launch later this month. And it's a great idea.

You buy a bike card (by registering online or in person from the Tourist Information Office in Abbey Church Yard), you head to one of the four docking stations (here's Green Park this morning, although apparently it's not operational yet), you wave your card at the gadgetry, you retrieve your splendid blue steed and off you pedal. Remembering only to return your bike to a docking station when you've finished with it.

As an added bonus, the first 30 minutes are free.

An excellent idea, and I shall be taking one of the bikes for a spin in the next day or so.

What's not so great, though, is the Bike in Bath website.

If you Google Bike in Bath you won't find it. Possibly because the page title on the Bike in Bath home page is "Home Page", which even from my limited knowledge of search engine optimisation I know is a bit of a bad start.

The fact that the words "bike" and "Bath" don't appear anywhere in the home page source code probably doesn't help much either, SEO-wise.

If you Google bikeinbath (without any spaces), Google will helpfully return a search for "bikes Bath". If you reject that suggestion and tell Google yes, you really did mean "bikeinbath", then the top link is to the whois record for bikeinbath.com

So far, so hard to find.

If you persevere and reach that elusive home page, your eye is immediately greeted by a chunk of light grey text on a white background (bad contrast), aligned left. Before you have a chance to finish reading it, it disappears and is replaced by another chunk of light grey text on a white background, aligned right (even harder to read.) This text flickers distractingly to and fro as you try to read the rest of the page.

Down the right-hand side are three grey panels with white text on them. Again, a bit hard to read. The middle one says "Recharg your ticket". Spelling mistake number one (there are lots).

Undaunted, you click the link to the Subscribe page. Whose title is SUBSCIBE (another spelling mistake). Here your can check availability of bikes in your "municpality" (losing count here) and "zona" (spelling mistake or untranslated Italian?) You learn you can pick up a bike from the "Holbourne" Museum. (It's Holburne, and is correct on their Station page, although here they've spelled "available" as "avabile".)

As well as the spelling mistakes there is non-English English all over the place. For example "You will contribute to reduce emissions"; "each stations is composed by a series of cycle-parking columns"; "move around the city in a fast, amusing and ecologically-friendly manner". Yes, "municipality" is an English word. But not one that anyone ever uses.

Never mind, though. Let's follow the instructions to register online:

"1 Register on the portal by accessing the panel for the reserved area"

There's no hyperlink from that text. You have to guess that to register you actually need to click a tiny blue "Login" link in the top right-hand corner of the page.

When you do, you get this:

They put a login form to their own administration pages on the same panel as they use for user registration? Why? Links like that should be totally private.

Click the Register button and it takes you to "Pagina senza titolo" which asks for personal contact details and password over non-secure HTTP. There are two pull-downs for "State" which both present lists of countries. There are two pull-downs for "Country" which both present lists of nothing at all. The "Zip Code" input box won't allow enough characters for a UK postcode.

These are all very simple mistakes which could have been put right with basic proof-reading (maybe by a native English speaker, since the site is directed at English people?) and usability testing.

Sorry, Bike in Bath. I want to love you, but I won't be using your website to register - there are too many errors to inspire confidence. Time for a stroll to Tourist Information.

UPDATE: still room for improvement on the Bike in Bath website

Serving suggestions

2011-09-08T14:17:00.001+01:00

“Daaaad...” It’s a word that strikes fear into every father’s heart, because you just know that it’s going to be followed by one of those questions that you can’t easily answer.

“Daaaad...” said Dixon Junior many years ago as we drove round and round an unfamiliar French town, exhausted after a seven-hour drive and unable to reconcile the map the hotel had sent us with the street layout. “Daaaad... How many planets are there in the universe?”

The question has gone down in family legend, and even though we now know the answer to that one (squillions, if you’re interested) the questions keep on coming.

“Daaaad...” we had last week, “Why do food packets always say ‘Serving Suggestion’?”

Well, thereby hangs a tale.

Remember in Toy Story, when Buzz Lightyear sees a TV advert for himself, which ends with a voiceover: “Not a Flying Toy?” And remember how it makes Buzz turn from arrogance to grim self-awareness? He’s not a real Space Ranger, he can’t fly, and his only value is as a plaything.

Hubris leads to nemesis, pride comes before a fall. And so it is with food packaging.

That ham you bought from the supermarket may have dressed itself up enticingly with a pack shot of sliced tomato, crispy lettuce and a freshly baked baguette. But inside the packet (once you get the plastic film off) is the ham, the whole ham and nothing but the ham.

Even on simple packaging where they could just as easily have said “Remove from Tin and Put on Plate”, they print “Serving Suggestion”: more to make sure the content doesn’t get ideas above its station, than as a reminder to the literal-minded consumer.

But it’s a concept that could be usefully extended to other kinds of product.

Suppose you’re in the market for a new printer. (And why wouldn’t you be? It’s so much cheaper than buying replacement ink cartridges for the old one.)

Inkjet printers are all pretty much the same, and in the end your decision comes down to the box art. Which shows a proud dad and his admiring wife and children watching as cheerful family snaps and fancy-looking pie charts whizz out of the printer too fast to catch.

Boxes like that really do need a warning on them. Something like “Not A Real Family” or “Your Colours May Vary And Actually Be Restricted To Four Shades of Brown” would be a start.

Seed packets would benefit from warnings too. Readers whose memories stretch as far back as February will no doubt recall the saga of the World’s Hottest Chilli, and attempts to grow same.

There was indeed a warning on the packet: “Handle and taste with care!” But perhaps what it should say is “Handle With Utter Disdain. ”

On the packet, the Naga Jolokia peppers are red, fruity and pungent-looking. Whereas on our windowsill, they’re small, green and totally insignificant.

Because it’s the same with those chillis as it is with so many others things in life: What You See Is Definitely Not What You Get.

Skullduggery in the vegetable patch

2011-09-01T12:15:00.000+01:00

Ahh, September. The month when the clouds of August roll back, the winds die down, the rain subsides and the sun bursts forth once more, just in time for everyone to go back to work.

All that remains of the summer holidays are memories, blurred photos of the family huddled miserably in the lee of a Welsh slate quarry, and bills.

Let’s not be gloomy, though. Because apart from meteorological schadenfreude, the end of summer also means the start of the vegetable show season.

Growers everywhere are preparing their prize specimens for display, and the methods they use to ensure success make the mind boggle.

Some competitors swear by secret potions. If you’ve ever wondered how that prize-winning pumpkin got so plump, then it’s probably thanks to regular doses of tea leaves, scrumpy and Bovril, drip-fed straight to the roots.

Some resort to furniture polish. It’s a well-known fact in horticultural circles that a quick spritz of Mister Sheen will give your best King Edwards the glossy shine they need to catch the judges’ eyes. And noses.

Some resort to trickery. Without giving away too many secrets, tying little kitchen weights to the ends of your runner beans is a favourite way of getting them to grow straight and true.

And while frowned upon in the bean-growing fraternity, the practice isn’t exactly illegal. As long as you don’t get caught.

No, the world of prize vegetable growing is a tough one, with no quarter asked or given. And anyone who enters it had better keep their wits about them.

It’s thus with some trepidation that we Dixons view the approach of this year’s Weston Village Flower Show, which takes place on Saturday, September 3 in the All Saints Centre, starting at 2.30pm.

Not that any of the competitors would stoop to skullduggery, you understand, but because our family reputation is at stake.

Mrs D has had some success in the past, but she’s already blaming the hopeless summer on a lack of winning produce. So perhaps this Saturday her two-year run as Onion Queen of Weston will finally come to an end.

And yours truly? Well, just read the introduction to the show programme. This year’s celebration of fruit-, flower- and vegetable-growing expertise will be opened, and the prizes presented, by none other than... Hugh Dixon, columnist with Ye Olde Bath Chronicle.

Ooh heck. Everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame, but this is taking the mickey. It means getting up on the hind legs and making a speech in which one tries one’s best to sound knowledgeable and entertaining about subjects about which one knows next to nothing.

Including chilli-growing, if this year’s miserable crop of duds is anything to go by.

Quite seriously, though, please don’t let this rare public appearance by your humble columnist put you off going. As all good gardeners will tell you, every rose has its thorn.

How we went on holiday by mistake

2011-08-25T14:22:00.000+01:00

“We’ve gone on holiday by mistake!”

That line should ring bells with anyone who's seen the 1986 film Withnail and I, in which two booze-riddled, drug-addled, out-of-work actors head out of London to spend a paranoid weekend in a country cottage that turns out to be a little less luxurious than they’d hoped.

Not that the Dixon family holiday was anything like that, you understand. But after we got back from a wet week in Wales and girded our collective loins for an extra two nights under canvas in supposedly sunny Hampshire, it did start to feel a bit like we’d wandered onto a movie set.

The camping trip was intended as a celebration of our wedding anniversary, although it’s hard to see how two days without mod cons qualifies as any sort of celebration.

Dixon Junior had run away to sea for a week in preference to living in a tent with his parents and younger sister. We remaining three crammed the car with camping gear, mosquito repellent and portable video games and hit the road.

Into the worst rainstorm to hit the south coast of England. Ever.

For this was Thursday, August 18, the day that flash floods struck Bournemouth and environs, roads were awash, the wind howled and all was absolutely frightful.

By some quirk of fate, though, the rain stopped just as we reached Lymington, and the campsite appeared to be well drained.

All thoughts of escape were suppressed as we gritted our teeth in the last blusterings of the gale, hoisted the tent, bashed in the poles of the windbreak and set up the stove for a brew.

What could possibly go wrong? Well not much, funnily enough. Friday dawned crisp and clear, and we took the ferry across the Solent. Which is a bit like going abroad but staying in England – as you drive off the good ship Wight Light in Yarmouth you wonder for a moment if you should be driving on the left or the Wight. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

One of the best bits about camping, though, is watching the other campers and feeling smug about your own set-up.

A young couple pitched up that evening, and pulled out the floweriest, flimsiest tent ever to be seen outside the glamping enclosure at Glastonbury. They spent hours positioning it just right and getting the guy ropes completely straight, and then started the barbecue. At dusk it became clear that in all their perfectionism they’d forgotten to bring a torch. By 8.30 or thereabouts they were cooking in the dark.

We got our comeuppance for our smugness a couple of hours later, though, as a noisy, sweary bunch of people arrived and put up their tents by the headlights of their Land Rover. By midnight other campers were yelling at them to shut up, and at seven on Saturday morning they packed up their tents, still swearing and shouting about needing bacon sandwiches, and moved off to another part of the site.

Oh well, we thought, as we headed back to Bath. We only had to put up with them for one night. Their families are stuck with them for the rest of their lives.

Greengrocers and apostrophes: what went wrong?

2011-08-04T09:21:00.000+01:00

Drive north out of Bath on the A46, and before you reach the all-day playground that is the M4, you’ll see a stall selling soft fruit.

At least, you can assume that’s what they’re selling. There’s a blackboard advertising their wares, but what it actually says is Strawberrie’.

At that point, whoever was doing the chalking must have run out of board. There’s a quite unnecessary apostrophe, but the final “s” is nowhere to be seen.

Or at least, it wasn’t last Sunday, when we trundled by. “Watch the road, Hugh, not the board! EEEEEEE...!”

Journey over with no further incident, there was time to waste a few minutes of reflection on that degenerate scion of English punctuation, the greengrocer’s apostrophe.

People have trouble with apostrophes: greengrocers more than most. Because even if the people selling summer fruits by the side of the A46 had squeezed a final “s” on to their board, they’d have been wrong.

The first rule of apostrophes is that they don’t go with plurals. But look at any display of fruit and veg worth its name, and you’ll see the problem. If you don’t fancy the pear’s, then choose some apple’s. How about some carrot’s with the roast tonight? And then a couple of mangoe’s for afters.

Those are the greengrocer’s apostrophes.

The second rule is that apostrophes show possession. If something owns something else, then the owner has an apostrophe and an s.

A couple of examples from the animal kingdom may be helpful here. Think of the bee’s knees, the cat’s pyjamas, the dog’s...

No, not those, cheeky.

The bee, the cat and the dog are the owners of the knees, the pyjamas and the... all right, dinner. So the three animals get an apostrophe-s.

It gets more complicated when you combine plurals and possessives. They go s-apostrophe.

So if two bees had 12 knees between them, they would be the bees’ knees. If four cats wore pyjamas, they would be the cats’ pyjamas. And as for the dogs, well, you get the general idea.

Rule three: apostrophes show that something has had a letter or two left out. “The cat’s outside” means “The cat is outside”. Simples.

Rule four. There is no such word as Its’. “Its” means “belonging to it”. “It’s” means “it is”. As in “It’s time the cat had its dinner.” You just have to learn that one.

To go back to our original roadside example: “Strawberries” is the plural of “strawberry”, so it doesn’t need an apostrophe.

The only time you’d put an apostrophe anywhere near strawberries would be if something belonged to those strawberries – for example the strawberries’ flavour, or the strawberries’ colour, or the strawberries’ tendency to get snaffled from the fridge before yours truly has a chance to sample them.

(Have you ever stared at a word for so long that it starts to look wrong even when it’s right? It’s happening right now with strawberries.)

So if you’re (shortening) in a greengrocer’s (possessive) shop and you see a sign advertising “Strawberrie’s”, you should now be able to explain confidently to them where they’ve gone wrong.

Although whether the greengrocer would thank you for the explanation is quite another matter.

Why our family is a load of losers

2011-07-28T09:53:00.000+01:00

There was a young guy walking round Sainsbury’s last Sunday morning who added a touch of culture to the otherwise mundane commercial proceedings.

He was singing, very pleasantly, in a mellow baritone. And the song he sang was Amazing Grace.

As we struggled up and down the aisles in a fruitless search for Ainsley Harriott’s Creamy Vegetable Spelt (don’t ask), his song drifted in and out of earshot, at once uplifting and slightly unnerving.

Prophetic, too, with its references to “lost” and “found”. We’d better change the subject now, before things get too deep and meaningful.

Especially because, over the last week, the Dixon household has become a veritable Bermuda Triangle of things disappearing and not showing up again.

First it was Mrs D’s reading glasses. She only bought them last Saturday morning, and by that same afternoon they had completely and utterly vanished.

Cue the old joke about needing your specs to find your specs. Or rather don’t, because it didn’t amuse Mrs D at all.

Especially when it transpired, two or three days later and after extensive floor-by-by-floor searches, that she’d dropped them down the front of her apron rather than putting them back into the case, and they’d been in the pocket ever since.

There have been other episodes too – like the car keys found in a jacket that hadn’t been worn for weeks – but the worst has been the Mystery of the Disappearing Book.

The book in question is Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut. It was meant to complement our already extensive collection of the Vonnegut oeuvre , and it was sitting on the sideboard waiting to be read.

And then it wasn’t.

It had gone, completely and utterly. The searches we conducted for Mrs D’s glasses paled into insignificance compared with the root-and-branch upheaval the house went through looking for Galápagos.

We still haven’t found it, and it looks like we never will. The only rational explanation seems to be that it got recycled with the papers. But with these disappearances becoming more and more irrational by the day, we probably need to look further afield for a reason.

And as regular readers of this column will know, this means blaming the Large Hadron Collider.

Boffins there announced last week that they have nearly found the Higgs Boson, or so-called God Particle. Nearly, but not quite.

Because it’s a well-known fact that the Large Hadron Collider has a mind of its own, and doesn’t want us to find the Higgs Boson, and sends out all sorts of coded warnings whenever anyone gets close.

This time, the warnings are plain for those who choose to read them. There’s a ghost in the machine, and if it wanted humanity to find the Higgs, it wouldn’t have hidden the book, or the glasses, or the keys.

Don't mess with the boson. Or, in the words of that hymn: “The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, The sun forbear to shine”.

You have been warned.

Parents - and teachers - face end-of-term hell

2011-07-22T15:02:00.000+01:00

You can always tell when it's the end of the school year.

In clothes shops, booksellers and stationers all over town, the posters start going up: "Back To School!"

Perhaps this is supposed to be some sort of ray of hope for parents already depressed at the prospect of keeping bored youngsters and stroppy teenagers from tearing each other's throats out for the next six weeks.

Because as we parents know, summer isn't the light at the end of the tunnel. It's the headlights of a speeding express train, and it's coming this way. Fast.

Of course, during those last few days of the summer term, schools still have to keep pupils under control and fully engaged in the learning process.

The provisions of the National Curriculum must be adhered to right up to the final ring of the school bell, or that nice Mr Gove will be knocking on the door wanting to know why.

So Religious Studies teachers reach for their trusty DVD of Monty Python's Life of Brian.

History lessons are made even more relevant with showings of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Philosophy teachers while away those last few hours with Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

And biology teachers cross their fingers and hope they can get away with Mega Python vs Gatoroid on the somewhat flimsy basis that the film is a serious investigation of climate-related disruption to the ecosystem of the Florida Everglades.

PE teachers have another ploy: sports days. During which it inevitably rains, forcing a re-run of that old standby Marathon Man.

All right, it doesn't have Pythons in it. But it does contain those extended scenes of torture without which no PE lesson would be complete.

Primary school teachers have it a little bit easier ("No they don't," says Mrs D), and in fact on the last day of term they even get presents and cards.

"Deer Miz Hunnypott," reads one treasured example. "Fank u four beeing my teechur. i wil miss u wen i go to big school. Luv from Kyle."

Perhaps Kyle would have been even more grateful if Miss Honeypot had taught him how to spell. Big school may present something of a steep learning curve to the poor wee mite.

As an experienced toiler at the chalkface, our very own Mrs D has been there and done that (although she's actually pretty good at teaching spelling, before you get any ideas to the contrary).

And the one thing she finds odd, not to say annoying, about the end of term gift-fest is the cruel disparity between the presents given to male and female teachers.

Miss usually gets flowers, or chocolates, or dainty pieces of tableware.

Sir usually gets booze.

Now don't think for a minute that gifts of any kind aren't welcome. But whether your child's teacher is male or female, please remember when you're out buying presents for them: it's the end of term, and everyone – not least the teachers – needs a very stiff drink.

All names have been changed to protect the innocent (Kyle) and the overworked (Miss Honeypot).

How Bath survived the killer bees

2011-07-07T10:09:00.000+01:00

July is upon us, and with it comes the start of the silly season. As newspaper staff pack their bags and jet away for their customary six-week Caribbean holidays, only skeleton crews are left behind to keep the public informed and entertained.

Bizarre and only partially credible tales pad out pages that in colder months would be filled with hard news.

And by honoured tradition, at least 75 per cent of these stories will be about unusual animal behaviour.

Even in normally level-headed Bath, something has been stirring. Or rather buzzing. Because at the weekend, the city came under attack from a swarm of bees. Or possibly two swarms. Or maybe even three.

The first reports came on Twitter, accompanied by hastily-snatched pictures of the apian horde taking up residence on a bicycle seat.

Then there was a video, clearly shot at some risk to the cinematographer, of the same swarm (or maybe a different one, it’s hard to tell with swarms) getting up close and personal with a floral display in Milsom Street. (Thanks to MusicalTeeth on YouTube for permission to use this video. Have a read of MusicalTeeth's blog.)

It’s all vaguely reminiscent of that rubbishy Michael Caine disaster film The Swarm, in which gigantic venomous killer bees from South America head north for the summer and threaten an all-star cast that includes Richard Widmark, Olivia de Havilland and Henry Fonda. A B movie if ever there was one. (Don’t worry, there’s worse to come.)

In the end, it was down to intrepid reporter Siobhan Of The Chronicle to bring a little sanity to the situation.

The Bath bees weren’t killer bees, they were just ordinary bees looking for a new home. And they’d just stuffed themselves full of honey, so they were fairly placid.

All in all, these bees were on their best bee-haviour. (Told you.)

There’s an old nursery rhyme which gives us a little more insight into the life of the bees and their keepers.

It goes:

“A swarm of bees in May is worth a load of hay.

“A swarm of bees in June is worth a silver spoon.

“A swarm of bees in July isn’t worth a fly.”

Which is a roundabout way of saying that swarms at this time of year are two-a-penny, and nothing to be really surprised about.

But the silly season needs more ammunition if it’s going to last until September, when the real news starts up again.

So bring on the Loch Ness Monster, which is reportedly camping out in the duck pond in Royal Victoria Park.

Bring on Sharktopus, a hybrid shark/octopus who makes Jaws look like a superannuated halibut, and who pops up regularly as the eponymous hero of a film on Syfy.

Or at least, he does when they’re not showing Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, or Mega Python vs Gatoroid, or Mega Piranha, which doesn’t have any natural enemies except the entire human race.

They’re all real films, and they’re all so bad that they’re not good, they’re really, really bad.

But if you do see one or more of these creatures swimming up the Avon, drop us a line. Because in the summer, all news is good news.

Brain of Bath update

2011-07-04T10:41:00.000+01:00

It just wasn't meant to be. Team Bath Chronicle came a disappointing 10th in Brain of Bath 2011.

The winners were solicitors Thrings, who as far as anyone can make out got almost every question right. Well done them.

Higher up the rankings than Team Chron came those stalwart chaps from The St James Wine Vaults, whose interpretation of the phrase "friendly rivalry" can best be described as loose.

Meanwhile, for those who like that sort of thing, here's a snap of me sniffing one of those plastic pots.

There's always next year...

Gearing up for Brain of Bath

2011-06-30T09:08:00.000+01:00

It’s quiz time again. And more specifically, the high-powered mental challenge that is Brain of Bath 2011.

Tonight the great and good of the city (plus a team from The Bath Chronicle) assemble in – yes, you guessed it – the Assembly Rooms to stretch their collective brains, show off their general knowledge and raise funds for homelessness charity Julian House.

Without blowing our own trumpet too much, the Chronicle team has done pretty well at Brain of Bath over the years. Indeed, the glittering cut-glass trophy has taken pride of place in the newsroom since last summer, and we won’t be giving it up without a fight.

At the start of every Brain of Bath the organiser, Cecil Weir of Julian House, gives out a dire warning: in the event of any dispute about the answers, he is always right.

And that’s the way it should be. Quizzes are about facts, not opinions. There can be no argument, for example, about who invented lemon curd. But you can bicker till the cows come home about why they ever bothered.

Of course, not everything in Brain of Bath depends entirely on general knowledge. A regular favourite is the so-called Smells Round.

How can things smell round, you may well ask. Well, you may ask, but no one will laugh.

The hard-working assistants dash round the tables and dish out 10 little plastic pots per team. In their past life they were 35mm film containers. The pots, not the assistants. Pay attention at the back.

In each pot is a cotton pad doused in smell, and when the teams open them a veritable symphony of aromas wafts skywards.

Gorgonzola mingles with Brut 33, aniseed dukes it out with Dettol. For a brief five minutes the Assembly Rooms smell like an explosion in an essential oils factory, and then calm is restored.

It’s only after the answers are read out that you realise that you’d never make it as a wine-taster. What you thought was banana is actually celery, and what you were convinced was Marmite turns out to be Chanel Number 5.

To make things even more difficult, there’s the Sport Round.

Now you might think that a newspaper would have an unfair advantage here, what with a crack team of sports writers at our beck and call.

But the sports guys are generally washing their hair on Brain of Bath night, and it’s up to the rest of us news/features/general dogsbody types to prove the old saying: You either know that you know nothing about sport, or you think you know something about sport, but you don’t.

Throw in a bit of internecine rivalry – solicitors vs accountants, Bath Chronicle vs regular pub quiz haunt the St James Wine Vaults – and you’ve got a recipe for a great night out. May the best team win – if they haven’t already.

How I stopped worrying and learned to love insecticide

2011-06-24T11:41:00.000+01:00

Never give a sucker an even break.

It seems a long time since February, and much water has passed under the bridge since then.

But readers of a horticultural disposition may well recall that it was during that gloomiest of months that the mighty LED grow lights were installed at Dixon Manor in the early days of our attempt to grow the World’s Strongest Chilli (official), the Naga Jolokia.

The powerful blue and red lights which we suspended above the seedlings back in the winter have since perplexed the neighbours, dazzled the cat and caused the disruption of several flights into Bristol Airport.

We even had some unkempt-looking bloke with a rucksack and tent knocking on the door last Monday asking if he’d reached Glastonbury. But that turned out to be Mister Holliday, who was never known for his sense of direction.

The lights do seem to have helped things grow.

Although oddly enough the Naga Jolokias haven’t really got going yet (they miss their homes in the Himalayas), while the cheap-as-chips chilli seeds that Mrs D brought home from Morrisons have gone completely bonkers and have already produced a few new pods.

What they’ve also produced, though, is aphids. Hundreds and hundreds of them.

It’s very easy not to like aphids. They’re brown, or green, or white, and they have a taste for young leaves. They creep out of their hidey-holes some time in April, attach themselves to your tender seedlings and breed like...

Well, like aphids.

It’s all very well living and letting live, but when a plague of uninvited sap-sucking midget pests sets up shop in your conservatory and proceeds to cover the leaves of your best specimens in sticky deposits, black mould and shed skin cases, then you’ve got a perfect right to feel aggrieved.

Now here’s the problem. As far as Mrs D is concerned, we are pretty much officially organic.

Slugs and snails may rampage unchecked through flower and fruit; pea moths may flutter at will through the legume beds; carrot flies may train their uncannily accurate homing beacons on what was going to be one third of next Sunday’s meat and two veg.

But if a hungry invertebrate comes sniffing round our crops, then all we’re really supposed to do is stop them getting in, or leave them to be devoured by their natural enemies, or squash them.

Well, they’ve already got into the conservatory, so it’s a bit late to stop them. And the cat has declared itself neutral as far as being a natural enemy of aphids is concerned. So squashing it is.

But when you’ve squashed 3,472 of the little blighters and you still don’t seem to be anywhere near halfway through, something’s got to give.

Thus it was that your once-organic blogger snuck out to the garden centre, bought some of the least noxious looking insecticide, brought it home and gave the aphids a damn good squirting. So long, suckers.

But it's our secret, ok? So whatever you do, don’t go telling Mrs D.

We aren't the Wood Preservation Society

2011-06-17T09:25:00.000+01:00

Now this may come as something of a surprise, but a lot of the things you see in adverts on the telly aren’t actually true.

We take as our text all those cheery people singing about the “Wood Preservation Society”.

They prance out into their gardens brandishing sprayers, paint-brushes and cheesy grins, do a bit of a Busby Berkeley number and Bob’s your uncle: their fences, sheds, pergolas, arbours and decking are as good as new.

Real life isn’t like that.

Take the fence between us and the next-door neighbour. It was put up ages ago by the last but one occupant of what we now fondly refer to as Dixon Manor.

And in the intervening years it has become a trifle wonky. So much so, in fact, that before we could even start to think about painting it we had to gird our loins in preparation for the fencing equivalent of some serious root canal work.

(Changing the subject for a moment, what makes people want to become dentists? OK, the money’s not bad, but all that grubbing around with the orthodontic equivalents of a cold chisel, a lump hammer and a wrecking bar can’t do much for your sense of truth and beauty. Answers on a postcard...)

Anyway, with a new fencepost drilled, fixed, fettled and concreted – who’d have thought a humble columnist had so many non-related skills? – it was time to break out the fancy new sprayer.

Or rather it wasn’t. Because it was windy. And the next day was windy. And the day after that was windier still. And then it rained.

Have you noticed that the sun always shines on the Wood Preservation Society? Well, it doesn’t on our fence.

And in a prominent place on the War-and-Peace-length instructions for the aforementioned Fancy New Sprayer, it said, in large bold letters: “Do not spray in windy conditions or when rain is expected within the next five hours.”

If you can spot any substantive difference between the above and “Do not spray, ever”, then please jot it down on the same postcard.

The time spent waiting for a break in the weather was put to good use reading the rest of the instructions.

Which included among other gems the sort of diagram that Nasa might use if it ever forgot how to build space shuttles and then wanted to put together a new one.

Eventually, though, the wind died down to Force One on the Beaufort Scale, charmingly described as “Light air: branches stay attached to trees, pedestrians walk vertically rather than at 45° to the horizontal”.

Out came the sprayer and the green paint. But what they don’t tell you in the adverts is that if you’ve got a slightly tatty old fence panel that’s previously been painted brown, half of the green gets absorbed and you end up with camouflage.

That and miniature green speckles all over your glasses.

We’ll do the rest in brown, and hope for the best. But that Wood Preservation Society has got an awful lot to answer for.

Bath's new cycle racks

2011-06-02T11:18:00.000+01:00

They came in the night, silently and without warning. Dark grey, purposeful, skeletal shapes, they embedded themselves at strategic junctions, pierced the streets with their alien roots, locked themselves down firmly, and waited.

Cycle corral, Barton Street, Bath

Few saw their coming. Even fewer saw them change, from their original, other-worldly, insectoid forms into a disguise so eerily accurate that in the cold light of dawn they very nearly blended in with the scenery.

Nearly, but not quite. A few observant souls realised as they trod Bath’s early morning streets that something had changed. Forever.

Enough of this nonsense. The arrival of Bath’s new bike racks is a serious matter, not to be trivialised into a sub-Stephen-King-style tale of tension, horror and catharsis.

Up to a couple of weeks ago, our bike racks, or cycle parking spaces, or whatever the appropriate name is, were rather ordinary-looking affairs. The majority resembled nothing more nor less than an unfolded staple with its pointy ends stuck into the pavement.

(Although in the course of the in-depth preparation for this piece – which involved standing up and looking out of the back window of Bath Chronicle Towers – one researcher did discover some odd spring-shaped stands at the bottom end of Kingsmead Square. But two of them are so badly bent that they could only be used by one of those racing bikes that goes round a banked circuit at 45°. Can a square have an end? We digress.)

The new bike racks, which are apparently known as "cycle corrals", are a much classier proposition. They’re painted the shade of grey you normally find on your very rich friends’ new kitchen units, and what’s really clever about them is that they’re shaped like cars.

Cycle corral, Queen Square, Bath

For a number of reasons, this is a very good idea.

First off, it continues Bath’s long tradition of thought-provoking street art.

Three years ago it was pigs, last year it was lions. This time it’s battleship-grey automobiles.

Second off, real cars will be less likely to drive “accidentally” into the new bike racks. Cars never deliberately attack their own kind (it’s always the other car’s fault), and they aren’t intelligent enough to tell the difference between the real thing and a clever simulacrum. Thus the new stands are less susceptible to attack. Look at the picture: the blue BMW is keeping a respectful distance. QED.

Third, and most importantly, it will sow doubt in the minds of car drivers. “Here’s this bike rack,” they’ll think. “It takes up the same space as my car, but they’ve managed to fit 12 bikes into it. If we all got out of our cars and onto our bikes, wouldn’t life be grand!”

Do drivers really think like that? Well, hope springs eternal...

The new cycle corrals have been spotted in Milsom Street, Queen Square, Westgate Buildings and Barton Street.

There are doubtless others breeding even as you read this, but our researcher was getting tired and had to have a sit-down.

They encourage cycling, they don’t bung up the pavements, they don’t spoil the view, and what’s more they annoy inveterate car drivers.

Bring 'em on - the more, the merrier.

Denmark bans Marmite - this means war

2011-05-26T10:04:00.000+01:00

By the time you read this, there will more than likely be a war on.

A war between countries traditionally seen as allies. A war between two former close friends, linked by common threads of history and heritage, proud bastions of democracy, freedom and justice.

Yes, dear reader (or readers, if there’s more than one of you left by now), before these words reach the public domain, it can confidently be predicted that Britain will be at war with Denmark.

You’ll probably know why. As reported widely in the media earlier this week, Denmark has banned Marmite.
Say it again slowly for full effect: Denmark. Has. Banned. Marmite.

There’s little more to say, but a lot more space to say it in, so let’s expand for a while on that ghastly thought.

It’s one of life’s great constants that you either love Marmite or you hate it. And if you hate it, you’re wrong. Fact. No arguments, please.

Marmite is the spread that made Britain great.

Marmite is to us Britons what the druid Getafix’s magic potion was to the Gaulish warrior Asterix.

Marmite takes mewling toddlers and moulds them into 16-stone second-row rugby forwards.

Marmite braces you at breakfast, lifts you at lunch and succours you at suppertime. A world without Marmite would be pale, insipid and downright unsavoury.

Yeasty, salty Marmite is packed with vitamin B12, niacin, thiamin, riboflavin, celery extract and lots of other good stuff.

And that’s what those dastardly Danes don’t like. Back in 2004 they passed a law banning the addition of vitamins to foodstuffs. Now, seven years later, they’ve started to enforce it, and Marmite is vanishing fast from the supermarket shelves of Copenhagen, Aarhus and Esbjerg.

Not that it was ever much of a hot product in the land of Hamlet, little mermaids and Sandi Toksvig. If you ever visit a real Danish supermarket, you’d be hard-pushed to find anything that doesn’t taste of smoke. Or caraway seeds. Or both.

Let’s lighten up a bit. Time for a Danish joke. Q: Where do you hide a slice of Danish bacon? A: Behind a glass of water.

No, this won’t do. There are some things in life you have to take seriously. And the Danish Marmite ban is one of them.

Maybe it won’t actually lead to war, but it will certainly lead to a roaring trade in food parcels to our beleagured ex-pat friends and relations.

And it won’t just be Marmite in the parcels. Horlicks, Ovaltine and Farley’s Rusks have all fallen under the wrath of the Dane. As has the Vegemite, the antipodean version of our national spread. Never tried it, personally, but some folk swear by it. ("Bloody Vegemite," they say.)

It’s easy to see the roots of the ban in a massive and hitherto well-hidden international conspiracy. Prince Philip, of course, is closely related to the Danish royal family, and it’s a well-known fact that he doesn’t like Marmite (subs please check). Plus Iceland used to be part of Denmark, and they’re chucking another shedload of volcanic ash in our general direction. So it must be true. The Danes are out to get us.

But as with all good conspiracies, and to quote one well-known Dane: “The rest is silence.”

Biometric scan, you chaps? What a wizard wheeze!

2011-05-19T10:19:00.000+01:00

Extraordinary news from a Bath secondary school, which has announced that it intends to do away with lunch money and instead identify and charge young diners by means of a biometric scan.

From early June, students at Beechen Cliff School will have their fingerprints digitised and converted into alpha-numeric data (it says here). The aforesaid data will be held in a database (because that’s what you do with data, innit?) and will be used to determine who gets to eat how much of what.

As the lads queue up for lunch they’ll pass their fingertips over a detector which will work out who they are, calculate how much their ever-willing parents have coughed up this week, and - all being well - begrudgingly let them into the dining hall to enjoy a hearty luncheon.

Gone at last will be the traditional method of paying for your lunch by dragging a Year Seven round behind the bike sheds, holding them up by their ankles and shaking them until the money falls out.

The idea of this new technological advance is, of course, to reduce fraud and cut down on cash handling. An excellent plan: the less cash schoolkids have the better. After all, they only spend it – what do they think money’s for, anyway?

And you’d have to be pretty inventive if you wanted to cheat the system. Rather than shaking down a Year Seven (literally or metaphorically), you’d have to transfer a precise copy of the whorls, loops and arches of his fingerprints on to the tips of your own, no doubt inky, digits. Quite a project for the budding biochemist.

Of course, in the good old days of Greyfriars School things would have turned out rather differently. Let’s put our collective ear to the door of The Remove.

“I say, chaps,” said Billy Bunter. “Old Quelchy’s come up with a wizard wheeze. The whole Remove has been told to queue up in the San to have our dabs taken. Then he’ll find out who ate all the pies!”

“Cheese it, Bunter, you burbling chump,” piped up Harry Wharton. “Everyone knows who ate all the pies: it was you!”

“You bally rotter, Wharton,” groaned the Fat Owl. “That’s a jolly unsporting thing to say about a fellow! But what do you think Quelchy will do if he catches me?”

“Six of the best at the very least, I should say,” chimed in Bob Cherry.

“Yarooh!” yelped Billy.

(Which is "Hooray!" backwards, fact fans. Never let it be said this stuff isn't educational.)

To cut a long story short, Billy and chums escape with a jaw from the head, Coker the bully is dunked in the fountain and Mossoo the French master lays on a banquet of buns.

Weekly for many years, The Magnet comic ran a Bunter story, usually penned by the inimitable Frank Richards. The characters really did say things like “Cheese it!” and “Yarooh”, and graphic descriptions of corporal punishment featured heavily.

Real life wasn’t a great deal better: along with the public school antics in an edition of 1929 are printed adverts for free passages to Ontario for “approved boy farm learners aged 15 to 19”. Licensed slavery, by the sound of it.

Not, of course, that anything like that would ever happen at Beechen Cliff. But digital prevention is certainly better than cure.

Funky monkeys take the biscuit

2011-05-12T15:02:00.000+01:00

If ever you should feel in need of a damn good frightening, then the best place to start is very definitely in front of the TV in your own sitting room.

Of course there’s the news, in which you can confirm your suspicions that the world is a very nasty place.

There’s the new series of The Apprentice, in which you can similarly confirm your suspicions that this year’s crop of would-be entrepreneurs are twice as mercenary, and twice as unaware of their own failings, as last year’s.

And if you’re in the market for liberal quantities of blood, guts, violence and swearing, then switch to the right channel at the right time and you might just happen to catch Gordon Ramsay’s Adventures With Offal. All right, that last one isn’t a real programme. But it could be, easily.

Still, there’s no doubt that one of the scariest sights on TV at the moment is that advert for Jammy (and other flavour) Dodgers.

For those of you who haven’t yet been scared out of your skins by it, here’s a synopsis.

Young lady stands in supermarket biscuit aisle. Amid the innocent-looking digestives are the Dodgers – not just Jammy but Toffee too.

And scampering above the Dodgers are two of the most evil-looking creatures you’ll ever see this side of a re-run of King Kong Meets Godzilla.

They’re both monkeys, but not the cute and cuddly kind. They’re CGI monkeys with cold, hard, staring eyes, and they’re trying to tempt the young lady into buying their wares.

“Jammy, jammy, jammy,” says the jammy-coloured one. “Toffee, toffee, toffee,” says its toffee-coloured counterpart.

(In another version of the ad there’s a choccie-coloured simian too. Guess what he says?)

All the monkeys have frills around their necks that resemble distorted Elizabethan ruffs, but are obviously intended to look like the biscuity bit of the biscuit.

But there’s something about their eyes that completely freaks you out. Dark pools of evil they are, where malevolence swims as purposefully as – well, a very purposeful malevolent swimming thing.

“Buy MY dodgers,” they seem to say, “or you will float with me down to the nether depths of Hell.”

If the makers of all these different Dodgers – that’s you, Burton Foods of Cwmbran – had wanted to frighten us off their Jammy, Toffee or Choccie varieties for life, they couldn’t have tried harder.

Or perhaps they could. Because now there’s a new contender for the title of Scariest Thing on TV. Another animal: a stuffed bear. It interrupts a Mediterranean tête-à-tête supper to tell the lurve interest – whose name is Janice – that her holiday need never end if she opens a packet of Birds Eye Emperor Prawns.

Visions like this give children nightmares, and should only be shown after the watershed.

No, if we have to have odd creatures on TV, then bring back The Goodies’ Funky Gibbon. At least you could dance to that.

Joining the hunt for intelligent life

2011-04-28T09:31:00.000+01:00

It’s been quite a week for high technology.

It all started on Easter Monday when Mrs D decided it would be a good idea to shoot off early to the car boot sale, leaving the rest of the family either to lie in until midday (step forward, Dixon Junior) or do the weekly shop (self and loyal daughter).

So while two of us trudged the aisles of Morrisons searching for titbits in the post-Easter wasteland, Mrs D trawled the piles of tat heaped on trestle tables up at the racecourse.

The weekly shoppers came back with the usual stuff: cereals, bread, ham, frozen peas.

The intrepid bargain hunter came back with real treasure. Not, unfortunately, the priceless but unrecognised antique that everyone else at the sale was hoping to find, but a Ladybird book.

And How it Works... The Computer - scanned pages here - is not your average Janet-and-John-Down-On-The-Farm kind of Ladybird book. It was written for the nerds of 1979, and has section headings like Binary Arithmetic, Gates and Highways and Does A Computer Make Mistakes?.

The fact that the latter section refers to something called a “parity bit” gives an idea of the intended audience. Which must have been pretty small, even in the halcyon days of free tertiary education.

The illustrations are scary too: white-coated technocrats wrangle punched tapes and cards. Cowed inputters develop repetitive strain injury as they labour beside the visual display units of mini-computers that take up more office space than a Transit van.

Fascinating stuff, and 1979’s predictions for the future are fascinating too.

“What is the latest thing today,” we read, “may be old-hat in five years time.” Five years? Tell that to someone whose iPhone 4 has suddenly been made obsolete by the iPhone 7, a week after they took out an 18-month contract with Orange.

Most of the computers in the book are painted orange, though. So perhaps the writers were more prescient than even they knew.

What they couldn’t predict, though, was the scary technological stuff that’s happening today.

If you’re on PlayStation Network, for example, then you’re doubtless a bit worried right now about your personal details getting into the hands of hackers. Those of us with online XBoxes and/or Wiis probably shouldn’t feel too smug either.

And if you’re an interstellar alien, you may find it just that bit more difficult to make contact with us brainy humans: the people who run SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, have run short of money and turned off their radio telescope array.

Hope springs eternal, though: there’s an internet rumour that Ladybird published a very short print run of that computer book in plain covers, to teach senior civil servants at the MoD about Peripheral Units and such, without appearing to be reading kids’ stuff.

If you find one of those, you’ve got a genuine antique on your hands, which might raise enough money to get SETI going again. What goes around comes around, they say.

Grab yourself a slice of happiness

2011-04-14T10:58:00.000+01:00

A news item on the radio on Tuesday caused a certain amount of early-morning harrumphing in the Dixon household.

It was the launch day of Action for Happiness, a movement whose aim is “bringing together people from all walks of life who want to play a part in creating a happier society for everyone”.

It’s a laudable goal, and the chorus of harrumphs from Dixon Towers may have been more the result of a Lenten lack of chocolate than any deeper-rooted cynicism.

Those who join the movement make a very simple pledge: “I will try to create more happiness and less unhappiness in the world around me.”

And that is a very good thing.

Of course, some people have been there before. Ken Dodd, Liverpudlian comedian and variety entertainer, inventor of the Diddymen and the tickling stick, hit the charts in 1964 with a jolly little ditty called Happiness, and he’s been singing it ever since.

That said, and to put the cynical hat back on for a second, Doddy’s next hit was called Tears, and it’s still the 19th best-selling UK single of all time, just below that irritating Bryan Adams number about Robin Hood.

Misery sells, it would appear.

Mind you, the fact that Boney M are the only band to have two hits in the top ten says quite a lot about the tastes of the record-buying public.

Where were we? Right, happiness.

The Action for Happiness website has been up and down a bit over the first couple of days of its existence, but once you’re on it you can learn, among other things, about the Ten Keys to Happier Living.

You can find out that Doing Good Feels Good, and you can read quite a bit of philosophical stuff about The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number, and Utilitarianism (which you hoped you’d heard the last of in O-level history lessons).

You can even download a Happiness Action Pack, and posters to stick up in your workplace.

And you can learn about what they call the GREAT DREAM: Giving, Relating, Exercising, Appreciating, Trying out; Direction, Resilience, Emotion, Acceptance, Meaning.

It all sounds great, and you shouldn’t be cynical, and you want everyone to be happy, and everything should be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and that Ken Dodd song is drilling a hole in your brain, but, but, but...

The pictures on the Ten Keys to Happier Living web page look strangely familiar. They’re black and white, 1950s vintage, happy smiling people. They could well have appeared on one of those comedy birthday cards with a modernised caption. You know the sort: “Mabel was just a shy retiring wallflower – until she discovered vodka”.

There’s something just a little bit creepy about all this enforced happiness, and before you know it paranoia starts to set in.

The men who know best are coming, with their smiles, and their philosophy, and their white coats.

“We want you to be happy,” they say. They look like they mean it. And they will be very hard to resist.

Rage against the machine

2011-03-24T10:46:00.000Z

This is a story of one man’s battle with the inanimate; of human ingenuity pitted against mechanical obstinacy; of native wit vying with the vindictive malice of a powered garden implement.

It’s a tale of frustration, of heroism in the face of adversity and ultimately of triumph – but of whom, and over which?

It begins in a small allotment on the edge of Bath, lovingly tended and nurtured by... Well, let’s just call her Mrs D.

It is spring, or at least something approaching it, and her thoughts are turning, as they always do at this time of year, to the burgeoning grass and weeds that thrive in the paths between the sturdy raised beds fabricated by her loving and resourceful Other Half.

Grass and weeds that might ultimately stand between Mrs D and the coveted title of Tidy Allotment Holder of the Year 2011.

After some debate, the die is cast. Yours Truly will buy a new grass trimmer to replace the current rechargeable model, whose battery goes flat after 10 minutes and whose approach to unsightly tufts is to tickle them into submission rather than give them the sound whacking they so richly deserve.

And Yours Truly will go where Yours Truly has never gone before: into the world of the two-stroke.

Now a two-stroke grass trimmer is a scary thing. It comes with a manual as thick as your wrist, and dire warnings about donning eye protection, ear defenders and hobnail boots before you even take it out of its box.

In fact, “scary” is an understatement. The new grass trimmer is downright terrifying, especially for someone whose relationship with two-strokes has never been close since the days when his dad wouldn’t get him a moped.

First, you have to put it together. You’d think they might have done that in the factory, but no, this trimmer is the grown-up equivalent of a Meccano set, designed to educate as well as to entertain.

Next, you have to fuel it up. In the special bottle provided, you mix 500ml of unleaded with several drops of gloop (whose main effect is to turn the petrol an evil shade of blue) and decant the heady brew into the tank of the waiting trimmer.

Which only holds 300ml.

Cue smothered guffaws from the assembled audience, who should be standing no closer than 15 metres IT SAYS HERE but persist in rubbernecking like gawpers at an accident waiting to happen.

Tighten fuel cap, clean up spill, tighten fuel cap even more, proceed to launch pad, stand by for blast off.

Contrary to expectations, this is the easy bit. A quick tug of the rope and the trimmer starts first time.

But will it trim? Not on your nelly. The business end whizzes round like crazy, but as soon as the plastic wiry stuff hits anything tougher than a single blade of red fescue it vanishes into the innards of the machine.

Turn off, dismantle soi-disant Bump Head, rewind plastic wiry stuff, re-assemble, pull rope, bump Bump Head, watch plastic wiry stuff do magic vanishing act for a second time. And a third, and a fourth.

Swear, give up, go home, try again next weekend.

There’s a knack to this trimming lark, apparently, so watch this space. If we ever find out what it is, we’ll let you know.

Why gambling is a mug's game

2011-03-17T08:57:00.000Z

Many, many, many years ago, stepmother Dixon decided it would be a good idea to put her stepson off gambling.

Her plan was a simple one. Give said stepson (yours truly) a fiver and tell him to pick a horse in the Grand National.

The chosen horse would naturally lose, young Dixon would be put off the gee-gees for life, and the Dixon millions would be safe for posterity.

Young Dixon decided to play along: first, he would choose the horse with the number of legs most closely approaching three; second, the dubious nag would be paired with a jockey with a career trajectory only slightly less promising than that of a seaside donkey minder.

As two concessions to hope, he would pay the extra 50p tax in advance (it was that long ago) and he would split his fiver each way.

Now an each-way bet, for readers unfamiliar with the ways of the turf, is similar to the offside rule in football. Those who don’t understand it spend hours having it explained to them by those who do, and neither party is happy with the outcome of the discussion.

But the general idea is if your horse comes in second, third or (sometimes) fourth, you still get a bit of your money back. But if the odds are less than four (or five) to one, you don’t get enough money back to recoup your original stake.

To add to your confusion, you also have to bear in mind the two basic rules of horse racing. The first of these is always to bet on the grey. Remembering always that greys aren’t grey, they’re white, with a bit of silvery-black thrown in. The second rule? Never bet on the grey.

And if you think that’s complicated, try working out a fourfold accumulator with a combination tricast on the side.

Anyway, the neophyte punter picked up the each-way concept pretty quickly, dashed off to the bookies and laid his money down.

Later that afternoon, the Dixons gathered round the flickering screen of their steam-powered black-and-white TV and waited for the off, secure in the knowledge that the horse would lose and that the heir to the Dixon fortunes would never henceforth be tempted to throw his supposed inheritance into the path of those thundering hooves.

The jockey was recovering from testicular cancer. His name was Bob Champion. The horse had the same great-great-great-grandfather on both sides of his pedigree, and was recovering from a serious leg injury. His name was Aldaniti.

Together, they won the 1981 Grand National at odds of ten to one.

Which meant a return on the original investment of something like £35, including the stake: not too shabby for a complete beginner.

There was a mighty throng at the bookies when we went back in to collect the winnings, and a sense of anticipation in the air.
Later that evening it was the final of the Eurovision Song Contest, and in those halcyon days the UK had at least an outside chance of winning.

The bookies were offering ten to one – we just laughed. But a few hours later, Bucks Fizz ripped their skirts off and won with Making Your Mind Up. And that’s why gambling really is a mug’s game.

Trying to make sense of the Census

2011-03-14T08:48:00.001Z

It’s amazing what pops through the letterbox when you’re least expecting it.

Only last week, as the Dixons were at work, or school, or whatever else it is they’re supposed to be doing between breakfast and supper time, the postie came along with a great big purple envelope and crammed it carefully through the door.

It had a picture of an origami bus on it, and it threatened dire legal penalties if we didn’t open it up and give it a jolly good read. So we did.

Inside was one of those questionnaires that start off easy but get more and more complicated as you go on.

You know the kind of thing.

“What is your name?

“No, not your surname, your first name. Answer in BLACK or BLUE ink, NOT purple, or green, or red or any tint, shade, admixture or combination thereof.”

So if the original questionnaire is printed in purple, why can’t you fill it in with purple? Just asking. Not really expecting an answer or anything.

Next question: “What is your address?” Oh come on. They know that already: they sent the form to our house, and it arrived safely, if a bit scrumpled, so They must already know where we live.

Whoever They are.

OK, humour Them. Anyone displaying this level of ignorance must be pretty important.

“Will you be living at that address on Sunday March 27?”

Probably. Unless we’re made homeless by a herd of rampaging wildebeest, or we win the Lottery and zoom off to the Caribbean.

A bit like Mrs D’s brother. Not that he’s won the Lottery, you understand. But he’s a plumber, which comes to pretty much the same thing. However, we digress.

“Did you answer YES or NO to Question 7a?”

Sorry, can’t really remember. We were too busy digressing.

“If you answered YES to Question 7a, proceed to Question 15b. If you answered NO, go back to page 3 and sign the declaration thereon.”

By now you’re getting fed up with all this bureaucratic snakes and ladders, but persevere you must.

Because after some research on the UK Census 2011 website, you find that failing to complete the form will leave you open to a fine “subject to level 3 on the standard scale under the Criminal Justice Act”.

Which in layman’s terms is anything up to a thousand quid.

So onwards and upwards. “A man walks two kilometres east, rests for half an hour and then walks 3.5 miles west. Where is he?”

Trick question, eh? Ah, hang on, it’s Dixon Junior’s maths homework. We’ll get on to that later.

Because finally, we reach the last few questions and can start to relax.

“What is your religion?” After the multiple choices (Anglo-Catholic, Postlapsarian, None, Nun...) there’s a box to fill in if you don’t feel you quite fit in to any of the pre-defined cultural norms.

You could use this space to claim that your religious beliefs preclude you from filling in census forms, or do the sad old joke about the Jedi. But it’s probably best to be sensible.

Because, after all, They DO know where you live.

Joanna Lumley and "slack morals"

2011-03-03T15:17:00.001Z

What does it take to turn an actor or other public figure into a National Treasure? How do they transmute from your everyday common-or-garden lesser spotted celebrity into something more enduring and – well – treasured?

There’s a good reason for asking. Because as soon as someone becomes a National Treasure, they seem to think they can mess with things they don’t really seem to know nothing about. And especially bringing up children.

As somebody said earlier this week, Jamie Oliver wouldn’t let a teacher manage his restaurant business without a bit of training. So what makes him think he knows how to run a classroom?

The latest National Treasure to enter the bringing-up-children stakes is Joanna Lumley. Who is, most definitely, a treasure.

She was one of the early Bond Girls. As Purdy in The New Avengers she was one of the few glamorous sparks in a dull decade bereft of true glamour.

She was hilarious as Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous. She has been doughty in her support for Gurkhas and Tibetans. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, she has more honorary doctorates than you could shake a stick at and in 2010 she was Oldie of the Year.

Joanna Lumley is every inch a true National Treasure.

But then, in the latest Radio Times, she has to go and spoil it all.

(Dixon puts on his stoutest tin helmet and presses on regardless...)

Today’s children, says Joanna, find it “laughably amusing to shoplift and steal.” Today’s children copy and paste their homework from the internet. Today’s children need to take on more responsibility. Today’s children have “slack morals”.

Slack morals? Slack morals? Sorry, Joanna, but you’ve lost the plot.

Here’s a little thought experiment. You’re the parent of two teenage children. You’ve worked hard to bring them up as best you can. You’ve encouraged them to do their own homework rather than blag it off Wikipedia. As far as you’ve noticed, they’ve never been done for shoplifting. And one of them is starting his Duke of Edinburgh’s this weekend with a 25-mile hike.

Now put them in a room with Joanna Lumley, and get her to tell them to their faces that they have “slack morals”. Would she?

And what’s her answer to the problems of modern youth?

“I would like to see children involved in hearty-sounding pursuits, such as building a camp,” she says. So far so good - camps are fun.

“Or getting an entire school to go and work on a farm for a term.”

What a fantastic idea. The children could learn hearty skills like operating heavy machinery, mixing pesticides, gutting chickens and drenching sheep for worms. And the teachers could have the term off – unless they’re expected to muck in.

Take it from someone who had a Saturday job down on the farm as a nipper – smelly it is, hearty it ain’t.

Sorry again, Joanna, but you’re wrong. Kids are just the same as they always were – but as National Treasures get older, for some reason they think they know better.

(Dixon puts on a second tin helmet and retreats quickly to his bunker.)

Why mauve is the new purple

2011-02-26T12:24:00.000Z

It's getting better all the time. The long, dark, turgid slog that was January is behind us, there's a chink of light in the sky at 6.40 in the morning, there's a hint of spring in the air, England have seen off the indomitable cricketers of the Netherlands. And just like the glossy cherry on the frosty icing of an especially moist cake, along comes London Fashion Week to cheer us up even more.

Ah, London Fashion Week. Regimes may crumble, earthquakes may rumble, but the show must go on. The glitterati hobnob with the fashionistas. Velvet flirts with velour, denim disses diamante. Electric blue clashes with strawberry pink. And loses.

And everyone who isn't directly involved pulls a sheet over their heads and wonders what it's all about.

What it's all about, of course, is the transmogrification of art into money. The often outlandish creations you see sashaying down the catwalk this week will soon be stripped down to become the off-the-peg stuff you'll be buying in the shops in a few months' time.
Click here for more

So what are the top stories at this year's extravaganza of style? What's hot to trot, what's too cool for school? We asked Chronicle style guru Aramintha Tyghte-Pringle for her tips for 2011.

First and most important, says Aramintha, is colour. And this season, that colour is mauve. "Forget taupe, darling. Forget aubergine. Apricot is so last October. Mauve is bold, mauve makes a statement. Mauve says: 'I am me; you are you'. Mauve is the new purple."

The signature look this spring, says Aramintha, is the hat. Think big, think brash, think that wedding (Minty's already got her invite! She's so made up about it!).

But this year the hat comes with a twist. "Darling, the big word is basketwork," breathes Aramintha. "Jasper, Vivienne, Issey, Stella: everyone who is anyone has gone for that open-weave look."

Hardly practical, though, is it Minty? Surely the main point of wearing a hat is to keep the weather off? And surely the holes in an open-weave basketwork hat would do exactly the opposite?

"Are you quite mad, darling?" squeaks Aramintha. "The girl who wears this kind of hat doesn't go outside! She so doesn't care about the weather! She gets a taxi! Everywhere!"

OK, Minty, we'll take your word for it. The world of fashion is a mysterious one, and it is not for us mere mortals to question its ways.

Finally, though, the question everyone's asking: are hemlines going up or coming down?

Aramintha fixes us with a steely eye. "Down, darling. Definitely down. Hemlines follow the markets, and times are getting tight. Why, Daddy's even had to let two of the gardeners go.

"But like he says, we're all in it together. That's why he's stopped buying Champers. And by June, my skirt will be right down around my ankles."

Aramintha Tyghte-Pringle is currently at the Priory recovering from a fit of the italics.

I'm not growing ganja

2011-02-10T09:11:00.000Z

Halfway up a hill on the outskirts of Bath, something is stirring.

Walk past one particular house late at night or in the early hours of the morning, and you may see from the conservatory an eerie pinkish glow. Passers-by of a nervous disposition may even imagine they detect flickerings, groans and noxious gases emerging from this otherwise ordinary suburban semi.

“What can it be?” you may ask. “What unnatural experiment are the inhabitants conducting within? Can they be harnessing the forces of nature to engender some foul and ghastly new life form?”

Steel your nerves, dear reader, and you will learn.

The house, as you may already have guessed, is Dixon Towers. And no, the pinkish glow is not an early Valentine’s Day lurve gift but, well, something of an experiment.

For a few years now the Dixon conservatory has produced a small but steady flow of chilli peppers – enough to keep us in pizza toppings, Saturday night curries and interestingly-flavoured vodka throughout the year.

But this year it was decided by the chief chilli-grower (yours truly) that we needed something a bit more challenging than your run-of-the-mill Cayenne. So we’re going for the Naga Jolokia, officially recognised as The World’s Strongest Chilli.

Or at least, that’s what it says on the seed packet. Where it also says that Naga Jolokias have a long growing season, and need to be sown in early February at the very latest to give you any hope of a crop by September.

But early February in the Dixon conservatory is traditionally a time when there’s very little natural light. So what we needed was a bit of illuminative oomph.

Now your typical greenhouse lighting system requires ventilating, ballasting, all sorts of complicated stuff. Stuff that doesn’t sit well in a conservatory that doubles as a home for three lively guinea pigs, 27 half-finished Airfix models and a ten-foot pile of choral music (don’t ask).

What was needed was a compact light source: hence the eerie glow.

Because what we ended up with was a new-fangled bank of LED grow lights. Pure blue and red illumination. No heat, low power, easily suspended above the plant pots using a length of old plank, three feet of string and a couple of lengths of angle iron.

The initial set-up caused some merriment among the younger generation (“Dad, are you growing ganja?”) And some of the instructions are a tad over-dramatic (“Shut off the power when there may have thunderbolt to avoid being damaged by the high pressure.”)

But we got there in the end. In a week or two, the Naga Jolokias will realise that they’re in an environment that approximates to their natural home in the Khyber Pass, and start to sprout.

Bathed in a magenta glow for 18 hours a day, the seedlings will burgeon into sturdy plants, and by September we’ll be feasting on blistering pods with a Scoville rating of a million or more. We hope.

And what of the flickerings, groans and gases? Don’t worry: they’re just the after-effects of last year’s crop.

Stuck with the traffic

2011-01-27T13:13:00.000Z

Hot off the presses of Lonely Planet comes a new guide to the West Country, which rather cheekily suggests that Bath, despite its spectacular architecture, cultural sophistication and culinary savoir-faire, will have you, the tourist, “weeping into your steering wheel” as you try to negotiate the rush-hour traffic.

And there was a telling comment about the article from a reader on thisisbath.co.uk : “You’re not stuck in traffic; you are the traffic.”

It’s a tricky one. Visitors to Bath have the option of arriving by car, train, coach, bus or bike. Each has its pros and cons, but for most people the big pro about driving a car is freedom.

Freedom from timetables, freedom from arriving in need of a shower, freedom to enjoy your own space as you travel. And, sadly, freedom to sit in a queue on the London Road pumping exhaust fumes into the skies above the Georgian city.

Those of us who live here often end up being part of the same traffic, but the reasons are a bit different.

In an ideal world there would be no need for cars in Bath. We’d all travel for free, in non-polluting electric monorail pods whose tracks would blend unnoticeably into the honeyed stone background, and which would whisk us silently from our homes on the outskirts to the cultural and retail paradise of the city centre in three minutes flat.

During the brief journey we would be lulled by ambient New Age music and wrapped in an energising cloud of lavender, grapefruit and patchouli essential oils, arriving at the SouthGate transport hub refreshed, envigorated and primed to be gently separated from our money.

In the real world, there’s First Bus.

For which, unlike the mythical monorail, you have to pay.

Of course bus companies have to make money. And of course if the fares were subsidised, we’d end up paying for them through our council tax in any case. There’s no such thing as a free ride.

But there is something a little bit skewed about a city where the most economic way to get your family into the centre is to drive a mile and a half to one of the most expensive car parks in town.

Last Saturday, even before First put its single and return fares up, it was cheaper to park in the Podium for an hour than to take self and young Miss D on the bus from Zone 3 to the bank and shops.

Cycling isn’t an option for us.

Walking in might have been, but walking back – uphill all the way – with the mighty half shoulder of lamb ordered by Mrs D was not.

Even walking there and getting the bus back would have been more expensive than driving and parking.

If we’d wanted to stay in town for longer than an hour, it might have made economic sense to drive half a mile to the Park and Ride, get the bus in and out, and then drive back home. Economic, but logistically bonkers.

We all want our freedom, and we all want our flexibility. But just for once, it would be rather nice to feel you could be part of the solution to transport around Bath, rather than part of the problem.

Get in touch with the inner geek

2011-01-20T09:08:00.000Z

Even when you get to the advanced age of [redacted], it’s rather thrilling when a relative even older than yourself gives you a book token for Christmas.

Because your modern book token is a clever thing: a plastic smart card as opposed to a cardboard folding one.

It’s got a magnetic strip and a barcode and a PIN and all that stuff, and you can go online and type in the numbers and it’ll tell you how much you’ve got left to spend on it.

Although the glacial reaction time of the National Book Tokens website suggests to the suspicious mind either that everyone else in the UK is trying to look up their balance at the same time, or that nobody’s ever actually tried it before, and the server is having a hard job remembering how it’s supposed to find out.

You can stuff your card into your wallet next to all the other bits of plastic, having read the dire warnings on the back about it expiring after 24 months and how you’re meant to treat it like cash.

(The difference being that cash, in this columnist’s hands, tends to expire in far less than 24 months. More like 24 hours, if you’re lucky.)

And then you can forget about it for three weeks, until suddenly one lunchtime, inspired by the brief appearance of a big shiny thing up in the sky, you decide to drag yourself away from your desk and go for a stroll.

Just like cash, the card starts burning a hole in your pocket, and before you know it you’re drawn as if by some eerie magnetic force through the door of Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights.

What to buy, what to buy? Fact or fiction? Words or pictures? Hardback or softback? So much to read, so little time to read it.

It’s time to get back in touch with your inner geek. And Just My Type by Simon Garfield looks just the thing.

It describes the difference between fonts and typefaces. (Don’t ask, read the book.) It tells you why the real geeks call fonts “founts”. It explains why Gill Sans is the “most British of types”, despite its designer, Eric Gill, being an out-and-out nutter. And it even tells you why you shouldn’t use Comic Sans for corporate communications.

Just the book for a newspaper office, you might think. To quote the typographer Beatrice Warde: “FROM THIS PLACE WORDS MAY FLY ABROAD/NOT TO PERISH AS WAVES OF SOUND BUT FIXED IN TIME/NOT CORRUPTED BY THE HURRYING HAND BUT VERIFIED IN PROOF.” (She wrote in ALL CAPITALS before it was considered SHOUTING. And she was more than chummy with Eric Gill.)

But a Tuesday afternoon at Chronicle Towers is clearly not the place for such musings.

The book gets a couple of sideways glances, before the banter (conversation is too grand a word) turns to more mundane matters such as why your columnist has never watched a single episode of Friends and the curious blob on a very senior executive’s elbow.

It isn’t easy having an inner geek. But with books like Just My Type, at least you know you’re not alone.

DIY on a wing and a prayer

2011-01-14T17:27:00.002Z

Extraordinary news from the Caribbean, where paleontologists have discovered fossils of an ancient flightless bird which apparently used the ends of it wings as ninja clubs to fight off its rivals and generally cause avian mayhem around what is now Jamaica.

The xenicibis was an ancestor of the modern ibis, and clearly far more dangerous than its chicken-sized frame would suggest.

Luckily, though, it became extinct around 12,000 years ago, so you won't be seeing one on your bird table any time soon.

Speaking of which...

The trusty bird table at the bottom of our garden eventually fell apart just after Christmas, having given years of stalwart service, and the hunt was on for a replacement. But it's only when you start pricing up the alternatives that you start to realise that providing the local blackbird population with a safe haven from the local moggies is not an enterprise to be entered on lightly.

Off we go to the garden centre (fifth time this year and counting) to see what's available. It would appear that the garden centre has seen us coming, and has put out its grandest and most palatial tables in readiness for our arrival.

For these aren't your everyday common-or-garden bird feeders. These are works of garden architecture in miniature, with slate or even thatched roofs, solid brass metalwork and hand-turned finials.

They are painted in subtle shades of cream or duck-egg blue. They would grace and complement the finest country house, they cost the earth and they are, in a word, overkill.

The only alternative is a wobbly-looking structure made of metal tubes that looks like it would collapse if a linnet landed on it, never mind the overfed pigeons that hover around our back garden.

Back to the drawing board. Or rather, off to another garden centre, which this time hasn't seen us coming, and where there is at least a reasonably priced selection of self-assembly kits.

We choose one of a suitably rustic appearance and bring it home, secure in the knowledge that with just a couple of turns of a screwdriver the whole thing will slip together nicely and the birdies will neither starve, nor fall off, nor be propositioned by the cat.

How very naive. In the world of bird tables, it appears, you gets what you pays for.

Mrs D disappears to do something important on the computer, leaving self to puzzle out an instruction sheet which: (a) appears to be a photocopy of a Daguerreotype of a print by mad artist William Blake; (b) refers to screws that are too short to join the requisite pieces together; and (c) involves the forcing of bolts through holes drilled just a millimetre too narrow.

Plus it's freezing in the garden shed, and the battery's gone flat on the not-so-sonic screwdriver, and that man flu you had over the new year seems to be coming back with a vengeance.

There's only one thing for it: start the year with a jolly good swear.

Christmas quiz

2010-12-24T10:26:00.000Z

It happens every December: in media organisations from the BBC to the humble Bath Chronicle, the news runs out before the end of the year.

Newspapers, radio stations and TV channels across the world are left with nothing to fill the gaps, except for that hoary old standby: the Christmas quiz.

And this column is no exception. We’re out of facts and opinions (not that we had many of either to start with) and we’re staring at a deep hole of the purest white.

So draw up an elf, throw another Yule log on the central heating and strain your brain with our festive brainteasers.

SCIENCE AND NATURE

The Eskimos are purported to have at least 40 different words for snow. But can you name the sort of snow that disappears from roads within two days but lingers for three weeks on the pavements in a salty, slushy mess? (2 points)
What is the correct medical term for that ghastly sinking feeling you get when you order most of your Christmas presents online and they still haven’t arrived at 5pm on December 23? (2 points)
Which is worse, man flu or woman flu? (2 points)

FOOD AND DRINK

Blue Quality Streets. What’s all that about then? Nobody likes them, they always end up left at the bottom of the tin in all their nasty coconutty grittiness. Why does Nestlé even bother putting them in to begin with? Why not give us extra purple ones instead? (5 points)
Brussels sprouts and parsnips. What are they actually for? (10 points)
Where did the wine go? (100 points)

POLITICS

How do you wriggle out of a promise not to increase university tuition fees? (0 points)

PICTURE ROUND

This is part of an everyday household object, photographed from an unusual angle: . Can you work out what it is? If so, please let us know as soon as poss, because we found it on the floor on Tuesday and since then we’ve only been able to get Channel 5 on the telly. (5 points)

ART & LITERATURE

You know that book you gave Aunty Flo last Christmas? You’ve given it to her again. And it’s too late to do anything about it. (-7 points)

REMEMBER WHEN

Can you remember exactly what you were doing on Boxing Day morning last year? If so, award yourself an extra... 10 points

LOCAL GEOGRAPHY

Where is the rampire? And was it worth the bother? (5 points)

SPORT

All sporting activity except tea-tray tobogganing has been cancelled until further notice. (0-0 points)

GENERAL KNOWLEDGE

How many generals do you know? (1 point for each)

There, that should keep you going through a couple of cold winter evenings. Of which there are plenty on the way.

There are no prizes. A good score is reward enough. Answers will be published as soon as we’ve worked them out ourselves

Happy Christmas, everyone. And take it easy on the mince pies.

Turn it off, turn it on again

2010-12-16T10:59:00.000Z

Ten days to go, eh? Bought all your presents yet? Thought so. In October, wasn’t it, when the streets were empty and the queues were short?

You felt jolly pleased with yourself then, and you feel even more pleased with yourself now as you watch from the comfort of a cosy pub as hordes of shoppers trudge through the gathering gloom.

Your tree’s up and dressed, your lights are gleaming, your cards are sent. It’s mulled wine and mince pies all the way from here to New Year’s Day.

That’s not really you though, is it? You’d like to think it was, but in fact you’re no better off than the other 99 per cent of the population: totally unprepared for Christmas.

The realisation that the Dixon family were in just the same boat came at precisely 8.43 on Tuesday evening, when it became clear that Christmas trees are not compatible with home networking.

We originally had a fairly simple system at Dixon Towers. The internet came in through the telephone wire to a router in what could loosely be described as the study. Then, by the power of radio, it went in a series of short hops to the bedroom in the roof and various games consoles, laptops and touch-screen devices liberally scattered about the house.

There was another radio network which broadcast music to the stereo system and grovelling letters of apology to the printer.

And all of this was fine and dandy, until the XBox 360 stopped talking to XBox Live.

Now any teenage boy reading this (and there are lots) will understand that if he can’t go on COD War IV and repeatedly kill and be killed by other teenage boys whom he has never met in his life, then that life isn’t worth living, and his parents need to sort it out. Fast.

A quick call to our internet service provider established that they couldn’t believe that our system had ever worked in the first place, and that they certainly weren’t going to offer to fix it.

Their only suggestion was to move the router downstairs and hard-wire it to the XBox.

And if that sounds complicated, then you might as well stop reading now. Because from here on things get really technical.

We moved the router. We bought special short wires to link it to the XBox. We reconfigured the wi-fi gizmos so that the internet would go upstairs from the router and then back downstairs to all the other gadgets and the music would go downstairs from the computer and then back upstairs to the stereo along with the letters to the bank and the pictures we were supposed to post to overseas relatives two weeks ago. And we turned it all off and we turned it all on again. Twice, just to be sure.

And the only thing that worked properly was the XBox. The music sounded like an early experiment by Marconi. The printer would have disappointed William Caxton. The internet was like treacle. But Dixon Junior could take potshots at like-minded warriors across the globe, so that was all right.

Then we got the Christmas tree.

And the only place it would fit was right next to the XBox. And Dixon Junior, quite justifiably, didn’t want pine needles getting into his electronic pride and joy. There weren’t enough sockets for the fairy lights. And Caxton needed his printer back. So we put everything back the way it was, as far as we could remember it. And it worked.

The moral of the story? If it ain’t broke, then don’t fix it. If it is broke, then fix it properly. And if you don’t think you can fix it, then don’t break it in the first place.

Sprout me no sprouts

2010-12-09T15:11:00.000Z

A report from the BBC earlier this week suggested that the rather chilly weather we’ve been having may lead to a shortage of Brussels sprouts this Christmas.

No real surprise about that, you might think. What is a bit surprising, though, is that the Beeb should have presented this as if it were bad news.

Anything that hastens a sprout on its journey between field and dustbin is a good thing as far as this blogger is concerned.

And cutting out the intermediate stages of boiling them and dishing them up for lunch seems like just the sort of energy-saving measure we should be embracing in these sub-zero days.

Mrs D takes a different view. One of the few things left growing on her allotment after the summer gluts are several sturdy purple sprout plants, which are hanging on to their treasured leafy globules like grim death. So perhaps there will still be the chance for us staunch anti-brassicans to refuse even a “token sprout” with the big bird.

There should be a few parsnips coming home too: another festive vegetable more honoured in the breach than in the observance. What’s so wrong with a handful of frozen peas to go with your turkey and trimmings?

As you may have gathered, Christmas preparations are well under way in the Dixon household, and to keep us on schedule we have all been issued with advent calendars of various designs.

Only one of these has the traditional religious motifs: seraphim and cherubim and kings on camels peering out from behind the windows.

We also have a robustly secular version, with a half-eaten mince pie, an pair of oven gloves and a box of hankies among the treasures behind the cardboard flaps. This acts as a salutary reminder that Christmas isn’t just about the fun things, it’s also about tidying up the mess afterwards.

Guess who got that one?

Then there’s the posh chocolate one, with the numbers printed in pale gold on a multicoloured background, making them even more difficult to find on a freezing December morning than those on the common-or-garden picture-only Advent calendar.

For the younger brethren (or sistren, to be more accurate but less grammatical) we have the gigantic pink Japanese cat calendar complete with even more chocolates in vaguely festive shapes.

And of course we all share that regular Christmas treat: the Advent Candle That Doesn’t Burn Properly.

It has the days of the month printed down the side, and the idea is that you light it in the evening and burn down one number a day.

So chunky is the candle, though, that the burning wick vanishes into the centre, leaving a waxy crust of unburned numbers on the outside.

It offers the perfect excuse for being late with anything from buying presents to writing cards to wrestling with a seven-foot refugee from a Norwegian pine forest: “But it’s only December the fifth – we’ve got tons of time.”

It isn’t, and we haven’t. Best look busy before it’s too late.

Sorry, Brian Sewell: we're not selling Lady Celia

2010-12-02T10:26:00.001Z

Challenging news this week as Brian Sewell, top art critic and purveyor of cut-glass accents to the gentry, pronounces from his cosy London clubroom that Bath should sell off some of its undisplayed works of art from the Victoria Gallery in order to shore up its finances.

One is reminded (as soon as you think of Mr Sewell you start to write a bit like he talks) of the oft-misquoted phrase of Sir Harold MacMillan (that’s Lord Stockton to you, madam) about selling off assets in times of trouble: “First of all the Georgian silver goes. And then all that nice furniture that used to be in the salon. Then the Canalettos go.”

Lord Stockton was talking about the sell-offs of the big public utilities in the ’80s, and he later said he had no objection to taking them out of public ownership, but what he questioned was using the money raised as if it were income.

Because once those artworks have gone, there’s no way you can get them back.

Now Mr Sewell hasn’t heretofore (told you) been noted as a commentator on matters of public finance, and he may not have considered that windfalls don’t work when it comes to budgeting.

Let’s do some sums. The B&NES art collection of more than 11,000 items is valued at £10.3 million.

(To put that into some sort of context: this May, a single 1932 Picasso called Nude, Green Leaves , and Bust sold at Christie’s New York for £70 million.)

And some 77 per cent of the Victoria Gallery collection is on display at any one time.

There’s a nasty smell of burning plastic, and wisps of smoke rise from the calculator ... Even if the council sold off all its undisplayed works of art, it probably wouldn’t raise more than about £2.4 million.

Which is about two per cent of its budget for 2010/11.

To use a deeply plebeian analogy, it would be a little bit like winning a non-life-changing prize on the National Lottery. You might be able to have a bit of a splurge, but you wouldn’t be able to retire on it.

Mr Sewell singled out one particular painting which he said should be sold: a 1905 portrait by the English impressionist Walter Sickert of Lady Celia Noble, the grand-daughter of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

It has strong Bath connections. Brunel of course built the railways around here. Lady Celia lived at 22 Royal Crescent, where she held salons and concerts before the Second World War. She donated the portrait to the gallery in 1948. Sickert himself lived in Bathampton from 1938 until his death in 1942.

Even though Lady Celia’s portrait isn’t currently on public display, it is available to view by appointment. (I'm hoping B&NES will let me publish it here. If they do I'll update this blog.)

It’s a delightful and informal study of a “strange beauty”. Lady Celia’s eyes avoid the painter’s, a hint of gold glistens in her hair. Sickert captures a mystery and elegance that doesn’t sit well with talk of council budgets.

It would be wonderful to see the painting on display.

Meanwhile, let’s be grateful that whatever Brian Sewell may suggest, Lady Celia is very much Not For Sale.

Why the mo will have to go

2010-11-25T09:53:00.001Z

You can tell from all the instruction manuals that something’s afoot. Mrs D has dragged out from the dark recesses of the kitchen cupboard the collected works of Delia, Nigella, Jamie, Kirstie and even the sainted Constance Spry, and is starting to Plan For The Big Day.

But before we can really get stuck in to the steaming of puddings, the roasting of hams, the garnishing of Yule logs, the winding of wreaths and the curling of dainty little ribbons, there’s a certain amount of domestic preparation to be accomplished.

The sort that you don’t read about in books like Jamie’s Pukka Xmas Dinners, Delia’s Countdown to Catastrophe or Kirstie’s Home-Made House of Horrors.

For a start, the oven needs cleaning. A horde of distinguished friends and relations is descending on us for the festive season, and they won’t take kindly to a turkey that tastes like last August’s pizza.

Or last April’s, come to that.

Here’s how it works. Mrs D buys some evil-looking, but apparently award-winning gloop and announces that she’s going to clean the oven.

A day or two later, she announces she may need some help, which is gladly offered. And on the scheduled cleaning day (everything’s on a schedule) it appears that she’s going to be sidetracked into the more glamorous projects of making the Christmas pud, and the decrustation of the cooker will devolve in its entirety to You Know Who.

Ah well, we live to serve.

Here’s a question, though: if chaps were really meant to clean ovens, how come oven-cleaning kits don’t come with chap-sized disposable gloves?

Don’t all shout at once.

Next job: get rid of the moustache.

Over the past four weeks the Dixon upper lip has become gradually bushier and bushier, all in aid of Movember, the international project which aims to raise awareness of – and funds for – men’s health issues such as prostate cancer.

There’s been mockery and sympathy. There’s been some sponsorship for my mo, though more would be welcome.

Me and my mo: please sponsor me for Movember

There’s also been amazement from friends and colleagues alike at how a mild-mannered blogger and columnist has swiftly transformed himself into a ferocious Mexican bandit.

But the riot act has been read, and the fun is nearly over. There will be no point in even buying any mistletoe, let alone hanging it up, unless that thing comes off.

On December 1, the mo must go.

Which is a shame, really. You can get attached to a moustache: you nurture it, you fiddle with it in moments of tranquility or tension, you admire its reflection in every shop window.

There’s a real art to shaping its ends so they balance up and don’t make you look all lopsided.

And it’s also very handy at the end of restaurant meals – who needs a doggy bag when you’ve got a ’tache to collect the left-overs?

It’s been a creative project on a par with Kirstie’s hand-blown baubles or Delia’s blackened gammon, and it seems sad to bring it to a close.

Never mind, though: there’s always next Movember. And at least we're ready for Christmas.

Hail to our future king and queen

2010-11-18T09:44:00.000Z

Well here’s to the happy couple! Just for a moment, we can forget the banking crisis, the toxic debt, the lengthening dole queues, the benefit cuts and the imminent arrival of Christmas 2010 – The One You Can’t Afford.

(Shortly to be followed by Holiday 2011 – The One You’ll Be Taking At Home.)

Prepare yourself instead to be whisked away from sordid reality to a faraway world of fantasy, glamour and eternal happiness.

A world where true love runs deep, where the sun shines every morning and where fluffy lambs gambol forever across rolling fields with never a thought of mint sauce.

It happened before our very eyes, in a moment made magical by the crystal ball of television.

As his eyes met hers it was so easy to sense the mutual attraction, the longing for togetherness, the unspoken but certain knowledge that this time it was going to last for ever.

He was the charmer: suave, debonair, silver-tongued. She was the girl next door with a cheeky smile and a heart of gold.

It happened on Tuesday, and those of us who were privileged enough to watch it will treasure the memory in our hearts for as long as we draw breath: that moment in the Australian jungle when Britt Ekland met Nigel Havers on I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here.

They were drawn together for an innocent game of Bonkers Conkers, a trial of strength in which the two contestants launch massive artificial chestnuts at another massive artificial chestnut in an attempt to smash it and retrieve a key which will open a chest which will reveal a question which if answered correctly will give the winner’s team-mates the chance to eat something a little more appetising than witchetty correct grubs.

Don’t worry, it was far less complicated than it sounds.

It was perhaps understandable that romance should have blossomed. Britt had been stuck in the girls’ camp with Gillian McKeith, whose grasp on the concept of teamwork seems shaky to say the least. And Nigel was already daggers drawn with former Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik, who gives his occupation on the I'm a Celebrity website as “comedian”, and lists his special skill as “wooing the ladies”.

Stay classy, Lembit.

Anyway, with irritations like that in their respective camps, it was little wonder that Nigel and Britt sought solace, however briefly, in each other’s arms.

Naturally there will be obstacles to their romance. It doesn’t help that Nigel is already married and appears to have something of a short fuse. It doesn’t help that Britt dated a string of pop stars in the 1970s and still enjoys what might loosely be described as a rock and roll lifestyle.

No, from the moment their eyes met their fate was cast: Nigel and Britt are destined to be king and queen of the jungle, and their love will serve as a beacon to light us on our way through the dark months that lie ahead.

William? Kate?

Never heard of them.

It's movember - splash some cash for my tache!

2010-11-11T11:47:00.001Z

Now here’s an interesting fact. All right, perhaps it’s not that interesting, but it’s a free fact, and you don’t get many of those to the pound these days.

You know that little double-ridge type thing between your nose and your upper lip? It’s called your philtrum.

It comes from the ancient Greek word for “love potion”, and a prominent philtrum purportedly makes its owner more attractive to members of the opposite sex.

All of which leads us, inevitably and inexorably, to our topic this week. Which is not sex, opposite or otherwise, but the condition of yours truly’s philtrum.

It may come as a shock to some of our more sensitive readers, but said philtrum has, over the past ten days or so, been getting bushier and bushier, and far less susceptible to frostbite.

Why, you may well ask? Why has the Dixon upper lip, previously known for its billiard-ball-like smoothness, suddenly started sprouting bristles?

Well, it’s all in a good cause: Movember. You can find out more about it on the Movember website, but the idea is that during the month of November, men grow a “mo”, or moustache, to help raise awareness of men’s health issues.

Sadly, one man every hour dies of prostate cancer in the UK, and much like the commitment to run or walk for charity, the gentlemen of Movember commit to 30 days of subnasal hairiness.

Given this blogger's general stoutness and associated lack of enthusiasm for running anywhere further than the nearest bus stop, this sounded like an effortless way raise some money for charity.

Reactions around the house were mixed. Mrs D went off in mild hysterics at the thought of having to snuggle up to the human equivalent of a Brillo Pad.

Miss D, who has never been slow to comment when dad’s five o'clock shadow gets to half past eight, looked dubious to say the least.

And Dixon Junior made a disparaging comment on Facebook.

Growing a moustache, it must be said, doesn’t require quite as much energy as running a marathon. But it does demand some fortitude on the part of the grower.

First off, there’s the nagging doubt that your upper lip may not be able to grow anything more than bumfluff without the application of industrial quantities of Growmore. Especially if you’re aiming for a more florid style like the Dali, the handlebar or the Fu Manchu.

Then, there’s the growing fear that those around you are sniggering at the incongruous efflorescence on your physiognomy (here it is after eight days' growth).

There’s also a slight worry that you’re starting to use unnecessarily long words to match the promised grandeur of your mo.

Finally, there’s the gradually increasing itchiness, coupled with the constant desire to look in mirrors or shop windows to see how much your prized Zapata has progressed in the past ten minutes.

It’ll be worth it, though. Hope sprouts eternal on the upper lip.

And if you can help by sponsoring me, get along to Hugh Dixon's MoSpace Page and splash some cash!

Interview with the Rampire

2010-11-04T11:44:00.001Z

You’ve got to hand it to NASA. Just when you thought they’d discovered everything there was to discover about the universe, they come up with something new.

This time it’s a Gamma Ray Bubble. Details so far are a little bit sketchy, but if we combine the few facts they have so far released with a healthy dose of journalistic speculation we can draw the following conclusions.

First, it’s big. Not as big as a galaxy, maybe, but NASA don’t use words like “giant” and “enormous” lightly.

Second, it’s a long way away, in the general direction of the centre of the Milky Way. Which means that you couldn’t get anywhere near it with a Bonfire Night rocket.

Third, even if you could hit it, it wouldn’t burst. Why not? Because, that's why.

Fourth, nobody really understands what it’s there for. NASA is holding a press conference next week to explain a bit more about it, but don’t expect it to make the Ten O’Clock News.

(Update: NASA's Fermi telescope finds giant structure in our galaxy.)

Now, one of the difficulties your average columnist faces when trying to explain all this high-powered cosmological shenanigans to the lay reader is how to make it understandable on a human scale. Sometimes, though, metaphors and parables can help.

And luckily enough, right here in Bath, we have our very own metaphor for the Gamma Ray Bubble: the pavement at the junction of James Street West and Westgate Buildings otherwise known as the St James Rampire.

Like the Gamma Ray Bubble (let’s call it the GRB to save a few photons) the Rampire is more than just big: it’s both “giant” and “enormous”. Indeed, it would not be stretching a point to call it “ginormous”. Thus saving a few more photons.

Just like the GRB, it’s a long way away. Or at least, it’s as far away from the GRB as the GRB is from it, which is saying something. Not quite sure what, mind. It’s all to do with the General Theory of Relativity. Keep up at the back, there’ll be a test later.

Like the GRB, it wouldn’t burst if you hit it. In the last four months they’ve poured so much hardcore, concrete, Tarmac, paving slab, sett, cobble and other assorted road-making materials over the spot where once grew a harmless and unassuming patch of grass that it would take a head-on collision with an aircraft carrier to cause it any damage. If we had any aircraft carriers left, that is.

And like the GRB, no one really understands what the St James Rampire is for. Especially the raised lip near the bus stop, around which hover such august institutions as InjuryLawyers’R’Us, Vultures4U and WeSueAnyCouncil. Dot Com.

What is a rampire anyway? Top (dead) poet John Dryden said: “The Trojans round the place a rampire cast.” Sixteenth-century geographer Richard Hakluyt added: “Let no man thinke that culverin or demy-canon can sufficiently batter a defensible rampire.” No one born any later was prepared to comment.

There’s little more to add. Gamma Ray Bubbles and Rampires are two sides of one coin: aged, mysterious, massive, impenetrable, unknowable.

We ignore them at our peril.

RIP Paul the psychic cephalopod

2010-10-28T13:27:00.001+01:00

So, farewell then, Paul the Psychic Octopus. The eight-tentacled, three-hearted cephalopod – whose FIFA World Cup 2010 predictions entertained us last summer as Capello’s Heroes limped out of the competition at a much later stage than they deserved – has died and gone to invertebrate heaven.

Paul was born – or rather, hatched – in an aquarium in Weymouth, but his natural wanderlust soon took him further afield.

At an early age he moved to Oberhausen in Germany and found a berth in the Sea Life Centre.

There, Paul accurately predicted the outcome of several Euro 2008 football matches by choosing which of two boxes, labelled with the flags of the competitors, to open first. Inside each box was a tasty mussel or oyster as a reward.

Paul really hit his stride with this year’s World Cup, though, when he correctly foretold the result of every single match of Germany’s World Cup campaign.

The football establishment closed ranks against him and lesser pundits such as Lineker, Hansen, Shearer, Tyldesdley and co shook in their collective boots.

Paul’s predictive skills were questioned in academia as well as the world of sport. Chris Budd, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bath, was quoted by the BBC as saying that Paul’s success rate was no better than you’d get from tossing a coin. “Mathematics can be spooky,” he said. You’re not wrong there, professor.

Be that as it may, all gritty rationalism got swept under the carpet when Paul hit the jackpot by predicting Spain’s triumph over the Netherlands in the final.

Paul was subsequently invited to make a victory tour of Spain, but his owners declined the offer, presumably fearing that the octopodophagous Spaniards might get carried away with the excitement of their win, and devour him in a stew of his own ink.

Not everyone was delighted with Paul’s predictions. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, claimed he was a tool of “western propaganda and superstition”.

And a hit squad from the Oxford English Dictionary was dispatched to Bath to deal with a certain blogger who was going round indiscriminately inventing words like “octopodophagous”.

Paul’s management team put him out to grass after the World Cup. But even now, before the mourning is over, conspiracy theorists are claiming that he actually died before the final in Soccer City, and that his last, most glorious, prediction was made by a double.

Why can’t they let the dead rest in peace? Paul was a true aristocrat among football pundits. (He had the blue blood to prove it – caused by haemocyanin, a copper-based respiratory protein, fact fans.) His memory should be left unsullied. De mortuis nil nisi bonum and that sort of thing.

Who now remembers Leon the porcupine, Mani the parakeet or Apfelsin the African red river hog, all of whom tried to emulate Paul’s predictive feats and failed?

No-one, that's who. Paul was the greatest. We shall never see his like again.

Eight Things You May Not Have Known About Paul the Psychic Octopus

2010-10-26T14:09:00.001+01:00

He was psychic.
He is dead.
He had EIGHT TENtacles. Spooky.
I predicted his demise in July 2010.
He was born in Weymouth, UK but emigrated to Germany.
Actually, he wasn't born. He hatched.
He had three hearts. One for everyday, one for Sundays, and one just in case another was broken by a lady octopus.
He knew more about football than most of the telly pundits put together.

RIP Paul the Psychic Octopus. We'll miss you.

And an extra ninth thing: he was called "Paul" because of its phonetic similarity to "Poulpe", which is French for Octopus. Or Pulpo, which is Spanish for Octopus. (I have no evidence for this whatsoever, but it sounds convincing.)

Golden chilli saffron vodka

2010-10-23T12:24:00.001+01:00

I had a glut of chillis this year, mainly very hot Paper Lanterns - a sort of Habanero.

Some are drying, some have been chopped up, blitzed and frozen in the ice-making tray.

But this was a worthwhile experiment.

Ingredients

70cl bottle of vodka (I used Smirnoff Red Label rather than supermarket)

Three hot red chillis

Large pinch of saffron strands

Method

Cut the stalks from the chillis, slice in half and remove the seeds. Be careful not to touch your face or other sensitive areas after cutting chillis - wearing rubber or latex gloves is a good precaution.
Open the vodka bottle and push the chilli pieces and saffron down inside.
Close the bottle and leave in a dark place for 3 weeks, giving it the occasional gentle shake. The vodka will take on a rich golden yellow colour - the more saffron, the more golden the finished product.
Strain the contents of the bottle into a jug through a piece of muslin. Discard the old saffron strands, and remove the chilli pieces from the bottle (I had to tease them out with a skewer).
Pour the golden vodka back into the bottle (use a funnel to avoid any wastage).
Freeze the bottle.
To serve: pour into small shot glasses and knock back in one. Throwing the shot glasses over your shoulder into the fireplace is entirely optional.

The colour is glorious, the taste is like honeyed rocket fuel with a vanilla finish.

Learn to stop worrying and love the CSR

2010-10-21T12:32:00.000+01:00

So this is it. The party’s over, the fat lady has sung, Elvis has left the building and it’s time to clean up the mess and pay back the billions that have been borrowed in our collective names.

The cuts are coming, and they’re going to hit hard. We’ll soon find ourselves steering into what one newspaper terrifyingly described as “uncharted social and economic territory”.

The dark clouds of austerity are gathering on the horizon, and none of them has a silver lining. 24-carat lead, more like.

Life in the UK for the next few years doesn’t look as though it’s going to be that much fun.

So what are your options in this new world of enforced belt-tightening? We consulted a panel of experts and distilled their wisdom into your Official Guide to Surviving the Cuts, as first published in Ye 250-year-0lde Bath Chronicle.

Here are the highlights.

Adopt the French position. Whatever the economic climate, our Gallic neighbours always seem to be enjoying themselves. If they’re not guzzling a four-course meal with a selection of fine wines and cheeses, they’re closing petrol stations, pouring milk down the Champs-Élysées and calling out the riot police. So follow their example: go on strike, and stay on strike.

Adopt the Greek position. As above, but with retsina and halloumi.

Become a hermit. Sell all your possessions, cash in what you can on the house and give the money to the poor (you won’t have much trouble finding them). Then wrap yourself in an old sack and find a nice damp cave. Be warned, though: long queues are already forming at Cheddar and Wookey Hole, so you may have to look further afield. Like Greenland.

Take your mind off the crisis by starting a time-consuming hobby. You’ll be using candles instead of electric light for most of next three years, so collect all the spent matches and use them to build a model of a well-known landmark – Bath Abbey or Pulteney Bridge, say, or even the Busometer if you fancy a real challenge. Faithfully reproducing all those curves and sticky-out metal bits should keep you going right past the end of this recession and well into the next one.(Picture: Kevin Bates, The Bath Chronicle)

Take a leaf out of ’70s chart-toppers Wizzard’s book: pretend it’s Christmas every day. It’s already happening in Bath: the lights started going up at the beginning of October, and they’re unlikely to come down until May 2011 at the earliest. By then it’ll only be five months until they’re due to put them up again, so why not just leave them where they are and let people enjoy a festive frisson every time they go to the shops? They won’t have any money to spend, mind you. But at least the streets will look pretty.

Grin and bear it. Let’s face it, there’s not really any other option.

Double yellow peril

2010-10-14T12:10:00.000+01:00

It started more than a year ago, with a circular from the council. There was a proposal to extend the parking restrictions up from the bottom of our road.

It was called the Various Roads, Outer Area, Bath: Prohibition & Restriction of Waiting Order 2009.

And as is right and proper in a democratic society, we were offered the chance to comment.

Which we did. And delivered our comments by hand to the wrong letterbox in Keynsham, two hours before the deadline. (Thanks, kind Keynsham person, for sending them on.)

The months passed, the council considered the views of objectors and supporters, and eventually ruled in favour of the original proposal. Not only was democracy done, but it was seen to be done. All very right and proper, even if our objections were overruled.

We sat down (metaphorically) to wait for the yellow lining lorries to arrive and lengthen the existing double yellows.

Then the winter came, and the snow, and the potholes. And still the yellow liners didn’t come.

Spring passed, and summer too. The potholes got worse, the yellow lines stayed the same length.

Then, in late summer, a second notice arrived from the council: the road was to be resurfaced. Regular readers will know all about that episode: casual browsers will be spared the gripping details.

Anyway, the road was resurfaced, and we waited for the double yellow lines to be replaced. In our naivety we thought that someone might do some joined-up thinking and implement the Various Roads Order.

They didn’t. Here’s what actually happened.

The coning people coned off an area which didn’t match the order but did bear a vague resemblance to what had been there before.

On one side of the road, a driver parked their car at the top end of the cones.

The lining folk came along and painted a one-foot double yellow line behind the car, then left a car-length gap, then continued the lines down to the bottom of the road.

They painted more double yellows further up the road, and then painted white Access Protection Markings parallel with them, so bits of the road with dropped kerbs had two yellow lines and one white.

They left most of the opposite side of the road unlined. Drivers used the car-length gap as a parking space.

The coners came back and coned the gap and the opposite side. A driver parked among the new cones. (Can you guess what’s coming?)

The lining people came back and painted in the first gap and most of the opposite side, leaving a second car-length gap opposite the place where the first one had been.

They covered up the white lines they’d painted a week previously with a thin layer of black gunge.

And then they went away, presumably feeling pleased with a job well done, and as of Wednesday morning they hadn’t come back.

Who said the circus had left town?

One good thing about cold callers

2010-10-07T09:14:00.000+01:00

First, the answers to the mini-quiz. The genuine dark red paint colour, as opposed to the fevered imaginings of a deadline-beset columnist, was Boot Red from Fired Earth.

Or Fried Earth, as Mrs D insists on calling them.

We’re not going to use it, mind. Opinion on the ultimate decorative finish for our bedroom walls has swung away from sombre reds and browns towards duskier shades like Smoked Trout and Poached Turbot.

This one will run and run. But for now there are bigger fish to fry.

How many times recently have you heard the phrase, “There’s nothing to worry about”? It seems to be the latest ploy of foot-in-the-door salespeople and telephone cold callers.

Some genius of a sales trainer has probably worked out that the callers’ victims need a bit of reassurance before they will part with their money.

We had a variation on the theme a couple of days ago. A greasy youth from one of the energy companies rang the doorbell, and fired off with the immortal line: “Evening sir, nothing to worry about, don’t get the boxing gloves out.”

Quite what sort of reassurance that was supposed to give is doubtful. The door was shut firmly but politely in his face.

And then there was the telephone marketer who started her spiel with “Don’t worry, Mr Dixon. This isn’t a sales call.” Yeah, right. And we’ve opted out through the Telephone Preference Service, so you can take us right off your so-called database.

The most offensive cold calls, of course, are the ones when the line goes dead for a couple of seconds, and then you’re asked if you’re the “named user of your computer system”.

The person calling doesn’t tell you not to worry. They tell you that there’s a problem with your computer, that they’re from some sort of service centre – or even from Microsoft – and they want to help you sort it out.

They don’t want to do anything of the sort.

They’re criminals, and they’re trying to plant viruses, bots or keyloggers on your system so that they can steal your personal information or otherwise subvert your PC. (It doesn’t work on Macs.)

Microsoft doesn’t ring people up out of the blue asking for information. Its staff have better things to do with their time, and they don’t have your phone number.

Now with most cold callers there’s always this residual urge to be polite. They’re only doing their job, after all, and not a very gratifying or rewarding one either.

But if one of these cyber scum ring you up one evening, and you’ve have a bad day, and you need to release some stress, and you’ve got the gift of the gab, then no one’s going to mind if you take out your frustrations on them by being as rude as you damn well like.

It ain’t half therapeutic.

Just like watching paint dry

2010-09-30T12:34:00.000+01:00

Decisions, decisions. The moment has come at Dixon Towers when we can prevaricate, procrastinate, shilly-shally and vacillate no longer.

Although we can’t do it tonight because it’s the cat’s birthday. And tomorrow we’ve got to do the weekly shop. And then it’s the feast day of Saint Remigius, Bishop of Rheims, Apostle of the Franks. And you know what that means?

Exactly. No windows in our family calendar for at least another week.

Anyway, once we’ve got that little lot out of the way it will definitely be time to decide.

On what, you may ask. What decision can be so important, yet so avoidable? Out with it, Dixon.

It’s time to come clean. The master bedroom at Dixon Towers is in dire need of redecoration. The once pristine cream on the walls is now a murky shade of yoghurt. The woodwork is flaking. There’s still a horrible patch of bare plaster from when we had the loft conversion done six years ago. Hey, we don’t rush things at Dixon Towers. But we can put it off no longer.

The brief is for dark red, but Mrs D’s conditions are strict: not too dark, and not too red. And thick enough to cover up aforementioned plaster in no more than three coats, seeing as how she’ll be doing most of the painting.

Yours truly’s conditions are less taxing. Nothing that will require a second mortgage to buy. And nothing that looks too much like Germolene.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Germolene in its place, you understand. It’s just that it has an unnerving resemblance to dead salmon, and it smells far too much like Doctor Pepper. Or maybe Dr P smells like Germolene. What was that about procrastination?

Tally ho for Homebase, where your columnist has been dispatched to pick up some test pots.

Where to begin? Well, the paint counter, obviously. But there’s one paint counter for the fancy stuff, and another for the Eezy-Klene Wun-Cote common-or-garden household emulsion.

Let’s split the difference: four from the posh aisle, four from the cheap zone. And from there on in it’s a lucky dip, because the names don’t offer much of a clue.

Burnt Raspberry. Carmine Blush. Deepest Scarlet. Vicar’s Crimson. Boot Red. Fox’s Bloodstain.

(Only one of these is a real paint. Any guesses which?)

A sharp intake of breath as you realise that just shelling out for the test pots will set you back almost as much as what you’ll end up paying to cover the walls, and then it’s home with your spoils.

From a first glance at the lids, Mrs D is not convinced. All too dark, all too red, in her judgment. Except for the Ruptured Salmon, which looks too much like the well-known ointment. And smells worse.

Never mind. The Dixon bedroom is now festooned with sheets of lining paper painted with squares of the samples. Unfortunately, though, they all look exactly alike, barring the nasty accident with the fish.

So we still can’t make up our minds, and next week it’s the memorial day of St Denis of Paris and his companions the martyrs. The painting will just have to wait.

Wild, wild Weston

2010-09-23T11:04:00.000+01:00

High noon in the Badlands. Small white empty clouds float motionless in a steel-blue sky. A harsh sun beats down on a dried-out gulch. Not even the tumbleweed stirs as the long hand of the town clock ticks, ticks, ticks towards 12.

A curtain twitches and a face appears briefly at the window, casts a worried glance towards town, then vanishes. The curtain flicks back and the dusty street is still once more. They’re coming. And they mean business.

Actually, if you believe anything you’ve read in the last 80 words or so, you’re the victim of what is known in the trade as journalistic licence. It’s time for a reality check.

We’re not in the Badlands of South Dakota: we’re in leafy Weston Village, Bath on Sunday lunchtime. It’s not a baking hot day: it’s about average for the middle of September. And it’s not even high noon: it’s one in the afternoon. Although strictly speaking it would be midday if we were on GMT and not BST. Let’s not lose track, though...

Because last Sunday, they were definitely coming, and they certainly did mean business.

“They” in this case meaning the road re-surfacers.

Ever since the cold snap last winter, our road has suffered from a bad case of the potholes. Driving down the hill has subjected the Dixonmobile (and every other vehicle) to the suburban equivalent of a spin round the tank training grounds on Salisbury Plain.

Suspensions have twanged, shock absorbers have boinged, passengers have bounced and unrestrained parcels have flown through windows every time a car went by.

But all the time, the promise has been there: “One day,” the handouts from the council have assured us, “we’ll come and mend your road.”

So at last the contractors arrived. All the parked cars mysteriously vanished (except for one), and a sweeper lorry trundled up and down clearing away the early autumn leaves while purposeful looking blokes in reflective jackets taped over the ironwork.

And everyone on the street came out to have a look. The excitement was palpable, we all had a chat, and waves of community spirit drifted upwards into the September air.

At last the big moment arrived and a gigantic machine started spreading the micro-asphalt.

(Which, for the non-technically-minded, is a combination of aggregate and bitumen emulsion that restores skid resistance quickly and with minimal disruption to the carriageway user. Or so it says in this leaflet. What it doesn’t say is how to get the bits off your carpet.)

First the machine did our side. Then it did the middle. And then it went away, along with the road-sweeper and all the yellow jackets.

An eerie hush descended and we all started to wonder: whose was that car at the bottom of the hill? Would the asphalteers ever come back and finish what they’d started?

Of course they did, on Monday, and we now have a lovely new road.

It may not be the wild, wild west. But it certainly livened up Weston.

Karrottenstein will rise from the grave

2010-09-09T11:58:00.000+01:00

Readers slavering in anticipation after last week’s mention of comedy vegetables will be delighted to know that our preposterous carrot won first prize at Weston Flower Show last weekend.

An in-depth trawl through Mrs D’s carrot patch produced a specimen of such ugly weirdness (or indeed weird ugliness – there’s not a lot of difference between the two) that it didn’t take much imagination to come up with a winner.

The carrot in question was broad and sturdy. It already had a knobbly protuberance that would make a passable nose, and markings suggestive of a mouth. We rifled one of the children’s old craft kits for a couple of googly eyes, and stuck them on with Evo-Stik. We grabbed a pair of spare stainless steel coach screws from the stainless steel coach screw cupboard and drove them into the sides of his neck.

A jubilee clip for a collar and a brass curtain ring round one of his carroty ears completed the ensemble.

(Money spent on DIY is money well spent. QED.)

Then we simply connected some electrodes to the carriage screws, awaited a passing thunderstorm, and faster than you can say “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley”, Karrotenstein was born.

To quote unashamedly and at length from our inspiration, Mrs S:

“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.”

Scary stuff. And Mary Shelley could just as easily have been writing about the Dixon kitchen on the night before the show as about Frankenstein’s gloomy laboratory at the University of Ingolstadt.

On reflection, “born” is the wrong word to describe the arrival of Karrottenstein. His roots are in the ground (or they were until Mrs D pulled him up). Maybe it would be better to say that he was propagated.

Be that as it may, The Big K presented a frightening prospect to his creators, the latter-day Victor and Igor.

We did take some pictures, and offered them to the editor of The Bath Chronicle for publication. But he felt that they were a little too disturbing to see the light of day in a family newspaper.

If you have a strong stomach, though, and a stronger internet connection, you can see Karrottenstein's picture here.

Like Frankenstein’s monster before him, Karrottenstein met an early and unnatural fate. Following his triumph in the humorous vegetable stakes, the only way was down. None of us fancied eating a carrot covered in glue, so we removed the screws, the clips and the rest of the metalwork and consigned him to the compost heap.

But don’t sleep easy: his vital force lives on among the potato peelings.

Be warned, gentle reader: Karrottenstein will rise from the grave, and walk the earth once more.

When vegetables go get weird

2010-09-02T09:23:00.000+01:00

So that’s it then. No more bank holidays between now and Christmas. A three-and-a-half-month desert of work, weekend, work, weekend, work…

Meanwhile, of course, the clouds have parted, the wind has dropped, the sun is shining and it’s summer at last, just in time for the kids to go back to school.

You get the picture. We need something to cheer us up. Now and every weekend between until the festive season.

Well, we can start with the Weston Village Flower Show. It’s this Saturday, and it should provide enough fun and jollity to get us through the first week of the Long Hard Slog Through Autumn.

Wallace and Gromit fans will remember the climactic scene in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Rotten cad and all-round bounder Victor Quartermaine chases Wallace, who has been transmogrified into a gigantic and voracious rabbit, through the village fruit and vegetable show. Quartermaine has armed himself with an ancient blunderbuss, loaded it with golden bullets supplied by the vicar, and is out for bunny flesh.

Meanwhile, in the skies above the show another chase is going on. Gromit and his arch enemy, Quartermaine’s slavering hound Philip, are slugging it out in an aerial dogfight (geddit?) in planes untethered from a fairground ride.

It’s not spoiling the story too much, if you’re one of the few people who don’t know it already, to reveal that the good end happily, the bad unhappily.

Don’t imagine for a minute that anything quite as dramatic as that will be happening in Weston on Saturday. The show is a generally calm affair, with more than 100 classes for produce, crafts, cooking and art.

With one exception: the Humorous Vegetable competition.

Quite possibly this part of the show was inspired by Blackadder II. (Remember the turnip that looked like a thingy?) It may equally well have its historical roots in the odd-looking produce that were such a memorable feature of That’s Life.

Be that as it may, if you want to see contorted carrots and preposterous potatoes in abundance, Weston All Saints Centre is the place to be this Saturday afternoon.

Mrs D was going to enter her secret weapon: a tromboncino. For those who don’t know – and there’s no reason why you should – a tromboncino is a monstrously mutated cousin of the courgette, with a curved body and a club-shaped blobby bit at the business end.

The specimen that Mrs D has nurtured lovingly from seed is now more than 120cm from nose to tail, and threw a system error when we tried to weight it on the electronic kitchen scales.

It also causes spontaneous and uncontrollable laughter in all who see it, and is quite rude into the bargain. We don’t really feel we can take it out of the house during daylight hours without causing a breach of the peace. So for now we’ll just stick with a comedy carrot.

Weston Village Flower Show, Saturday September 3, 2.30pm in the All Saints Centre, Weston High Street, Bath.

'Tis the season to be jolly silly

2010-08-26T12:27:00.000+01:00

August. The dog days. The hottest, stickiest time of the year. A time so called because of the ancient observation that Sirius, the Dog Star, is at its closest to the Sun in August, and is thus responsible for hot weather.

Or, as one ancient put it, a time when: “the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies.”

Palpable nonsense. Those ancients may have known a thing or two about waving swords about and singing roundelays and giving each other the plague, but they didn’t have a clue when it came to explaining the weather.

Neither, though, do we. For the last week most of southern England has been under attack from a small hurricane, which has battered us left, right and centre – especially Dixon Junior who has been swooping up and down the Channel on a yacht – and triggered off potato blight alerts on Mrs D’s mobile.

So much for ancient wisdom. No doubt we’ll have a warm, dry January to make up for this month’s windy wetness.

But the other name for August, especially in and around newspapers, is the silly season. And that tradition of printing implausible stories, often concerning animals, carries on whatever the weather.

Earlier this week, for example, it was reported that a crocodile had been spotted circling round sailing boats near the port of Boulogne.

Some bright spark christened it Croc Monsieur, and for a day or two the coastguard, police and army went onto high alert.

Le croc français turned out to be no more than a floating log. It would be inappropriate to call it a frog log, but it just kind of slipped out.

And the original eyewitnesses, whom we know only as Pierre and Laurent, are probably now enjoying the traditional hospitality of the gendarmerie. Which as far as we’re aware doesn’t include much in the way of tea and biscuits.

And now Bath has its very own silly season story to rival other papers’ tales of 30-inch Ratzillas and other prodigies.

At the bottom end of the evolutionary scale, it appears that microscopic worms have forced the transfer of this weekend’s racing at Chepstow to the Bath course.

The worms, or root gall nematodes as they’re known to their friends, have caused instability in the Chepstow soil, which is obviously pretty dangerous on a racecourse.

And in the jargon of the newsroom, it’s the sort of story that has legs. Even if the worms haven’t.

Could this be the start of something much bigger?

Maybe the sneaky nematodes are hatching plans for world domination, or undermining England’s 2018 World Cup bid by destabilising the soil of sporting venues across the country.

Maybe they’re in the pay of an evil cartel of artificial turf suppliers. Maybe they don’t want their Bank Holiday disturbed by the horses.

Or maybe not. Because that would be a bit too silly, even for the silly season.

No surrender to the big cheese

2010-08-19T09:21:00.000+01:00

It was Charles de Gaulle who said of his native France: “How can you govern a country which has 246 different cheeses?”

History does not tell where he got the number from. Indeed, some sources claim that le général put the figure at 258. But judging from our recent holiday across the Channel, he probably underestimated.

Visit any self-respecting French hypermarket and it’s not just the cheese counter that’ll have you staggered. Twenty-five different types of ham. A bewildering range of natural yoghurts. Three different sorts of pizza-flavoured cracker.

And the wine. Let’s not get started on the wine. (Too late, unfortunately. We already have.)

No, there’s a colossal difference between the English concept of choice and the French idea of choix.

To your average Sainsbury or Tesco, choice means either (a) own brand or (b) expensive.

To its French counterpart, la choix seems to a passing Brit to be synonymous with abundant variety.

And the only problem with that is that it leads to indecision among those who are doing the buying and mutterings of rebellion from those who are traipsing along behind wishing they were still at the beach.

The differences don’t end there, of course. You won’t find many English supermarkets in which a live spider crab glares balefully at you from a glass tank, knowing that the only thing preventing a dinner date is a certain squeamishness on the part of the designated cook in the matter of grabbing said crustacean and bumping it off.

On the other side of the coin, you won’t find many French supermarkets that do cashback. Big swing, small roundabout.

No, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. And the cheese is always smellier.

As we discovered when, seeking to bring back a little souvenir of de Gaulle’s administrative nightmare, we plumped for a Camembert with the unlikely sounding name of Jort.

Jort is made of unpasteurised milk. Jort is moulé à la louche. Which would take an entire blog to explain. Follow the link instead. Jort is supposedly best eaten with a wine of the 1984 vintage. Fat chance on our budget.

(Quick break here for our Word of the Week slot. Tyrosemiophily: collecting the labels of Camembert cheese. Strange, but nonetheless true.)

Anyway, Jort was so smelly it had to be put in the rooftop box on the way home to forestall a full-scale revolution on the part of the smaller passengers.

Thinking about it, we should probably have acquired an export licence before attempting to drive on to the ferry.

And once we were back in good old Blighty, Jort had to be transferred to a holding cell in the garage, whence it now exudes a malodorous warning to anyone rash enough to approach it with a cheese knife. According to one French supplier, a good Camembert should give off "odours of farmyard and stable". If that's the case, Jort is good in spades.

Still, it will meet its fate, sooner rather than later, at a dinner for two in celebration of our 20th wedding anniversary.

And it will undoubtedly taste a heck of a lot better than it smells.

You can't lick the bowling

2010-08-05T11:24:00.000+01:00

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Mrs D plans a jaunt during the the school holidays, and muggins here must needs take a day off to ensure that children (a) get out of bed before 11.30; (b) don’t burn the house down when they do get up; and (c) maintain at least a basic level of nourish-ment.

Plus Bath Chronicle Towers was scheduled for one of its occasional technological meltdowns, and home was a far better prospect than an unequal struggle with the many-tentacled octopus that is our computer system.

Mrs D’s awayday? Well, it was a bit hush-hush. Suffice it to say that it involved a very posh garden: so posh that she needed photo ID to get in.

Need another clue? Arrange these letters into a well-known acronym: RHH. More than enough said.

How to fill the day without tears, though? No amount of electronic sedation from Messrs Nintendo, XBox and Co was going to be enough. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.

Welcome, therefore, to the world of ten-pin bowling. Welcome to a building with the floor area of an aircraft hangar and the ceiling height of a small shed. And welcome to the home of utter humiliation.

First challenge: getting the scoreboard to work properly. (There’s no escape from technology, even on your day off.) Just type everyone’s name on a keypad that seems to have been drenched in cola and then sprinkled with the dregs from a crisp packet. And then apologise to the people in the next lane for messing up their scores.

Second challenge: choose your ball. There appear to be two sizes: extra small and extra large. Choose the former and you’ll need the fire brigade to extract your fingers from the holes. Choose the latter and you’ll end up in hospital with a dislocated shoulder and a broken toe. Eventually you find the one large-sized ball. It’s pink.

Third challenge: the bumpers. These are the rails down the sides of the lane that stop the children’s ball dropping into the gutter. You need an advanced degree in computer science to work out how to program them, and even when you crack it, one side doesn’t work properly. Adjust the scores accordingly.

Fourth challenge: aiming. The first few times you take your kids bowling, they’re still quite small and need to use one of those special ramp things to point the ball in the right direction. You, on the other hand, have to rely on your natural bowling skills. And thus get beaten hollow. Nowadays the youngsters are big enough to wield the ball themselves. And still whup you.

Fifth challenge: inconsistency. How is it possible to score zero on your first two goes and then a strike on the next? Just asking.

Halfway through the whole sorry episode you spot what they should have given out at reception: the instructions, in the form of a leaflet entitled How To Bowl! This blithely informs you that “The art of ten-pin bowling really is quite simple to master” and then goes on to demonstrate that it isn’t. With copious illustrations. Art means practice. And practising is what you haven’t done enough of.

Still, the children have fun. And that’s what holidays are all about.

The man with the keys to the world wide web

2010-07-29T09:25:00.000+01:00

Excellent news. Bath entrepreneur Paul Kane has been entrusted with one of the keys to the world wide web. And if it all goes pear-shaped, he’ll be the man to turn it off and turn it back on again.
Or to be slightly more accurate, in the event of a terrorist attack or hacking exploit that threatens the integrity of said web, he would travel to the US to meet five of the other six keyholders. Together they would reboot the Domain Name Security System and reboot the www.
All of which sounds like a jolly good thing, on the face of it. Even if you don’t quite understand what it means in practical terms.
It does leave a few questions unanswered, though.
First off, how is Mr Kane supposed to buy himself an airline ticket to America if the entire world wide web has gone into hacker-induced meltdown?
And what happens if he loses his personal key down the back of the sofa? Has he got a spare? Has he put it on a keyring? Preferably one of those electronic jobs that warble back at you when you whistle at them?
And how many times has he heard most of these wisecracks before in one form or another?
So there’s absolutely nothing for us to worry about. Especially those of us who don’t know the difference between the world wide web and the internet, and probably never will. Because Mr Kane has got it all under control.
A bit like Bath and North East Somerset council, really. (He wrote, going off at a complete tangent.)
After last Sunday’s Sky Ride Bath, questions were asked on thisisbath.co.uk about how much money, if any, the council made from the event.
One regular contributor discovered that it would cost £550 to get a Temporary Traffic Regulation Order to close all the roads, plus an additional cost for advertising.
Following the link (shortcut: tinyurl.com/2ufqunk) provided by our reader takes you to the Licences and Street Trading page on the council website that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that B&NES does indeed control everything.

Want to start a zoo? B&NES will sell you a licence, for £534 plus vets’ fees.

Want to trade as an acupuncturist (or a tattooist, or indeed any sort of -ist that involves piercing the skin)? The permit is a snip (ouch) at £72.

Want to put up a banner across the highway? Be prepared for a world of bureaucratic pain.
Want to store fireworks, or poisons, or petroleum? Want to breed puppies, or keep a sloth, or a tapir, or a crested porcupine? Fancy your chances as a chaperone for children involved in a theatrical performance? B&NES has the licence or certificate you need, or can tell you where to get one.

Just remember though, that if you want to start a new career as a pedlar, pushing a wheeled trolley is not acceptable.

You can even find all the forms you need to set up a sex shop. But you didn’t want to know that, did you?

Bureaucracy gone mad? Not really. Whether it’s the web or the real world, we all need someone to keep us safe from the mutters.

If you're bored, you're boring

2010-07-22T15:37:00.000+01:00

Right. That’s it. The lessons are over. The postmortem about school report has been held and concluded to nobody’s complete satisfaction.

The blazers, sweatshirts, dark trousers and sensible shoes have been scrunched up in a heap or left to fester in a dark corner.

For a couple of moments a veil of peace settles on the household.

In that brief stasis, the relief they feel at having no more maths, French, geography, food tech, whatever, just about outweighs the horrific realisation that they’ve got nothing to occupy them for six whole weeks.

Then all hell lets loose.

School is the only thing that really keeps kids busy. And being busy is the only thing that keeps them from either throttling each other or thinking up smart comebacks to any instruction from their parents.

All right, they probably throttle each other at school too, and cheek the teachers while they’re at it. But isn’t that the main reason you pay your council tax, to stop them doing it at home?

“Mum, Dad, I’m bored,” say the not-so-little ones.

“Well, find yourself something to do,” says the increasingly frazzled parent.

“But there isn’t anything to do,” comes the well-practised response.

“Well read a book, or go for a walk, or tidy your room,” says parent, playing for time.

“But that’s B-O-R-I-N-G. Why aren’t we on holiday? All our friends are on holiday.”

“Well we’re going next week,” says parent, playing the trump card.

“But everyone else has gone this week. That means we won’t see our mates for ages.”

“Well it’ll be all the more fun when you get back together, won’t it? And anyway, you can Facebook them.”

“But they can’t get on Facebook in the Rocky Mountains. And why can’t we go to Canada? Why are we going camping in Devon? Again?”

Perceptive readers will have noticed that the conversation has already descended into one of the classic modes of parent/offspring non-communication: what psychologists call the But/Well Interface.

Child starts every sentence with “But...” Parent answers every objection with “Well...” And there are no winners. Ever.

When your columnist and his brother were young, we were looked after by Grandma Dixon (you remember, the one with the odd theories about women’s lifespans).

Her response to any hint of an “I’m bored” scenario was a pre-emptive strike with some Rudyard Kipling:

“The Camel’s hump is an ugly lump/ Which well you may see at the Zoo;/ But uglier yet is the hump we get/ From having too little to do...”

Neither of us had a clue what she was on about, but she did instil in us the love of literature which has continued to succour us in our later years.

Of course we didn’t have video games in those days. All we had was a stick. But what might loosely be called the electronic cosh is definitely the modern parent’s truest, bestest, closest friend.

Plug in, turn on and wait for the electricity bill. At least it saves on arguments.

Ringo Starr and the psychic octopus

2010-07-17T18:12:00.000+01:00

One of The Beatles' lesser-known numbers is a jolly little ditty called Octopus's Garden.

It's not exactly what you'd call a classic. It wasn't written by John Lennon, or Paul McCartney, or even by George Harrison, but by drummer Ringo Starr, whose talents as a lyricist are hardly up there with the greats.

He sings it too, on the album Abbey Road, in those lugubrious tones that he was later to put to good effect as the storyteller in the Thomas and Friends animated TV series.

"I'd like to be, under the sea, in an octopus's garden in the shade," warbles Ringo at his most Liverpudlian. And somehow you can tell he means it.

Funnily enough, if you should ever chance to visit the website of the Daily Telegraph, you can find a picture of Ringo visiting this year's Chelsea Flower Show.

The caption identifies him as the narrator of the tales of anthropomorphised locomotives, but there's not even a mention of his job with the Fab Four.

Whether that says more about the Telegraph web site or about popular culture is a question we shall leave to the reader.

Anyway, cephalopods. They're back in the headlines after the astonishing success of Paul the Psychic Octopus's World Cup 2010 predictions. And rightly so.

They're fascinating creatures. They have eight legs (no surprise). They have three hearts (big surprise: one for each set of gills, one for their body).

They're pretty brainy, too, for an invertebrate mollusc. So brainy in fact that Sam Holliday has started contractual negotiations with Paul with a view to assuring the continued success of The Bath Chronicle's all-conquering Brain of Bath quiz team. Although it remains to be seen how Paul will cope in the infamous "smells round".

It's a bit like the old joke. "My octopus has got no nose." "How does he smell?" Oh never mind.

Paul is a bit of a turncoat, though. He was hatched in a tank in Weymouth, but early in his career emigrated to a sea life centre at Oberhausen in Germany. And since then he has taken an unhealthy interest in the fortunes of the German football team.

He correctly predicted four of their six Euro 2008 results, but it was at the World Cup that he really got into his stride. (Do octopuses have a stride? Subs please check.)

By choosing food from two boxes, one with the German flag and one with their opponents', he accurately foretold Die Mannschaft's progress from defeat against Serbia to defeat against Spain.

(OK, they had some wins too. But let's just remember the good times.)

And now the Spaniards have invited him to an annual octopus festival, at which they have promised not to eat him. Paul (and his minders) have wisely declined.

Sadly, Paul's career as a football pundit will only be short-lived. The natural lifespan of the common octopus is only two years, so he's close to retirement. A pity really: he'll never get to see his original homeland's success in Brazil 2014.

Never mind, though. We've always got Alan Hansen.

Why women live longer than men

2010-07-08T09:51:00.000+01:00

It’s always heartening to read that things in this neck of the woods are better than they are elsewhere in the country.

Crumbs of comfort, maybe, but it does give you a slightly self-satisfied feeling to know that you were either born here or could afford to move here at some time in the past. You couldn’t now, but let that be.

Anyway, a report from the Association of Public Health Observatories adds grist to that particular mill.

(What is grist, while we’re on the subject? Has anyone ever seen it? Can you buy it from the market? Can you set fire to it? Does it bounce? Answers on a postcard...)

Anyway. “People in Bath,” we read, “live up to two years longer than the national average.

“Life expectancy for men in Bath and north east Somerset is 80, while for women it is 83.5.

“Which is significantly higher than the averages for England of 77.9 years for men and 82 years for women.”

So, as far as men are concerned, is 80 “significantly” higher than 77.9? Well maybe. The trusty Chronicle Towers calculator (it’s one of those ones with mechanical buttons and a hand crank and it doesn’t need batteries) was pressed into action to do a bit of statistical analysis.

Let’s crunch some numbers and find a percentage: 80 minus 77.9 is 2.1. And 77.9 divided by 100 is 0.779. And 0.779 times 2.1 is 1.6359.

Rounding up, men in Bath live 1.64 per cent longer than the national average. For women, the percentage is smaller: just 1.23.

(Guess who’s been helping the kids with their maths revision? Guess who’s got a brain like a bowl full of mashed potato? So please don’t trouble to write in if you think these sums are wrong. Enough tears have been shed already.)

There’s no obvious reason why women should live longer than men. Grandma Dixon, of blessed memory, used to claim that it was because women sit down and stand up every time they go to the loo.

This means, she theorised, that over an average lifetime women do more exercise then us chaps, and are therefore haler, heartier and more prone to bouts of longevity.

Several hours of internet searches have produced no confirmation of this breakthrough in medical thinking.

(There were a lot of pictures of cute kittens though, and a video of someone falling over. Grandma Dixon wouldn’t have approved of the World Wide Web.)

Be that as it may, there is good news in Bath and north east Somerset Health Report 2010 . (PDF, 600Kb).

We eat more healthily, we’re less likely to smoke or binge drink. Our children are less likely to be obese, although strangely they’re also less likely to be physically active than the average English child.

For more information, download a PDF file of the complete report from http://tinyurl.com/2wtqu4y.

It treats statistics in a far less cavalier fashion than the present writer, and suggests that those differences in life expectancy are indeed significant.

But on the theories of Grandma Dixon, it remains mercifully silent.

Lost in space - with a dodgy boiler

2010-07-05T11:03:00.000+01:00

Technology has two very different faces.

A bright, shiny face and a grim, grumpy face. As events earlier this week will illustrate.

First, the bright and shiny bit: the International Space Station, or ISS to its chums.

Just look at its vital statistics.

At nearly 51 metres long and 109 metres wide, and weighing 370 tonnes (that’s 407 tons in old money), it’s the largest and heaviest artificial satellite ever to orbit the earth. It travels at an average speed of 17,239mph, at a height of up to 286 miles above the ground, and completes 15.7 orbits per day.

It currently carries a crew of six people, who for all sorts of very good reasons aren’t allowed to indulge in any kind of interplanetary rumpy-pumpy, according to a recent interview with NASA Commander Alan Poindexter.

(Now there’s a good square-jawed- New-Frontier-Buzz-Lightyear-style American surname if ever there was one. Just the right sort of star-spangled hero to lead humanity to infinity and beyond. No cosmic nooky on his watch, you can be sure of that.)

The ISS is big enough to be seen from Earth with the naked eye, and for the last few nights it’s been passing almost directly over Bath. You can find predictions for the next ISS passovers for Bath at heavens-above.com

There’s something just a little bit awe-inspiring, and humbling too, about standing outside on a clear summer’s evening as it tracks across the sky, taking just four or five minutes from rising in the west to disappearing into the east.

Catch it if you can – it’s quite a show. And remember as it goes by: it’s not flying, it’s falling with style.

So that’s the exciting side of modern technology. Now for the dark, grubby downside: our hot water system.

Imagine: you stroll in from an inspiring five minutes watching the ISS zoom past, to find Mrs D with her special doom-laden face on.

And you know you’re in for a spell of protracted misery when she utters those dread words: “Hugh, I can’t get the boiler to work.”

Which sounds uncannily similar to “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” Except about six times worse.

Kids will go unshowered. Washing will go un-upped. Towels won’t dry on the towel rail. But that won’t matter because we won’t be having a bath any time soon.

Of course, there’s a hi-tech solution: engage diagnostic skills, repressurise the warp coils, calibrate the quantum flux generator and stand by for ignition. But no. The green light is flashing and the yellow light won’t come on, and let’s face it, you don’t have the slightest idea why not.

You can bet your booty they don’t have this sort of trouble on the ISS. But then, nor do they have the eventual cure. Which is to open up the innards and give everything a good wiggle. Turn it off, turn it on again, run the hot water and bingo.

Stand back and modestly accept praise from assembled family members. You have boldly gone where no man has gone before.

Until the whole damn lot goes wrong again the following morning. Time to introduce the chequebook to the boiler man.

Large Hadron Collider goes to Glastonbury

2010-06-24T10:01:00.000+01:00

Have you ever had one of those mornings when inspiration refuses to come?

When words – never mind whole sentences – flow from your brain to the tip of your typing finger with all the grace and alacrity of Emile Heskey chasing a through ball?

When ideas are as rare as English women tennis players after the first round at Wimbledon?

(And yes, we know the men won’t do much better either. So don’t bother writing in.)

When your vvv is as www as an xxx’s yyy in the middle of a zzz with two qqq’s? (Fill in gaps later.)

If you’ve ever tried to get words on to paper for a living, the chances are that you know the feeling.

So what do you do to get the creative juices flowing again, to lubricate the brain/paper interface, and to ensure that the remaining two legs of this week’s outpouring are at least half literate?

Well, whatever you might think after this week’s Budget from the Black Lagoon, the answer is not cider. Especially not at 9.15 in the morning, mister Osborne sir.

No, if you need a dose of inspiration, just look eastwards, to the Franco-Swiss border, under which runs the giant torus that is the Large Hadron Collider.

Yes, we’ve been there before. Usually when the good old LHC has inexplicably broken down because a pigeon has dropped a chunk of quantum baguette into its insides.

This time though, it’s different.

Because a radio news report earlier this week suggested that the boffins in charge of the LHC are trying to get it started on the road to musical superstardom by converting its heretofore silent subatomic womblings into sounds.

It’s rather like when you buy a new computer. It comes with all sorts of fancy toys that you never get round to using – film editing software, website creation tools, the first level of a game that stretches the graphics card to its limit and crashes just as you’re getting the hang of the controls.

Instead you use it as intended – for emails, web browsing and writing to the bank explaining how you’re going to pay back the money you borrowed to buy it in the first place.

But one lazy day your discover that hidden away under the bonnet is a full 32-track recording studio, with instrument samples, graphic equalizers, flangers and other incomprehensible sonic effects.

A few minutes fiddling – a cowbell here, a horn stab there – and you’ve got a hit on your hands.

Or nor. What you’ve actually got is an out-take from Hot Chip.

But what does all this have to do with the LHC? Well, its everyday work (renormalising Higgs bosons, mixing quark-gluon plasma) was getting a bit dull, and it needed its own creative outlet.

And now the LHC has found that outlet: the music within itself.

So be warned. If you’re at Glastonbury this weekend, and 1,600 superconducting magnets appear on the Pyramid Stage, then you’re about to hear the sound of protons colliding at the speed of light.

A bit like Kraftwerk, by all accounts. But without the tunes.

Bath Regency Detective: sneak preview

2010-06-17T10:20:00.001+01:00

“City in line for own detective show” reads the headline in The Bath Chronicle. And what better sort of TV detective for Bath than one from the Regency period?

For it is, to paraphrase a novelist who stayed in Bath for a bit, a truth universally acknowledged, that a city in possession of a gang of villains, must be in want of someone to give ’em a proper sorting.

Yes, coming soon to a screen near you is what can only be imagined as an Empire-line version of every hard-hitting Mockney detective series you’ve ever seen on TV.

Here’s a sneak preview:

SCENE I

A well-appointed apartment in the Paragon. Miss Betty Smallpiece has met an unpleasant end. Her friend, the fashionable Miss Abigail Cavendish, is being grilled by Inspector Nasher, a rough diamond with greasy hair and yellow fingernails bitten to the quick. Sergeant Trotter, his sidekick, lurks menacingly at the back of the room.

MISS CAVENDISH: We have had a most delightful evening, an excellent ball.

NASHER: Shut it, slaaaaag!

MISS CAVENDISH: For shame, sir! Would you toy with my affections?

NASHER: Are you ’avin’ a laugh? You are, you’re ’avin’ a laugh, ain’tcha?

MISS CAVENDISH: Upon my word, you overstep the bounds of propriety.

NASHER: Give us a fag, love. I’ve got a mouth like a fireman’s boot.

MISS CAVENDISH: I most certainly will not. My father shall hear of this!

NASHER: That’s it, darlin’, you’re nicked. Cuff ’er, Trotter.

SCENE II

Nasher and Trotter peer in through the door of a cell at the headquarters of the Bath Watch. Filthy straw lines the cobbled floor. Miss Cavendish languishes in chains.

MISS CAVENDISH: I swoon, I swoon!

TROTTER: Is this some kind of fit-up, guvnor? You’re not tellin’ me it was her what done it?

NASHER: Nah, she’s ’ere for ’er own protection. If we ’adn’t ’ave brung ’er in she’d ’ave woke up in Twerton with a chalk line round ’er.

TROTTER: You’re a sharp ’un guvnor and no mistake. Whadda we do now?

NASHER: We’re the Sweeney, son, and we ’aven’t ’ad any dinner!

SCENE III

Miss Cavendish has returned to her family lodgings with her betrothed, the dashing Mr Lower-Lansdown. Nasher has uncomfortable news.

NASHER: That’s our villain. As soon as I laid eyes on the smarmy git I knew something weren’t right.

MISS CAVENDISH: But Inspector, Mr Lower-Lansdown is heir to a thousand acres in Hampshire. What possible desire could he have to do poor Betty to death?

NASHER: Search me, darlin’. But his prints was all over the blunderbuss. And his real name ain’t Lower-Lansdown. It’s Walcot. We’ve got ’im bang to rights.

LOWER-LANSDOWN: You’ll never take me, copper. I can’t do time again.

NASHER: Yeah, right. Take ’im down the nick, Trotter. And if you ’ave to ’urt ’im, don’t mark ’im.

MISS CAVENDISH: How can I thank you enough, Inspector? Maybe we will meet again at the Assembly Rooms next Friday forenoon?

NASHER (TO HIMSELF): I hate this place. It’s a holiday camp for thieves and weirdoes. All the rubbish...

FADEOUT

Next week: Jamie’s Regency Dinners

Waiting for the fur to fly

2010-06-11T08:45:00.000+01:00

The appearance of last week’s ramblings got yours truly into a certain amount of trouble.

Some colleagues felt that the shameless and extended plug for a certain Open Garden event in Weston this Sunday was in some way an abuse of its writer’s position.

And a female member of the Dixon household was, perhaps justifiably, a little bit miffed that her gentle and forbearing nature had been misrepresented both in print and online. Misrepresented to such a degree that, she contends, it amounts to defamation of character.

Yes, our cat is suing The Bath Chronicle for libel. With particular reference to the suggestion that she regularly lurks in the flower beds waiting to sink her claws into unsuspecting passers-by.

Now any hack worth his or her salt will have more than a passing acquaintance with McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists.

The current, 20th, edition covers such essential topics as court reporting, copyright, protection of sources and defamation.

But nowhere in its 570 pages does it suggest that a moggy may take her owner – or indeed her owner’s employer – to court. And even if she could, we’d have – courtesy of McNae’s – any number of defences.

Take your pick from justification, innocent dissemination, fair comment, privilege, qualified privilege and “other”. The cat hasn’t got a leg to stand on, litigation-wise.

She can roll on her back and look cute all she likes, but at the end of the day we know she’s a lean, mean, ludicrously fluffy biting machine.

And rather than wasting her time and money dragging us through the courts, she’d be far better off going to the assistance of some of her larger feline cousins.

The San Francisco Fudge Factory, in Church Street, near Bath Abbey, is one of the sponsors of the Lions Of Bath 2010 project.

Their lion sculpture, The King of Fudge, took pride of place (geddit?) on the roof above the shop. The work of artist Gareth Sayers, The King is one of the simplest and most distinctive of the sculptures appearing across the city: a shiny chocolate head revealed by a peeled-back “mane” of gold foil.

He looks regally distinguished and good enough to eat, both at the same time.

Or at least he did, until some scumbag pushed him off his perch last Saturday night.

You wouldn’t really want to get inside the mind of the peasant who did it. It must be a rather dank, sweaty and unpleasant place if its owner’s idea of a good time is going to the trouble of climbing onto a roof and vandalising an attractive and valuable work of art. Enough said – anger is bad for the heart.

King of Fudge has been taken back to Lions’ Den central for repairs.

And let’s just hope the culprit doesn’t have a midnight encounter with the man-eater outside the Cork Vaults in James Street West. Because our cat would be more than happy to lend a paw.

Everything in the garden's lovely. Well, it will be...

2010-06-03T10:54:00.001+01:00

It's shameless and gratuitous plug time. It comes round every year with monotonous regularity, and we make no apology for returning to the subject once again.
On Sunday week, 11 keen gardeners in Weston village – including Mrs D – will be opening up to the public in aid of Dorothy House Hospice Care and voluntary groups in Weston and Newbridge.
Last year the event raised £1,900, and gave visitors the chance to enjoy a glimpse behind the garden wall and maybe gain some inspiration for their own plots.
The great news is that because of this year's cold winter and slow spring, everything in our back patch is only just coming to fruition and, according to the Head Gardener – Mrs D, and she's got one of those mugs that say so – will be in perfect nick on the day.
(On the subject of mugs, yours truly is considering getting one that says Under Gardener. Hopefully it won't be taken too literally.)
Anyway, if you do decide to come along, we can promise a horticultural treat at least as thrilling as any Chelsea Flower Show. Here are just a few of the treats in store:

THRILL to the burbling of our incredible solar-powered fountain. The bloke in the shop knocked £30 off the original asking price; he said he was fed up with staring at the boxes on the shelf. *
GUZZLE the lollies and ice-creams sold for a minimal fee by the willing band of "volunteers" press-ganged by Mrs D for the occasion.
GASP as the cat, apparently comatose under the foxgloves, leaps into action and takes a swipe at anyone foolhardy enough to stick their hand in her general direction.
WONDER at the extraordinary medieval doo-dah

which Mrs D lugged home from the Chelsea for hanging lavender from, and which yours truly was ordered to suspend from the kitchen ceiling at considerable risk to his person.

There are some lovely flowers, too. And that's just our place. Who knows what other wonders will await you as you stroll around the streets of Weston? Do come along – it's a very worthy cause.
Weston Village Open Garden Event is on Sunday, June 13. It runs from 1pm to 5pm. Admission is by programme, which costs £5 on the day or £4 in advance from Kit Johnson estate agents and Weston Fruit Stores, both in Weston High Street. A full list of Weston open gardens is available online.

* Potential visitors please note: fountain only works in full sunlight. Anyone found obstructing the solar panel will be asked to move. Fountain is not directly comparable with similar installations at Versailles, Blenheim Palace or the Trevi in Rome. Your statutory rights are not affected. Not a flying toy.

How many more stoats must die?

2010-05-27T08:54:00.000+01:00

The biggest unanswered question in the aftermath of the Queen’s Speech on Tuesday wasn’t “What happens next at Oldfield School?”

It wasn’t “You know those national ID cards? How would you feel if you were a young person who’d forked out £30 on one so you could buy booze easily, and now you can’t get a refund? Because we’re just about to scrap them?”

It wasn’t “What did the Duke of Edinburgh do to win all those medals? And is he going to stay awake this time?”

It wasn’t “How soon can we book a holiday to avoid election fever in May 2015 once they introduce fixed-term parliaments?”

It wasn’t even “How can David Cameron and Harriet Harman be so chummy one minute while they’re walking into the House of Lords and then rip seven colours of whoopsy out of each other a couple of hours later in the House of Commons?”

No, what everyone was asking – well, some people, anyway – was this: “Why did half the people at the State Opening of Parliament look like they were extras in a costume drama set in the far-away kingdom of Ruritania?”

If you have the time and the inclination, take a quick look at the website of Messrs Ede and Ravenscroft, robe-fettlers to the gentry.

Here you will discover that at the tippy-top of the tree of ennoblement, dukes wear robes with four rows of ermine and gold, followed by marquesses with three-and-a-half rows. Mere barons bring up the rear with just two.

There’s a load of stuff about coronets too but it’s all a bit too complicated and technical.

The robes, you will be intrigued to learn, are made from scarlet superfine faced cloth, and “rarely need replacing”.

All of which sounds a bit like a certain lumberjack shirt which makes occasional appearances at Dixon Towers when the proprietor is called upon to undertake wintry DIY duties. And just as smelly.

Here the similarity ends, though. Because when the duking day is done (or marquessing, or baronising), the wearers don’t just stick their robes in the back of the dukely (or marquisly, or baronial) wardrobe. They send them back to Ede and Ravenscroft for safe keeping. E&R wouldn’t touch the Dixon plaid with a barge pole.

But before you become too entranced with the day-to-day romance of the British nobility, remember this: uncounted stoats died to supply those trimmings.

Isn’t it time for the killing to stop?

And then there’s Black Rod.

Bloke in funny britches gets door slammed in face. Bloke knocks three times on door. MPs open door and come quietly. What’s all that about? Don’t answer, please: life’s too short.

Space prevents us from going into the duties of Black Rod’s four counterparts, the Rods Green, Scarlet, Blue and Purple. They do exist, though, and they don’t live on Cloudbase with Colonel White.

It’s 2010, and we’re broke. And in the Houses of Parliament, once a year at least, they’re partying like it’s 1859. Does anyone really care?

World cup fever starts here

2010-05-20T14:09:00.000+01:00

Not long to go now. From the moment that the very first driver clipped the very first cross of Saint George flag to the roof of their car, there has been no escaping it.

Yes folks, it's the World Cup. Or to give it its full name, the 2010 FIFA World Cup South AfricaTM .

It starts on June 11, little more than three weeks away.

And if all goes to plan England will lift the gleaming golden trophy out of its official Louis Vuitton travelling bag a month later on July 11.

How can we be so sure? Well, two city types at JP Morgan bank have done a bit of quantitative risk analysis and come to the conclusion that the fixture schedule gives England their best chance of a win since 1966. And seeing what a great job city analysts have done on the economy over the last couple of years, who could possibly disagree with their predictions?

1966, though. The year when football stayed at home. The year when some chancer nicked the Jules Rimet trophy and left it in a South London hedge, where it was found by Pickles the wonder-dog. (Who, for trivia fans, met his end soon afterwards, choking on his lead while chasing a cat. A true hero.)

1966, the year of World Cup Willie, the first and cheekiest World Cup mascot. The year when the merchandising really got going.

Four years later, the contest moved to Mexico. In those days people could still afford petrol, and Esso cashed in on cup fever by producing a collection of 30 coins depicting the members of the England squad and crafted of the finest aluminium.

Woe betide any 1970 parent who went to a Shell garage to get their petrol. Small boys in those days had no interest in collecting tokens for glass tumblers. They had a brace of Alan Mullerys, five Gordon Bankses, three Martin Peters and no Bobby Moore OBE, and Esso was the only place they could complete their collection. Except in the murky waters of the school swapsies market, which was already flooded with those Captain Scarlet bubble gum cards that you could arrange into a giant jigsaw.

Such was the rare quality of the Esso coins that a complete set of 30 now sells on ebay for at least £6.50. What a return on your dad's original investment in petrol: not even enough to put a tenth of a tiger in your tank.

Still, there's one thing to be grateful for. At least the powers that be at FIFA have scheduled England's fixtures to avoid any clash with the Weston Village Open Gardens day on Sunday, June 13.

Our first-round tussle with the USA is just one day before that, and it would have been a pretty bad show if all Mrs D's horticultural efforts over the last months had come to nought because everyone was at home or in the pub watching England's glory boys on their first step to international triumph. There is justice in the world after all.

Recipes for disaster

2010-05-13T08:43:00.000+01:00

It's been more than a year now, according to the uncannily accurate archiving system at Bath Chronicle Towers, that this column/blog/whatever touched on the pink and meaty subject of SPAM®.

And from the capital letters, and the nifty little R in a circle, which it took the best brains in the IT department two and a half hours to find, you can no doubt tell that we're not talking here about Unsolicited Commercial Emails.

No, this is the real deal – 90 per cent pork, enrobed in clear salty jelly, and no less sustaining than it was in the dark days of World War II, when the Allied armies marched resolutely to the fray on nothing more than a bellyful, and whole families survived for weeks on SPAM® fritters, a few turnips and a dubious fish called the snoek.

(The snoek probably deserves a column all of its own, but it's not going to get one. Suffice it to say that it rhymes with "snook" and could either be a pike, a perch or a moray eel. And you'd only want to eat one in times of dire national emergency. Like in about six months' time.)

Anyway, Mrs D came back from a shopping expedition the other day with a reminder that SPAM® is now and forever shall be with us, in the shape of SPAM®: The Cookbook by Marguerite Patten.

And as often when there's the slightest suggestion that impulse buying might be involved, she deflected any criticism by claiming to have "got it in a charity shop".

We'll let that one ride.

Now, the Dixon household prides itself on culinary eclecticism and adventurousness, but this cookbook really does take the biscuit.

It includes recipes for such delicacies as Chicken Cordon Bleu (boneless breast stuffed with SPAM®); SPAM® Slippers (aforesaid luncheon meat, chopped and spread on a roasted aubergine); SPAM® Steaks in Port Wine (what it says on the tin); and Penny-Wise Paella (SPAM® with budget ingredients like peeled prawns, mussels on half shells and saffron, which the fragrant Marguerite admits is the "most expensive spice in the world".)

There are many more recipes, but what ultimately persuades you that none of them should be tried out for real is the SPAM® Porcupine.

Perhaps in recognition of the savoury luncheon meat's wartime heritage, it looks like one of those mines with prongs sticking out that you see at the seaside converted into a charity collecting box.

The body of the mine is a raw cabbage, or a grapefruit if you're feeling adventurous. The prongs are cocktail sticks. And onto the prongs are stuck alternating lumps of gherkin, pineapple, avocado, cocktail onions, glacé cherries, and – yes, you guessed it. That meat.

Heston Blumenthal, look to your laurels. Jamie Oliver, eat your heart out. We have seen the future, and it is SPAM®.

We won't be using the cookbook any time soon. But if we decide to enter Masterchef, we'll know where to turn for inspiration.

Watch out, it's a Wednesday

2010-04-29T13:35:00.000+01:00

We had a visit last week at Chronicle Towers from some jolly friendly people from the BBC.

They've set up a website under the umbrella of the BBC College of Journalism which brings together a lot of very sensible advice to those of us who make our living from news gathering and publishing.

Much of it is geared towards TV and radio, but plenty of it is applicable to any form of journalism – or indeed to anyone who writes as part of their job.

The guidance ranges from the practical – how to spot fake pictures, how the courts operate – to the inspirational.

If you watch one internet video this week, then visit the site and track down Alan Little's passionate and humbling 15-minute guide to clear and authoritative writing.

But tucked away in the depths of the site is a section on how to use statistics, averages and percentages – and how easy it is for journalists to misuse them. It's the sort of thing that makes your everyday newshound go all glassy-eyed and start to wonder where the next pint's coming from, but persevere with it and you'll realise how dangerous numbers can be when they get into the wrong hands.

To illustrate, here's a raw and apparently chilling statistic: There are at least twice as many dangerous nutcases on the roads on a Wednesday morning as at any other time of the week.

On the face of things it sounds shocking. But does it stand up to numerical scrutiny?

Well, here's a brief analysis, based on one columnist's experience.

It's Wednesday, school-run time. You and family hop in motor, fire up CD player and hit the road. Two minutes into journey, you reach the narrow bit where they haven't got round to marking double yellow lines and are still using parked cars as ad-hoc traffic calming measure.

Calming? In a pig's eye. Everyone is rushing for the same gaps and no one's giving way or waving to say "thank you".

Drop off Mrs D for a day at one side of the pupil/teacher interface, continue with young Miss D on way to opposite side of interface. Pull into supermarket car park to top up with essentials. Open boot to load said essentials.

Car behind drives into leg.

Fury at other driver tempered by relief at non-breakage of tibia and/or fibula. Onwards and upwards, and drop off youngster.

Last leg (ho ho) of journey. Turning right at T-junction. Bike pulls up on left side. Road in front clear, start forward. Bike shoots ahead, turns right in front of bonnet. Slam on brakes, avoid bike by inches.

Only memorable feature of cyclist: in-ear headphones.

Moment of decision: descend into road rage or take deep breath and reflect that statistically, it's just another Wednesday morning? QED.

Hey, you, get offa my ash cloud

2010-04-22T21:20:00.002+01:00

A long, long time ago, when your columnist was a mere stripling, the Dixon family lived in a country cottage in the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire.

Half a mile to the south stretched a leafy belt of beech woodland. To the north rolled the fertile plains of the Vale of Aylesbury.

It was a beautiful place to grow up, although the country lanes did tend to get a bit muddy in the winter. And having your friends around involved a logistic exercise almost as complex as bringing back stranded holidaymakers from Spain by boat, taxi, Eurostar and rickshaw.

The only problem with this otherwise idyllic setting was the fact that the house was under the flight path out of Luton Airport,

which in the early 1970s was establishing itself as the departure point of choice for package tourists.

And in those days, jets were noisy.

The worst offenders were the BAC One-Elevens and Lockheed TriStars operated by Court Line.

On the inside they were cramped and uncomfortable. On the outside, like everything in the 1970s that wasn't made of brown vinyl, they were painted in queasy pastel shades of butterscotch, lilac or pink.

And they screamed. Right over the roof of our house.

In those days of fuel crises, economy weighed more heavily on the airlines' minds than the comfort of those left behind on the ground. Planes took off on a much longer, shallower slope than they do today, and their engines were much louder.

So even 12 miles from Luton, the noise on a summer's day was enough to drive you out of the garden and into your headphones. Which were indeed made of brown vinyl. And through which you could do just as much damage to your hearing by listening to Pink Floyd at full volume. (Told you: even the bands were pink.)

Then, on August 15, 1974, Court Line went bust. Its nauseatingly-coloured planes were grounded, and for a few weeks we could sit outside in relative peace.

It seems a long time ago now. All right, it was a long time ago. Don't go there.

But what goes around comes around, and thanks to a cloud of ash from an Icelandic volcano, we've just enjoyed an even quieter period than that gentle summer of 1974.

With easyJet, Ryanair and the rest no longer cranking up their reverse thrusters just as they reach Bath airspace en route to Bristol airport, the only blots on the horizon have been hot-air balloons delivering their cargoes of exotic vegetables to the posher supermarkets.

But presumably not to Iceland.

On Wednesday it miraculously became safe to fly. Contrails hatched the clear blue skies, and the moans of the avocado-deprived middle classes gradually died away.

Now of course we should feel sorry for those whose lives have been disrupted by the flight ban, and we should be glad that things are getting back to normal.

But wouldn't it have been nice if it had gone on just a little bit longer?

The end of their world is nigh

2010-04-16T09:31:00.000+01:00

"The insides of the yellow bird were marvellous to behold. Here were small spools, a line of knobs, a glimpse of amplifying circuits. The two humans let their fingers enjoy the delight of toggle switches.

"With scarcely a murmur, it rose from the ground. Superb in powered flight, it wheeled above them, glowing richly in the sun.

"'Make the world safe for democracy!' it cried."

A bit of context may be needed here. The yellow bird-like machine is the heckler, the two humans are Gren and his mate Yattmur, and the scene takes place in the dim and distant future, in Hothouse , a novel by Brian Aldiss, the "godfather of British science-fiction".

Gren and Yattmur are on an epic journey across an earth inhabited by predatory plantlife, a very nasty telepathic fungus and the tummy-belly men, who live in strange symbiosis with trees.

This unfamiliar earth has stopped spinning on its axis and is tethered to the moon by strands spun by the traversers, mile-wide arachnid vegetables that commute between the planets, feeding off the sun's hard radiation.

The human race has devolved back to the trees, shrunken in size and lifespan, sometimes hitching rides on the Traversers and mutating into even stranger life-forms on the way.

You couldn't make it up.

But Brian Aldiss did, nearly 50 years ago, and even today Hothouse reads with a modernity that belies its age. Humans have lost control of the world and their own destinies, and function at pretty much the same level as the semi-sentient plants that they eat. When they're not being eaten themselves.

Hothouse isn't really a warning about a man-made environmental crisis – it's a fantasy about what might happen in the far future as the sun gets closer to turning nova.

But like all good science fiction, it speaks to our own time. And what strikes closest to home, finishing the book three weeks before a General Election, is the heckler machine.

The heckler is the only high-tech artefact in a world where even the wheel has ceased to exist.

To Gren and Yattmur it's an incomprehensible relic of a distant past, as it flutters above their heads, exhorting them to "Vote for SRH – vote for freedom!" and telling them that "Statistics prove you are better off than your bosses."

All the heckler's political slogans and posturings – support the two-day working week, boycott chimp goods – are made meaningless by the passing of time.

In the present day, of course, we can't ignore the party-political slogans. And even the most apolitical cynic would think twice about swapping today's politicised media mayhem for the opportunity to live in a continent-sized banyan tree under constant threat from wiltmilts, vandalberries and deadly nettlemoss.

But won't it be nice when it stops?

Hothouse is published by Penguin Classics, and is worth every penny of £8.99.

Charmin mess with the bottom line

2010-04-11T21:09:00.000+01:00

One of the great things about the human race, we're always being told, is its adaptability.

Wasn't it humans who developed tools, conquered fire, broke the hold of gravity and walked on the moon?

Wasn't it humans who learned to read and write, to count and to calculate, and wasn't it all that and more that makes us human?

Well, yes, it was and it is.

So why is it, when we're supposedly such models of flexibility and innovation, that we're also so resistant to change?

Why, when we supposedly find it so easy to rise to technological challenges like recording off Sky+, editing movies on our iPods, or fixing the door back on the icebox when it falls off for the 15th time this week, do we get all worked up when someone changes the name of a perfectly memorable toilet tissue from Charmin to Cushelle?

You could almost hear the huffing and puffing of indignation from sofas across the land as the first TV adverts went out. (Not a small amount of it emanating from the elegant chaise longue in the front parlour at Dixon Towers.)

"What?" spluttered viewer upon viewer, their voices merging in chorus above the rooftops of Great Britain. "What was wrong with Charmin? Why have they retired the cheery bear and replaced it with some new-fangled marsupial?"

Yes, sadly (if it's possible to get sentimental about bog paper), Charmin has gone the same way as Marathon, Opal Fruits and the artist formerly known as Prince, then known as a squiggle, then known as Prince again because the squiggle was too hard to say properly.

Charmin has been re-branded, and even if you've never used the stuff in your life – if Izal was good enough for our grandparents, it's good enough for us – you could be forgiven for feeling that in some way the fabric has been altered without your permission.

But why pamper life's complexity? After all, ridicule is nothing to be scared of. (Spot the references, pop-pickers.)

The makers of the erstwhile Marathon bar changed its name to Snickers to fit in with a US-inspired global marketing plan. But as far as can be determined by a quick trawl of the internet (which is never wrong), Charmin is still Charmin on the other side of the pond.

So perhaps the re-branding is down to the animals. Golden labrador puppies take a lot of beating when it comes to – well, you know – and maybe the Charmin bear with his cheeky grin didn't quite cut the mustard in some European marketing focus group. Koalas look cuddly. Cushelle sounds cuddly. So let's run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it.

And that's the bottom line.

Boson buddies

2010-04-05T21:23:00.000+01:00

It is only by a stroke of very good fortune that this week's column has appeared on these august pages.

And anyone who had their ear to the ground last Tuesday will understand why.

Because it was on Tuesday that the Large Hadron Collider eventually got down to business and started its life's work: creating God particles.

What, you may well ask, is a God particle? What, you may equally well ask, is the Large Hadron Collider?

The best answer to both of those questions is probably "Don't ask." But for those with more curiosity than sense, here is a layperson's guide.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC to its chums, of which there are few) is a giant doughnut-shaped tunnel under the Swiss-French border that pings sub-atomic particles round and round in ever-decreasing circles in an attempt to create conditions similar to those that existed at the time of the Big Bang.

It has already broken down twice: first when it overheated and second when a bird flew over and dropped a baguette into it, bunging up its inner workings with crumbs.

And it cost 10 billion pounds, give or take a euro. Crumbs indeed.

The God particle (or Higgs boson to its chums, of which there are even fewer) is... Well, just don't go there, is all. Look it up on Wikipedia, or eBay, or something, but you'll only get confused.

Suffice it to say that it's a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model in particle physics.

It's called the God particle because if there is a god, then she made it first. Or something.

With us so far? Thought not.

There are mysteries which are too subtle for the mind of man, and the Higgs boson is most definitely one of them. Let's just note that it started working properly this week, and that the world hasn't vanished into a black hole of hubris. Yet.

Anyway, it is but a short hop (for a bunny) from God to chocolate eggs.

Mrs D forswore all forms of chocolate for Lent. Except for one Malteser, which didn't count. And for Dixon Junior's birthday cake, which was special.

The sighs of despair around Dixon Towers have had to be heard to be believed. Chocolate deprivation is no laughing matter, and we can only be grateful that her self-denial didn't extend to the occasional snifter.

Perhaps we should have modelled our Lenten preparations to the archdiocese of Milan, where apparently they start Lent six weeks before Easter and have a mini-Easter every Sunday.

Luckily it's nearly over, but we need to remember: shops traditionally run out of chocolate eggs, hens, bunnies and other symbols of regeneration early on Easter Saturday, and don't bother re-stocking. And to avoid more pain for wife, kids and columnist, it's best to buy them well in advance.

Or suffer the consequences.

Car wash won't wash

2010-03-26T21:49:00.000Z

"You might not ever get rich..." Replace the "might" for a "will" and you've got a pretty accurate statement of one particular columnist's financial outlook, even after Chancellor Darling's generous/swingeing/prudent/ election-winning fiscal fit-up yesterday afternoon.

Sorry, can't be more precise about the Budget due to lack of crystal ball ahead of impossibly tight deadline. But seeing it came from a man with the same name as a character in Blackadder Goes Forth, it was probably a Very Cunning Plan.

Anyway, that isn't the point. The point is that if you were ever of a stacked-heel, spangly-top-wearing persuasion then you'll recognise the quotation as the first line of Rose Royce's 1976 disco smash Car Wash.

No, not the 2004 remake by Christine Aguilera and Missy Elliott. That was pants, as was Shark Tale, the film it came from.

And that isn't the point, either. The point is: what's the point of a car wash?

Your trusty motor is grubby. It's caked with winter mud, rimed with salt from the gritters, and it's in need of a bit of spit and polish.

Ah, the gritters. Sounds like some nasty affliction that carries off the heroine of a 19th-century novel.

"Oh do come quickly, Doctor Trueblood! Mistress Stella is stricken with the gritters and I fear she will not see the dawn!"

And no, that isn't the point, either. The point is that given the state of your car, you have a choice. You can spend an afternoon in a howling gale with bucket and sponge and chamois leather, with tepid soapy water running up your sleeves.

Or you can head to the car wash.

By some bizarre coincidence, every driver within a 15-mile radius seems to have had exactly the same idea. A crafty count of the queue, times the length of a wash, suggests you're in for a 20-minute wait. No matter, it beats doing it yourself.

So, quick in-and-out job, or the works, with hub scrub, underbody hot wax and turbo dry? It's got to be the five-star treatment to stand a chance of shifting the incrustations from the bottom of the Dixonmobile.

As you wait, every driver in front appears to have bought an even deeper cleansing programme than your Gold MegaWash®. Rather than taking the projected two minutes, each cycle seems to take at least ten. Are they in on some secret?

Your turn at last. Stretch out of the window, can't quite reach, hop out, key in the number, hop in, hop out again to unscrew the aerial, hop in again while the machine makes impatient whirring noises. Drive in. And relax, as brushes whirl and soap squirts. Close the window. Fast.

You ponder a mystery. Why does everyone else's wash take twice as long as yours? Why do their cars come out three times cleaner? And where did you put that aerial?

"Better than digging a ditch," sang Rose Royce about her '70s disco car wash. Only just, Rose. Only just.

Smile, you're on Google Street View

2010-03-18T10:10:00.001Z

Last week’s ramblings about the imminent Digital Switchover brought a flutter of comments on www.thisisbath/co.uk, and some fascinating extra information – including the fact that the Mendip Transmitter pumps out 500,000 watts of power while its poor Bathampton relation only manages 250 (little more than a couple of old-style lightbulbs).

Be that as it may, Mr Jenkins has taken up the digital baton this week and we shall have to find other grist to our mill.

And it’s good news, folks: a silver lining without a cloud. Because, at long last, we can now look at Bath (and most of the UK for that matter) on Google Street View.

It was last April that the Google camera cars were first spotted in Bath, and only now can you go online and see a street-level panorama of the city.

It’s like reality, but through a 12-month timewarp. You check your house: yes, it’s there and the front door needs painting. Your car (number plate nicely blurred, thanks Google) looks a heck of a lot cleaner then than now. Who’s that in your front room? Phew, just the cat.

It’s when you start looking at the streets themselves that things get slightly weird.

Over that past couple of months we’ve got used to permanent salt coverage: a thin pinkish-grey coating sitting there until the rain comes along and fills up our gardens and watercourses with brine. But when Google was here, the streets looked – well, dark grey and normal.

Staying at street level, you can marvel at the lack of potholes. Check it out for yourself here at the junction of Weston Park and Weston Park East. Early last summer it was smooth as the proverbial. Today, it’s Bath’s very own Grand Canyon, around which someone has spray-painted a white rectangle. Which even this complete duffer at highway maintenance can tell you won’t stop it spreading.

Then there are the shops. In April 2009, SouthGate was a building site, the Busometer was shrouded in blue plastic, and there was still a Somerfield in Weston High Street.

Now if Google Street View was just that little bit better, we could point our interweb device in through Somerfield's front window (you can find it here) and settle once and for all the arguments about whether or not the new Tesco has fewer products but shorter queues. As things are, we’ll just have to rely on our memories.

But the best - and weirdest - thing about Street View isn’t in Bath at all: it’s in an unassuming residential area in West Bromwich in the deepest Midlands.

It’s one of those things that’ll probably disappear fairly soon once the powers that be at Google find out about it, but while you have the chance, it's here, floating in the sky above the junction of Compton Road and Whitehall Road. A gigantic pair of wire cutters.

How did they get there? Perhaps it’s best not to know. Because for this, dear readers, was the phrase “you couldn’t make it up” made up.

Bath digital switchover - when less is more

2010-03-11T09:52:00.000Z

Is Bath about to become a city of haves and have-nots? From some of the grumblings about the forthcoming switchover to digital telly you might think we were.

It’s all down to Bath’s hilly geography and the position of the two transmitters that serve us.

Ten miles south of the city, cresting the Mendip Hills, towers the “mighty” Mendip Transmitter, a colossus of guyed steel tubing, at 305 metres (that’s 1,001 feet in real money) the 15th tallest structure in the UK. After 14 other, slightly higher, TV masts.

A couple of miles to the east of us is the Mendip Mast’s stubbier relative, sometimes referred to as the Bathampton Transmitter but officially known as just Bath. And unless you’re one of the lucky few Bathonians with a clear line of sight to the Mendip transmitter, Bath is where your TV signal comes from.

In its previous incarnation, Dixon Towers was served by the punier of the two towers. We got the two main BBC channels, Channel 4, and ITV1. If you stood on your head in the loft with a transistor radio clamped to your ear you could just about pick up Classic FM. Not that you’d necessarily have wanted to. There was no Channel 5, let alone any of the digital channels. And that’s the way it still is today.

When we moved to the west of the city our viewing horizons opened up. Even before we bought a digital box, there was Channel 5 (although we’ve never watched it). With the box we got price-drop tv (the ghastly fascination of watching other people max out their credit cards soon wanes). And there was digital radio (or a disturbing bubbling sound, depending on the phase of the moon). TV and radio heaven.

What didn’t change when we moved, though, was the amount we had to pay for our TV licence. And because of that we felt rather chuffed: whether or not we watched them, we did get a whole load of extra channels for no extra money.

(We also got a phone call from the new proprietors of Dixon Towers East asking why their telly wasn’t working properly. But they’d moved from Bristol and didn’t understand...)

So let’s go back to the question about Bath’s haves and have-nots.

If we still lived in Dixon Towers East, we’d be rather looking forward to the digital switchover. From March 24 we’d be getting good digital reception on eight channels, in place of the current dodgy analogue signal on four.

And a couple of weeks after that, on April 7, we’d be getting an extra 10 channels, including BBC3, BBC4 and limitless re-runs of Tinky Winky on CBBC. Without spending anything extra on the TV licence.

Yet some people seem to think they’re being hard done by, and even that they deserve a licence rebate because they’re not getting a full set of channels. Are they right? Or are they just moaners?

How to survive World Book Day

2010-03-04T08:12:00.001Z

One of the rites of passage that every child – and every parent – has to go through as they grow from wide-eyed pre-school tot to slack-jawed partied-out teenager is that jamboree of literacy that is World Book Day.

This year’s WBD is on Thursday, March 4. Which is today, if you’re reading this on time. And if you’re not, then shame on you.

By time-honoured tradition, children keep WBD a secret from their parents until the very morning of the day itself.

And this is why one of the more charming aspects of this annual festival of literary consciousness-raising is the screams of mums and dads at 7.30 in the morning of World Book Day as their little ones leap from their beds and announce cheerfully: “Mummy, Daddy! I’ve got to dress up for school today!”

It’s at times like this that parental resourcefulness and initiative are stretched to their absolute limit.

First you have to persuade your offspring that even though they’ve got a ready-made costume, the Incredible Hulk is not in fact a character from a book. Or at least not the right sort of book for World Book Day.

Then, once they’ve got over that little disappointment, you have to make them realise that converting them into Mrs Tiggy-Winkle or Peter Rabbit is going to take more (a) time and (b) fake fur than you can conjure up between now and the beginning of school.

As you wipe away the inevitable tears, inspiration strikes: Harry Potter. The kids in JK Rowling’s money-spinning wizard-fest look and dress just like ordinary schoolchildren. All right, rather posh ordinary schoolchildren, but something’s got to give.

So all you have to do is put your child into their everyday school uniform, slap on a lightning-flash scar with some lipstick, take the lenses out of an old pair of specs and Albus is your Dumbledore.

The howls of protest have to be heard to be believed. “But everyone’s going as Harry or Hermione!” they shrill. “Can’t you think of something better?”

Eventually you stick a cushion down their fronts and pack them off to school as half-convincing Fat Controllers. Honour is satisfed, at least until next year.

Luckily for parents, World Maths Day, which this year was one day before WBD, doesn’t arouse quite as much enthusiasm.

Not because of its unfortunate initials, but because it involves visiting a website and doing lots of sums. And in any case, who wants to dress up as a quadratic equation?

Eventually, of course, like Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy, these childhood rituals slip into the past. But next time you see a bunch of kids looking like Tracy Beaker or Captain Underpants, please spare a thought for their parents.