Bath's Big Bang Theory

It was a mystery surrounded by a riddle wrapped in an enigma.

It came in the middle of last Sunday night, when all right-thinking Bathonians should long since have trundled up the Wooden Hill to Blanket Fair.

It was weird, it was loud, it was eerie. And the following morning, on thisisbath.co.uk, the mystery got its first public airing:

"Bath baffled by big bangs" read the headline, and by golly were we baffled.

Not a few West Country towns and cities are known for their strange noises. Gallons of ink, for example, have been spilled dissecting the mystery of the so-called Bristol Hum. 

Others are not so well known: you can Google for hours without finding any mention of the Gloucester Rumble or the Shepton Mallet Whine.

And yet, and yet...

Bath, blessed in so many other ways, never had its own special noise. Until Sunday, that is, when it got The Bang.

Early reports of it came through on Twitter, as they always seem to these days. One bang was heard at 11:43pm, the other about six minutes later.

And that was it. Everything went quiet again. Except for Twitter.

Now the really strange thing about all this auditory upheaval was that Dixon Junior and yours truly heard the bangs almost exactly an hour earlier. We were watching Match of the Day, and we thought it was Mrs D thumping on the bedroom floor for us to turn the telly down. And we did, sharpish. But the following morning she denied all knowledge.

So what was it that we heard? A pre-echo of the sound reported on Twitter an hour later, transmitted through a wormhole in the space-time continuum? (There's a lot of those up our road. Not as many as there are potholes, though.)

Were they sonic booms, or fireworks, or even, as some wag suggested on thisisbath, property prices going through the roof?

Perhaps we shall never know. Shakespeare had a point, though, when he wrote in The Tempest:

"Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,/Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not."

Perhaps he'd heard the Bath Bang.

Baking bad

After the disconcerting news a couple of weeks ago that a school in faraway Canvey Island has banned the distribution of triangular flapjacks at lunchtime on the grounds that someone might get hurt, things could only get worse.

Mrs D did the weekly shop the other day at a supermarket that shall remain nameless (they’re all the same really, only the carrier bags are different) and came back with a baguette so floppy that...

Well, so utterly bendy and unbaguette-like that if you’d used it as a wand, or a baton, which is what “baguette” means, and tried to produce a rabbit from a hat, or conduct Beethoven’s Fifth, you’d have ended up with a vole, or Air on a Penny Whistle.

All of which leads to the inevitable conclusion (in Mrs D’s mind, in any case): why not bake our own bread?
It’s the latest big thing. Every other TV programme seems to be cashing in on the bread-making craze. And how simple could it be?

Grab a bag of flour. Weigh it out, sprinkle in dried yeast. You haven’t got any dried yeast. Go to shop and purchase same. Add salt. Engage in half-hour deliberation on relative merits of adding sugar or leaving it out. Chuck in some olive oil for good measure. Add water. Mix. You’ve added too much water, dough has consistency of treacle. Add flour to correct. Mix. Dough is too dry. Add more water. Mix. Repeat until quantity of dough is twice that required in recipe. Add more salt. Taste. Feel unwell. Knead until dough is soft and pliable. Remove leavings from under fingernails.

Cover and allow to rise in warm place. If such a place actually exists.

Wait for two hours, periodically peeking into bowl. Dough oozes, bubbles and quivers.

Pummel violently, leave to prove.

Form into Gallic-looking stick, bake until done, wait until cool.

Slice, tear, rip, chew.

Outside is like reinforced concrete, inside is like Blu-Tack.

It’s not as easy as it looks, this bread-making mallarkey.

Meanwhile, though, in the kitchens at Dixon Towers, Mrs D is whipping up a Schiacciata with Olives, Prosciutto and Porcini Mushrooms. That’s an Italian flatbread to you. And what could possibly go wrong?

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.