Chillies in a box

It’s a hard life being an amateur chilli grower, and February is the hardest month of all.

Because February, of course, is the month when the little darlings get planted. Or should it be March? Or even January? It depends a bit on which packet of seeds you read, but one thing’s for sure: chillies need both light and warmth.

Neither of which is much in evidence in the conservatory at Dixon Towers, which faces north west and lets in draughts like the Titanic let in water.

So what we need is a controlled environment. And that means a visit to IKEA to buy a chest, which we know before we set off is called an Apa. And it also means a conversation with a member of staff who isn’t keen to tell us where we might find said Apa in the flat-pack aisles at the end of the store, and who instead suggests we track it down in the children’s section.

Which, what with it being a Saturday afternoon, is knee-deep in tinies, hell-bent on obscuring the product from the paying customer.

So it’s back to the staff member, who is at last persuaded to look up the Apa on his terminal and divulge its hiding place among all the other flatpacks (what is it, some sort of trade secret?).

Home again to build the chest. Pause for  speculation about why IKEA Allen keys are never up to the job.

Finish chest with aid of electric screwdriver, stand back and admire.

OK, now for the heat. Place horticultural mat in bottom of chest. Drill hole for wire in end. Remove plug, pass wire through hole, re-attach plug.

Pause  to reminisce about the good old days when you had to buy a plug whenever you bought a new appliance.

Crack on with it, Dixon. We need light. Assemble fluorescent fitting and switch, in contravention of every wiring regulation known to man.

Fix gaffer tape to inside of lid. It doesn’t stick. Apply two coats of PVA glue to lid. Pause overnight while glue dries. Attach more gaffer tape to lid, fix light fitting to gaffer tape with double-sided tape. All seems well.

Place seed trays on mat, turn on mat and light, close lid and await results.

Important scientific discovery. Fluorescent light fittings give off heat. Seed trays give off water vapour. Gaffer tape does not stick to PVA-impregnated hardboard in warm damp environment.

Light fitting falls off, missing trays by a whisker.

Off to the DIY shop to buy industrial-strength pipe brackets. Drill holes in lid, attach brackets, dangle light fitting from same. Sorted.

By this stage the budget is so out of control that  if any chillies do emerge in August (or July, or October), the unit cost will be on a par with  expensive luxuries like saffron. Or even printer ink.

Then Mrs D  sucks her teeth judiciously and asks  “Don’t plants need air?”

Resist temptation to debate  transpiration with someone who clearly knows more about it than you do.

Open the lid a crack, leave the chillies to do their stuff.

They’ve had all the help they’re going to get.

DIY on a wing and a prayer

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.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it

Amid all the explosions, fireballs, airborne gas canisters, 250ft plumes of black smoke and general conflagration- related excitement that has filled newspapers, websites, TV and radio over the last day or so, you would easily be forgiven if you'd missed one of the more important news stories of the week.

So in case it passed you by, here it is again: the Large Hadron Collider has broken down, and won't be working again until the spring.

For those readers who haven't really cared up to now, the Large Hadron Collider (let's call it the LHC so we don't use up too many words) was launched on September 10 this year with the purpose of investigating the state of the cosmos in the moments immediately following the Big Bang.

The LHC is basically a whopping great underground doughnut with a circumference of 27km. It lives under a mountain on the Swiss/French border and fires subatomic particles at each other at unfeasibly high speeds.

When they hit each other they transmogrify into even smaller particles (or perhaps bigger ones – subs please check), in ways which are supposed to tell us everything we never knew about the origins of the universe and were always afraid to ask.

You can't actually see with your own eyes what's going on inside – at least not not unless you've got spider-senses or you've guzzled too much Kryptonite – so the only video they could show on the telly when they fired it up was a load of physicists whooping and partying.

And if you've ever met a physicist, you'll know exactly how televisual that was.

However, the whole thing is now temporarily bust, thanks to a coolant leak in the electrical system.

And somehow that brings this failure of an almost inconceivably complicated gadget a whole lot closer to home. Because we've all experienced something similar, when the fridge makes things warm instead of cold, or the central heating does the opposite.

It's always the same question: do you chuck it out and buy a new one, do you get it repaired by a professional, or do you mend it yourself?

Now with our friend the LHC, the options are limited. You can't just walk into Currys, whack your 6.2bn euros down on the counter and say "A new Large Hadron Collider, my good fellow, and make it snappy." And you won't find an LHC Repairs section in any edition of the Yellow Pages this side of Alpha Centauri.

So our physicist chums have a whole lot of DIY ahead of them before the protons can dance and the Higgs bosons can sparkle once more under the bosky slopes of the Jura.

Some months ago an equivalent catastrophe struck the Dixon kitchen. The microwave started doing impressions of Guy Fawkes Night, and the Comptroller of Budgets decided that we couldn't afford a new one – or a repair service.

It was time to head online to find out (a) why the thing was making warmed-up ravioli look like it had been struck by cosmic rays that had taken a wrong turning somewhere outside the orbit of Jupiter and (b) what we could do about it.

And so it was that we stumbled across The Only Really Useful Piece Of Information On The Internet (official).

If you're interested you can find it here, but basically it involves taking out the old waveguide cover (you knew that already, didn't you?) cutting out a slice of fresh mica to the same shape and slotting it back in. You get the mica from a mica shop, natch.

We saved so much money by using this web-inspired wheeze (no trip to Currys, no teeth-sucking repair person) that we were able to pay for two foreign holidays and an iPod Touch with the change.

But now a new challenge awaits, of more LHC-like proportions. Last week Dixon Junior was on Bebo or some such when the computer made a noise like a train wreck and wouldn't reboot.

A helpful chap at Farpoint Developments in Walcot Street said it should be easy to fix: all you need is a new disk drive (£50), a screwdriver, and a certain amount of self-confidence. Roll on the weekend.

But if this column doesn't appear next Thursday, you'll know why. Either its writer has had an unfortunate entanglement with a very high voltage, or he has sold himself into slavery to pay for a new computer. Watch this space.

This column first appeared as a column on thisisbath.co.uk on September 25 2008.