Purple tomatoes, cannibal rats

It can hardly be a coincidence, in the week in which Mrs D sits down and starts to think seriously about ordering the entire contents of five separate seed catalogues, that the BBC should choose to stir up horticultural alarm and despondency.

“Genetically-modified purple tomatoes heading for shops,” screamed the headline, while the mind quietly boggled.

How much genetic modification are we talking about exactly? Have the Canadian growers bred sentience into these mauve solanaceae? Have they endowed them with little purple legs so they can trot their way to the shops? And little purple hands to hold their shopping bags?

Let's face it, we could be looking at a squirrel scenario here. You know how it goes: tough foreign breed is introduced to our shores and squeezes out native red variety, which only survives in niche habitats in the north of Scotland.

All right, our British red tomato isn’t really any more native than its Canadian GM clone. But it’s happened before, it could happen again. So why let the facts get in the way of a good scare story?

And speaking of scare stories, did you hear the one about the cannibal rat ghost ship? Now that really did make the skin prickle.

It started in the Sun, with a sobering headline: “SHIP OF GHOULS”; a well-balanced introduction: “A GHOST ship laden with cannibal RATS is sailing for our shores, experts fear — as nobody knows where it is!”; and a photo of the ill-starred cruise liner Lyubov Orlova looming out of a writhing mist of Photoshop.

Regional papers with circulation areas bordering on the Atlantic Ocean were quick to pick up on the tale. Step forward the Herald of Plymouth with “Ghost ship full of cannibal rats could be about to crash into Devon coast.” (Notice that phrase “could be”? Try replacing it with “not” and see if it changes the meaning.)

And it can only be a matter of time before our very own Bath Chronicle splashes (geddit?) on “DEATH ship packed to the GUNWALES with cannibal RATS with a taste for purple TOMATOES sighted at Saltford MARINA and heading up the Avon for BATH!!!”

PURPLE TOMATO MOLECULE: some anthocyanin, yesterday

At least it would make a change from all that fuss about bus gates.

In times of trouble, though, the BBC is quick to calm our fears. It pretty much ignored the cannibal rats, and instead concentrated (double geddit?) on the tomatoes.

It appears that they will be squished in their native Canada before embarking for our shores, and every last seed seived out to ensure there’s no chance of genetic contamination or cross-breeding.

And the purple pulp will contain enhanced levels of anthocyanin, which sounds nasty but is really an anti-oxidant that does all sorts of healthy things to you. Allegedly. You can get it from blueberries and cranberries too, but they don’t taste quite as good on pizza.

So mix yourself a stiff Bruised Mary and relax: when it comes to tomatoes, the boffins know best.

Yes, they have no bananas

Rather sad news reaches us from Bristol Zoo, where the monkeys are having bananas phased out of their diets.

The same thing is happening at Paignton Zoo, too. Recent research has shown that bananas grown for human consumption are too sugary for simians, and as a result the macaques,  marmosets and cherry-crowned mangabeys are becoming over-aggressive and prone to tooth decay and diabetes.

Instead, they’re being switched to a diet of fresh green vegetables and brown rice, as a result of which, according to the head keeper of mammals at Paignton, their coats are getting shinier and their outlook on life sunnier.

Now, skirting around the gloomy prospect for any living creature of a diet that could well include both broccoli and brussels sprouts, the main thing about all this no-bananas shenanigans is that it brings into sharp focus one of the biggest bugbears of modern life in January: the Enforced New Year’s Resolution.

Nobody asked the monkeys if they wanted to give up bananas. (Come to that, nobody asked them if they wanted to live in a zoo.)

And in the same way, no one asked if you wanted to give all the things that are bad for you and do a bit of exercise, on the flimsy pretext that it’s no longer 2013.

And you certainly didn’t ask a certain national newspaper to force-feed you a new supplement called Do Something. Because frankly there’s more than enough to do already, from cleaning the gunge off the bathroom tiles to rebuilding Mrs D’s raised beds, which have gone soggy in the rain.

Mind you, if you do fancy a new hobby, you could always start collecting partworks.

Back in the day these informative publications, which by some bizarre coincidence always seem to launch in early January, would help you learn carpentry, car maintenance, cross-stitch, egg-painting and any number of other useful household crafts, all for £1.99 for the first issue along with a free – yes FREE! – binder, then £4.99 each for the remaining 127 instalments as long as you place an advance order with your newsagent because it won’t be on the shelves come April.

Nowadays, as well as sharply priced instruction manuals, you can collect all the requisite bits for a Marvel Comics superhero-themed chess set (FREE board!), a Lancaster bomber (FREE Guy Gibson!) or even a Disney Pirates of the Caribbean Black Pearl Galleon™®© (FREE Johnny Depp!)

Although it’s hard to see the attraction of building up a model plane or sailing boat, rib by laborious rib, over the next two years of your already glamorous life. Or indeed of spending a sum not unadjacent to £250 on a chess set (£7.99 a pop), when you’ve got a perfectly good one already. Even if the Marvel variety is crafted from lead-free metallic resin, and yours is only made of plywood.

No, this year let’s stick to simple resolutions, like writing sentences with a proper verb. And not starting them with “And”.

Damn. That’s two broken already. Pass the bananas...

Essential Christmas Countdown

Wednesday. Two weeks before Christmas. Mrs D lurches from her bed with as much energy as she can muster, given that she is down with a very nasty case of Lady Flu.

(Which is of course exactly the same as Man Flu, except genuine.)

“It’s two weeks till Christmas!” she says, her voice hoarse from one too many rehearsals of the school Nativity Play. Or possibly from the aforementioned bug.

Yes, Mrs D, we know. It is indeed  two weeks till Christmas. Or at least it was. Now it’s considerably less than.

Aaargh.

What we need is a Christmas countdown. You know, like all those domestic goddesses have. The Kirstie Allsopps, the Delia Smiths and the Mary Berrys (or even Berries) of this world.

Best leave Nigella out of it for now. She's got enough on her plate.

So here it is. Cut it out, fix it up with a fridge magnet, lose it down the back of the sofa, find it next August and wonder what all the fuss was about...

Your Essential 2013 Christmas Countdown. Accept no imitations.

Dec 12: Try on Santa outfit, blogger for the wearing of, and Mrs D’s impressionable young pupils for the scaring of. Examine suspicious marks left by previous occupant. Take to dry cleaners.

Dec 13:  Friday the 13th. Stay in bed, don’t tempt fate.

Dec 14/15: It’s the weekend! Not the best time to go shopping.

Dec 16:  Day off. Buy all the presents. Every last one. Including emergency replacements for the stuff that you ordered from Amazon and is due to arrive from Japan some time between now and Saint David’s Day.

Dec 17: Realise you’ve forgotten to send your brother a birthday card. Ring up and grovel.

Dec 18: Realise you’ve forgotten to send anyone any Christmas cards. Decide to go green, save trees, avoid wear and tear on the already strained postal service and generally make a virtue out of a necessity.

Dec 19: One week till  Christmas! No, wait, that was yesterday.

Dec 20:  One week till the day after Boxing Day! Go back to the dry cleaners to pick up Santa suit. Ignore pitying looks from dry cleaning operative. Take suit home, clamber into same. Succumb to sneezing fit induced by residual cleaning fluid in snowy white beard. Visit school, scare tinies. Job done.

Dec 21/22: It’s the weekend! Again! Crikey, where did last week go? Remember last weekend how you made a  good case for not going shopping? No more excuses, they won’t wash. Booze, smoked salmon, more booze, cheese footballs and even more booze won’t buy themselves, you know. The supermarket awaits.

Dec 23:  Ask spouse in a polite spirit of co-operation if she has definitely made the cake. Awaken some time later to discover that you have landed a starring role in 24 Hours in A&E.

Dec 24: Christmas Eve, and it’s too late to panic. Load up the car, hit the road for the relatives on the other side of the country, notice with abstract curiosity that everyone else in the entire world seems to have had the same idea.

Dec 25: Christmas Day. Relax, it’s all taken care of.

Four more candidates for Greatest Bathonian

The votes are flooding in for Bath law firm Mogers’ online poll to find the Greatest Bathonian.

As reported in last week’s Bath Chronicle, the sometimes controversial contenders are Jane Austen (obv), Uranus-discoverer William Herschel, painter Thomas Gainsborough, proto-postman Ralph Allen, four-minute-miler Sir Roger Bannister, singer Peter Gabriel, architect John Wood the Elder, and Georgian fashionista Beau Nash.

Now, whether or not these worthies were or are true Bathonians (born within the sound of the Abbey bells, or in the Princess Anne Wing of the RUH at a pinch) is open to endless and ultimately fruitless debate.

But there are certainly quite a few important historical heroes who are missing from the list. 

In no particular order:

• Doctor William Oliver. The inventor of a very classy cheese biscuit. Bequeathed the recipe to his coachman, who got very rich on the proceeds. The  biscuit-making machine was purportedly moved from Bath to Reading in the 60s. Or the 70s. Or the 80s. The Bath Oliver has never tasted as good since.

• Saint Alphege. Purportedly born in Weston Village, Bath. Saint Ælfheah to his Anglo-Saxon chums. Or Elphege, or Alfege, or Godwine. They weren’t that hot on spelling in 1006, when he became Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1012 he was clubbed to death with animal bones by a band of marauding Vikings. Most famous for having a school named after him in Whitstable, where Mrs D did her first teaching practice. There’s a spring in the hills above Weston called Saint Alphege’s Well, and tradition holds that if anyone attempts to build houses on it, the holy roller will rise from the ground and whack them round the head with a ham hock. If only.

• Bladud. Legendary King of the Britons and early animal welfare activist, he purportedly drove his leprous swine into the Avon (as you do) and discovered the hot springs, thus accidentally founding Bath’s medical tourism industry. His name is honoured to this day by the stag and hen parties who visit the city every weekend and end up getting bladdered.

• Queen Victoria. It’s all about the obelisks. Early in her reign, she pitched up in Bath and purportedly had a Hanoverian hissy fit when she discovered that Queen Square was named after her great-grandmother, Queen Caroline, rather than herself, and that the obelisk had been erected in honour of her grandfather. (Frederick, Prince of Wales, if you’re interested. Frederick, Prince of Wales, if you’re not.) The citizens tried to appease her by naming a park after her and building therein a second obelisk, guarded by three of the dopiest-looking lions ever to be rejected for service in Trafalgar Square. She was not amused.

Observant readers will have noticed four uses of the word “purportedly” in the above romp through Bath’s murky past. (Five including that last one.) Which goes to show that history is very much in the eye of the beholder.

But all claims for Greatest Bathonianhood for such luminaries as Napoleon Bonaparte, Catherine of Braganza, Albert Einstein,  Attila the Hun or Elvis Presley should be treated with the greatest suspicion.

And as for that Ronnie Wood...  

Selfies, onesies and twerking

So, the votes have been cast and counted, the contenders sorted and sifted, and we have a winner.

Not, you'll be happy to hear, for the Most Preposterous Supermarket Food Advertised During a Single Episode of I'm a Celeb… (although Lidl's Three Fish Roast ought to win a prize for something, if only for being conceptually even less appealing than the Waitrose five-birder).

Nor indeed for the most unappetising snack served up on said Ant-and-Declathon. No, this prize is a literary one, whose previous winners include such lexicographical luminaries as "chav" (2004); "bovvered" (2006); "simples" (2009) and "omnishambles" (2012).

Yes, folks, it's the Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year Award, in which thesaurian hopefuls vie for the key to enter the hallowed precincts of verbal Valhalla, to scale the Mount Parnassus of grammatical glory...

All right Dixon, stop showing off. Just tell us the winner and we can crack on with the rest of our lives.

A selfie, yesterday. Too old for twerking.

OK. The 2013 Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year was (drum roll)…

Selfie (n): "A photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone... and uploaded to a social media website."

Among the also-rans were Schmeat, Oinguito, Binge-watch and Twerk. And if you don't know what those mean, you'll have to look them up. Oh wait, you can't: these upstarts will wither on the vine of linguistic respectability and will never find a home in Dictionary Corner.

"I've never taken a selfie," said Mrs D reflectively when she heard the news. "And I've never worn a onesie either. What do you do when you want to go to the loo?"

Well may she ask. Fortunately though, this year's must-have fashion item didn't even make the shortlist so we shall probably never find out. Still, there's always next year. 

A sneaky peek at the early declarations gives us such gems as:

Unsurance (n): The feeling you get when you decide not to insure your offspring's student bus pass and, yes, he goes and loses it.

A dictionary, yesterday. Too old for selfies OR twerking

Cashmare (n): A very vivid dream in which you convince yourself that your wallet is stuffed with £10 notes. But when you wake up and look, it isn't.

Shrumper (n): Your purple pullover after it accidentally got mixed up in a hot wash.

That's enough nouns. Verbs, adjectives, adverbs and even conjunctions are in with a good chance too, so if you can think of a good one, let the Oxford people know.

Although Squerk (v): To jiggle lasciviously while sitting at your desk - is going to take some beating.

All of which proves, if nothing else, that the English language is a tough old bird (if you want tender, go for a five-bird roast) that is quite happy absorbing all the neologisms that new technology, party politics and celebrity culture can throw at it.

And if you're still not convinced, you can stick that in your pape and sploak it.

Watch out for Comet Ison

Excitement is mounting among star-gazers all around the world, as what could be this year's big interplanetary event comes ever closer.

Comet Ison, or Comet C/2012 S1 to its friends, or Comet Nevski–Novichonok to its Russian friends, was hatched in the mysterious and distant Oort Cloud, and is currently hurtling towards the centre of the solar system.

Comet Ison, yesterday. Or possibly the day before

It will reach its closest point to the sun on November 28, zipping round behind and heading back outwards again for a close encounter with Earth some time on Boxing Day.

It's already visible from the UK if you have a good pair of binoculars and know where to look. It's a bit fuzzy, and has a slightly greenish tinge. But the big question is, will we get to see it with the naked eye?

Will it be as bright as the Great Comet of 1843, which had a stupendously long tail; or as dramatic as the equally Great Comet of 1882, which broke up into little bits and had a backward-pointing "anti-tail"; or as attention-seeking as the no less Great Comet of 1744, which was a proper show-off and boasted six separate tails?

Well, it all depends on who you believe.

If you take certain over-excitable newspaper columnists at their word, Comet Ison will be 15 times brighter than the moon and visible in broad daylight, will cast double shadows and will shine in through your bedroom window at night, keeping you and yours awake for the next three months.

Too flashy for its own good: the Great Comet of 1744

If you're of a more sceptical disposition, you'll more probably be of the opinion that it will be visible in the night sky but won't be as exciting as all that.

And if you're a complete and utter killjoy, you may well decide that Ison is fated to boil up as it goes round behind the sun and won't be here for Christmas.

The fact is, in the immortal words of Sir Patrick Moore, "we just don't know". But it's certainly something to look forward to.

There was a time, of course, when superstitious people thought that comets brought wars, plagues, famines, natural disasters, revolutions and the overthrow of governments in their wake.

In these days of rationalism, we're perfectly capable of organising most of those for ourselves without the help of an extraterrestrial chunk of ice.

But surely it's no coincidence that the papers right now are full of stories of mutant super-rats, of false widow spiders lurking under lavatory seats and leaping out to bite innocent bottoms, and of ghastly orange Spanish mega-slugs that threaten our native British gastropods?

(Mind you, if the Spanish slugs eat up the broccoli before Mrs D has a change to cook it, the can't be all bad, can they?)

Until Comet Ison fades back into the firmament next January, things can only get crazier.

Guinea pig heaven is a place on earth

OK. That's the whizzes, bangs and flashes out of the way for another year.

All that's left of the money you spent on fireworks is a sooty cardboard box in the garden and the sticks from a few spent rockets rattling around on the garage roof.

The lovingly carved pumpkins are turning to mush on the front doorstep, the trick or treat sweeties have coalesced into a sticky mess on the kids' bedroom floor.

And even more tellingly, style icon Samantha Cameron, who graced a number of newspaper front pages earlier this week all done up for Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, has reverted to a wardrobe in sensible shades of autumnal russet, cumulonimbus grey and crepuscular blue.

Probably. This blogger's grasp of what's in and out, fashion-wise, is shaky to say the least.

Everything, in other words, is back to normal. It's cold, it's raining and it's six weeks till Christmas. Or is it seven? In many ways the latter would be far, far preferable.

So what are we going to do to cheer ourselves up?

Twitter seems a good place to start. There's always something heart-warming on Twitter.

Take the tale, repeated and retweeted ad nauseam, of Sooty the randy guinea pig.

Sooty, from Pontypridd, tunnelled out of his cage, broke into another enclosure occupied by 24 female guinea pigs, had his wicked way with them and was found the next day exhausted but highly chuffed with his efforts.

This, according to Twitter, is the best story about a guinea pig you'll ever read in your entire life.

Maybe so, but no one seems to be worried that it's old news, and that South Wales's very own cavy Casanova made his great escape way back in the year 2000.

Or that Sooty, and his 43 direct offspring, and probably all his grand-piglets too, have long since departed to guinea pig Heaven.

Which brings us in a roundabout way to broccoli: one of those vegetables, along with sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower and kale, on our eat-it-to-set-a-good-example-never-mind-if-you-like-or-not list.

The only possible excuse for avoiding it, up to now, has been the fact that it contains high levels of fructose, which in susceptible individuals can cause distressing symptoms of a gastric nature.

That one's unlikely to wash at Dixon Towers, but there is a small chink of light on the ever-more-wintry horizon: our very own guinea pig Heaven, right here on earth.

Because living at the back of the house are three of the cutest cavies ever to escape a Peruvian cooking pot. (No risk of any offspring – the vet put a stop to any Valley-style shenanigans round our house).

And as Mrs D let slip just the other day, they are very partial to a stalk or two of broccoli.

So here's the plan. Next time the evil brassica pops up on the menu, hide it away while it's still raw.

Make a small hole in the side of the guinea pig cage, paint some convincing-looking tracks from there to the kitchen, and say, when asked if we have any broccoli: "We did have, but the guinea pigs ate it."

Sooty would have been proud.