Signs of spring

Extraordinary though it may seem, it is now spring.

In the world of modern-day newspaper publishing, where this first appeared, yesterday is the new tomorrow and these words were processed in winter, while the wind was howling, the frost was freezing and the hail was hailing.

Whereas they're being ingested by you as you recline on your patio in the vernal sunshine as lambs are gambolling, daffodils are blooming and blackbirds are all of a twitter.

As if. The chances are that whatever the season, the icy eastern blast isn't going to turn itself off any time soon.

Be that as it may, it's time to get this year's vegetable crop going. Last weekend's treat was a visit to the garden centre – one that sells seeds, and plants, and trowels and stuff along with the scented candles, wind-driven mobiles, ambient CDs and malevolent-looking reptiles that are your average garden centre's stock in trade. 

Here, while Mrs D pondered which brand of spud she'd be digging up next autumn, yours truly wandered amongst racks and stacks of chemicals, and wondered as he wandered: how much of this stuff actually works?

Here, for instance, was a packet of friendly mycorrhizal fungi, which allegedly encourage massive amounts of root growth. (Don't buy the unfriendly sort, or you'll end up under three feet of toadstool.)

Here was a bottle of brown treacly gloop, extracted from algae, which purports to pep up your petunias and put poke into your potentilla.

And here were the nematodes, which sound like a 60s pop combo but are actually a natural method of pest control.

Everything sounds promising, and over the years we've tried quite a few of them. We've got no idea of how much good they've done, mind you. Because you can't, unless you test everything under rigid scientific conditions.

But it's springtime, and who cares about science? We'll just stick them all in the ground, and see what pops up.

Weird tales from the red planet

 Things are going a bit pear-shaped up in space. Or on Mars, to be a little bit more precise.

NASA’s Curiosity Rover has been pootling around on the surface of the Red Planet since August last year, sieving soil, hammering rocks, drilling holes and brushing up the dust afterwards.

Looking dangerous: Mars Curiosity Rover

Not to mention taking some rather attractive panoramic holiday snaps of the surrounding landscape when it has a moment or two to itself.

Or at least it was until last Thursday, when it threw the interplanetary equivalent of a massive wobbly and stopped in its tracks.

Understandable, really: there is only so much DIY a 2,000lb six-wheeled scientific dune buggy can do without needing a sit-down and a cup of tea.

The boffins at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were having none of that. They logged straight into the computer systems on the stubborn little gizmo, worked out that there had been a crash, and put it into something called “safe mode”, which basically means that Curiosity stops all of its scientific investigations and sits there quietly waiting for someone back on Earth to work out what is wrong with it.

Weird or what?

Although it does make you wonder what would happen if they pushed the wrong button and accidentally sent it into dangerous mode.

 Wild parties with luscious five-legged Martian lovelies?

Drag races across the arid plains of Gale Crater against rolling balls of prickly, sentient Venusian tumbleweed?

Titanic pincer-to-pincer battles against malevolent crab-like fungoid entities from the dark planet Yuggoth?

Sounds like someone has been reading too many weird tales by HP Lovecraft. Or eating too much cheese before bedtime. Or indeed both.


Because putting a Mars Rover into safe mode is really no different from what all of us do when the computer fouls up.

The advice of endless magazines, of spotty lads in computer shops and of husbands who would rather be having a kip works for both, and really is the only solution: turn it off, and turn it back on again.

The power of the penguin

We were watching the penguins the other night. Not literally, you understand. The weather outside may be frightful, but as far as can be ascertained the real things haven't migrated quite this far north.

No, this was the TV programme. By turns happy, tragic, thrilling, heart-stopping – a bit like Strictly Come Dancing but with even more feathers. And in the Antarctic.

Not that we watch Strictly. Re-runs of Time Team are more our scene. Postholes win prizes and all that.

Where were we? Oh yes. Penguins.

Cute little dudes who make you happy to shell out for your TV licence. (Shell out? Get it? Sorry.)

Other penguins

As soon as you start watching, you're drawn into the drama. A huddle of fledgling Emperor Penguins is under attack by Percy the Predatory Petrel. Help is at hand, though, in the shape of Adélie the Rescue Penguin, who hustles off Percy and saves the day.

But then Adélie's penguin pals turn up and start bullying the poor little chicks, pushing them into the icy ocean before they're ready to get their feathers wet. Mix in some jaunty background music and these penguins are more animated than a Pingu, more human than a meerkat.

The hushed tones of David Tennant add a touch of class to the welter of Attenborough-esque anthropomorphism. "Gripped by a collective urge," he intones, "they start to move as one."

A bit like the conga at Mrs D's birthday party last year. But imbued with rather more style and grace.

We know all about collective urges in our house. Last weekend we had a collective urge to forget the capital of Finland. Some odd synchronicity caused us to lose the same brain cell at the same time, and probably in the same place as the car keys.

Back to the penguins.

Safe from the predations of Percy, the Emperor chicks swim away to spend their formative years at sea, as the soundtrack waxes Wagnerian.

But in a final touch of bathos, we track back to PenguinCam, the show's unsung star. The real-live penguins attack the intruding automaton. It teeters, it totters, it wobbles. And they pull its head off.

Such is life.

Enemies in the shrubbery

You know how it goes. It’s a cold but sunny Sunday afternoon, and you start getting the guilt.

Your other (most would say better) half is slaving away outside, lopping off dead branches, scooping up fallen leaves, scraping away alluvial mud while you – yes you – are lounging idly in the armchair.

There’s nothing for it but to join the fray. Out at the front is a grumpy looking shrub that was decorative in its infancy, but is now excluding 30 per cent of the natural light from the sitting room window. And it needs your immediate attention.

Some lubricant, yesterday

Wield the garden shears. The blades rattle suspiciously, rather than making that “ker-snick” noise that all good shears are supposed to make. Apply lashings of 3-in-1, attempt to tighten. Fail. Try again with WD-40. Fail. Wonder idly why lubricants have names like internet banking passwords rather than something meaningful like “Un-Sticko”.

Shears are past redemption. Grab shiny new long-handled pruner. Attack shrub with gusto. And the imagination starts to wander.

The knotty branches of shrubbus subwindowensis are the things you love to hate. Misplaced apostrophes. Snip. The word “iconic” as over-used by the BBC. Snip. The phrase “Methinks” in comments on websites. Snip. “It’s” when it should be “Its”. Snip. Vice versa. Snip

“Your” when it should be “You’re”. Snip. “There” when it should be “Their”, or “They’re”. Snip. Emails without subjects. Snip. And worse, and worse – unimaginably worse.

Those garden recycling bags in full

“Hugh!” The dream is shattered as Mrs D lugs a seventh recycling bag of gardening debris round from the back of the house. “You’re not killing that shrub, are you?”

This isn’t a shrub, darling. This is a viper’s nest of grammatical, orthographical and syntactical errors. And now it’s correction time.

Mrs D is not convinced. But where there’s life – or at least a few dispirited leaves clinging to the denuded stems – there’s hope. Nothing that a light dusting of fish, blood and bone meal won’t cure.

All is forgiven. The twigs are gathered up into an eighth and ninth recycling bag (Bath and North East Somerset Council made a killing out of us this week at £1.50 a pop), and as we relax in our lighter, airier sitting room, there’s just one fly in the ointment.

 “Hugh! That window needs cleaning.” Ah well – onwards and upwards.

Shiny new teeth

We Dixons are the sort of family that has almost every electronic gadget under the sun.

From set-top boxes to video streamers to three different breeds of games console; from phones to tablets, from laptops to phablets: if it's white and shiny and needs a charger, we've got it. You can play music in the loft and have the sound come out in the kitchen: it all works by wireless. Except when it doesn't.

And if Mrs D sends her obliging hubby out to the shops, but forgets to put organic spelt on the shopping list (so much more digestible than horsemeat, we find), then we have an app for it. Even if she is reluctant to use it and would rather phone up.

But don't get the impression that Mrs D is a technophobe. Only this week she came back from the dentist's with the last word in white, shiny, rechargeable gadgetry: an electric toothbrush.

Now electric toothbrushes are scary things. Inside the box, along with the handle, are heads, brushes and nozzles for every orthodontic eventuality. 

There's a half-size DVD that will roger the innards of any computer you try to play it on. And there's one of those instruction manuals that unfolds like a map of the world, and boasts almost as many languages.

In all of which, from Farsi to Erse, is a dire warning: Do Not Turn On Before Putting In Your Mouth.

Ignoring this basic rule will cause toothpaste to spatter all over the bathroom walls: not a good thing when yours truly has spent his weekend engaged in chemical warfare with the limescale , and would be most displeased to see said walls messed up again.

So there it sits, its charging light flashing an eerie shade of green. You grasp it in both hands (it's damn heavy), attach your personally colour-coded brush fitting, apply the toothpaste, position the brush at an angle to the gumline, and gingerly press the button. The whole concern shudders like a Saturn V rocket just before blast-off – anything this powerful must be doing you good.

And if you're in town this weekend and you see a family whose gnashers glow a radioactive shade of blue, don't be alarmed: it's only us, showing off our shiny new teeth.

horse haiku

beef burger burger
burger horse burger burger
don't eat lasagne

Watch out, there's an asteroid coming

Unnerving news reaches us from astronomers at the La Sagra Observatory in the mountains of Andalusia: on Friday February 15 a 130,000-tonne 45-metre asteroid will pass within a whisker of the Earth.

An asteroid, yesterday. Not 2012 DA14 but you get the general idea.

Closer than some man-made satellites, almost close enough to reach out and touch, 2012 DA14 (for that is its name, rather than the much more Spanish and romantic Asteroide Gordo) will scoot just 17,200 miles from the surface of our planet before whisking off again on its odd-shaped near-Earth orbit.

All of which poses a very pertinent question. (And no, it doesn’t beg the question. That means something rather different, as will be illustrated later.)

It’s only a week until our close encounter, and the Corporal Joneses are conspicuous by their silence. So why exactly is no one panicking?

Well, to start with, the astronomers are pretty confident that it’ll be a near miss.

They don't like it up 'em!

Second, after all that nonsense about the Mayans a month or so back, the world has entered a state of apocalypse fatigue: in the last couple of years, we’ve heard so many predictions of the end of the world  that a 45-metre asteroid heading in our general direction isn’t worth getting worked up about.

Watch out if you’re still around in 2110, though, because on that return visit there is just a chance that 2012 DA14 will collide with the Earth. A chance of one in 7,692,308,000. Which is the same as winning the lottery three times in a row (this sounds about right, but please could some kindly mathematician check the sums for us?)

So don’t panic, carry on as normal, keep on taking the tablets. You won’t even be able to see asteroid 2012 DA14 pass by unless you happen to live in Eastern Europe and possess a very powerful telescope. It’s a tiny storm in a giant celestial teacup.

And if you do feel a thump on the back of your head on February 15, you can be sure it isn’t an asteroid fragment, much less Armageddon.

It’s your loved one, gently reminding you that you’re a day late with the flowers and chocolates.

So, to illustrate the correct use of the phrase “begging the question”: Why haven’t you done anything about Valentine’s Day yet? QED.