Runny Thoughts

I don't pity da Fool

I’ve just spent a pleasing half-hour, on my last free weekday evening for ages, catching up with one of my favourite blogs, so I thought I’d encourage you to say hello to it too.

Here it is. Just under the words ‘here it is’ in the last sentence, if you’re still looking.

As you will see from reading any one of the glittering posts thereon, Mr. Fool is interested in words. Specifically, he delights in the exploration, explanation, and probably a couple of other words beginning with ‘expl-‘, (you’ll have to ask him for those) of the how, why, when, what, which, where and wherefore of language. He is erudite, witty, and jolly funny.

There’s really very little else to say. If you like language, you will love the Inky Fool. That’s an order.

Do Yourself A Flavour

Back in the day, when I knew no better, I had a cookbook addiction. My shelves groaned under the weight of glossy food porn, each new fad lovingly and self-consciously represented at great and ostentatious expense. I was especially fond of cheffy books: the Roux brothers, Anton Mosimann, Alastair Little, Shaun Hill, Jean-Christophe Novelli, Marco Pierre White, Pierre Koffman, and so on and so fifth. (This was before the revolutionary days of the River Cafe and their authentic, yet somehow staggeringly expensive take on Italian peasant cooking). I pored over them, taking in their wisdom, fondly imagining that one day I would actually cook sumptuous dishes like “lapereau farci au foie gras, aux artichauts et truffe” instead of the more mundane concoctions that actually represented my daily fare, for example the searingly honest and earthy “tranche de toast avec beurre salé, coulis de marmelade d’orange Coopers”.

Funny how everything sounds more glamorous in French.

Hardly a month went by without the latest celebrity chef launching their own book, each more glamorous and expensive than the last, and each, truth be told, reproducing very similar cooking with subtle variations to trap the susceptible (that’ll be me). Then, sometime in the 1990s, there was a revolution. It was a mild revolution, a bit like the decision one occasionally makes to keep one’s socks in the left-hand drawer instead of the middle one, but it was a revolution nonetheless.

Until then, most of the chef cookbooks that I had seen had clearly been written from the point of view of someone who did all their cooking in a professional kitchen. To this day, when I see the words ‘preparation time: fifteen minutes’ followed by a list as long as your arm of ingredients that need peeling, chopping, whipping, shelling, slicing, dicing, or sometimes chasing around the kitchen with a net and a cleaver, alarm bells ring in my head like the triangle part in the last movement of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto. Fifteen minutes. Yeah, right. It takes me that long to peel a clove of garlic.

These books were also beautifully illustrated, the perfection of the presentation merely underlining the impossibility of the task before you. It was as if the chefs were taunting your inadequacy. “See that?” went the subtext, “you’ll never be able to do that, you won’t. That’ll be thirty-five pounds, please.”

But in the 90s there emerged a refreshing strain of books, written by accomplished, and sometimes prominent chefs who had actually spent a fair proportion of their time in domestic kitchens, and who encompassed in their writing an innate understanding of everything that that entailed. Ovens with dodgy thermostats; imprecise measurements; unavailability of key ingredients; tendency to slosh in just that little bit more wine/oil/cream than the recipe prescribes. These impediments, and many more, are familiar to the domestic cook, and these new writers, while bringing to the table, as it were, their immense professional knowledge and experience, also understood that most people don’t actually want to reproduce restaurant food in our own homes. That, after all, is why we go to restaurants.

In addition, these chefs-turned-writers could actually write. The leader of this pack, for me, was (and is) Simon Hopkinson. He was chef-proprietor of Bibendum in South Kensington in its absolute heyday, before turning his hand to full-time food writing. I still miss his magnificent column in The Independent. What Hoppers did in his first book, the incomparable Roast Chicken & Other Stories, was very simple. He chose some of his favourite main ingredients, and he wrote about them, taking care to include, for each one, several contrasting recipes, all carefully designed to show off the featured ingredient to fabulous advantage. He didn’t show off, he didn’t blind you with science, and, touchingly, he included fanfares to other cooks and writers by whom he had been particularly influenced. The book exudes love of cooking, eating and the written word in equal measure, and remains very near the top of my Desert Island Cookbook collection some fifteen years later.

Others, of course, have joined it, including several by The Country’s Favourite Nigel, whose latest offering, Tender, Volume Two, I was lucky enough to be given for Christmas.

Now, I yield to nobody in my admiration for Mr. Slater. In the Runny household, his word is law. If Nige says there is good to be found in swede, I put forty-five years of bitter and contradictory experience to the back of my mind, and give it a try. When he extols the virtues of kale, I swallow manfully and do his bidding. Dammit, the man’s a legend - his books are stuffed full of common sense and knowledge, and he writes like an angel. Furthermore, and possibly most importantly, you get the overwhelming impression that about once a month he thinks ‘bollocks to it’ and makes himself a fish finger sandwich with ketchup and mayo on Kingsmill medium white sliced, followed by a family-sized Galaxy. This is how I want my food heroes - underneath it all, just as slutty and greedy as the rest of us.

But, much as I love Nigel, and look forward to discovering the joys of his latest offering, my heart this Christmas was stolen by an outsider, something quite unexpected and original. It is called The Flavour Thesaurus, it is written by someone I had never heard of, and I think you should buy it.

Niki Segnit is, as far as I can tell, neither professional chef nor food writer. But she clearly loves, and knows a lot about, food. And she has found a way of writing a book about food that is refreshingly original, and does something not, as far as I know, attempted before.

Which, of course, is what original means, so do me a favour and ignore the last part of the previous sentence. I can’t be bothered to delete it.

The Flavour Thesaurus does what it says on the tin. Using as her basis an alluring flavour wheel (like a colour wheel, but, well, with flavours instead of colours), Segnit explores the possibilities presented by the pairings of 99 ingredients, which come under a broader umbrella of 16 categories: ‘roasted’, for example, or ‘green & grassy’. She does this in what I would call a selectively exhaustive manner, eschewing some of the more outlandish combinations that would arise from an absolutely rigorous adherence to the principle, but offering a mini-essay on every pairing deemed worthy of inclusion. Blackcurrant and mushroom, for example, doesn’t make the cut, but cauliflower and chocolate does, with a brief description of Heston Blumenthal’s (who else?) cauliflower and chocolate risotto.

By avoiding the ‘everything has to be presented in recipe form’ option, she has liberated both herself and her reader. Entries include historical detail, pithy comment, a snippet or two of fascinating information, outspoken personal opinion, and plenty of dry wit. Cuisines from all over the world are referenced, as are, gratifyingly, many films and TV shows, as well as other writers, from Homer (the Greek one, not the Simpson) to Jamie Oliver, via the OED.

Sometimes, when the fancy takes her, she includes a compressed recipe; more often, she doesn’t. The brevity of the entries encourages the reader to dip in and out of the book, although I’ve found it so interesting that I’ve been reading it from cover to cover, and every page is an encouragement to explore, to experiment, to cast aside the foul tyranny of recipe culture that has held us in its thrall for so many years and trust the instinct of one’s own taste buds.

The result is an absolute joy. Her writing is pithy (have I said that already? How unpithy of me), drily informative without being tedious or lecturing, and possessed of an economical wit. Here she is, for example, on a horseradish and bacon sandwich: “Sink your teeth in and feel your eyeballs begin to turn upwards. Note how the horseradish gets behind the bacon and gives it a nip on the backside.” And on the combination of walnut and parsnip: “Like gnawing on Pinocchio’s leg.”

There is more in this 400-page book than you will find in dozens of other, more heavily promoted, tomes.

Even better, there isn’t a single photo in it. I feel adequate again.

Note-By-Note

Classical Music (I capitalise it because it is Important) is missing a trick.

In these days of universal internet access, the coverage of Classical Music events remains hopelessly outdated.

Sure, there have been innovations such as the ‘Conductor-Cam’, whereby you can examine the maestro’s every wiggle in infini-slo-mo; or ‘Bat-ear’, which records and analyses individual players’ performances to see if they were actually playing all the notes or just busking their way through.

But while television presentation has moved with the times, written concert reviews remain dry, factual and boringly informative. I maintain that this is because they are written after the event, when the reviewer has had ample opportunity for calm reflection and consumption of over-the-counter sedatives.

In these modern days of instant gratification and on-the-hoof opinion, something more immediate is required. Perhaps Classical Music can look to Sport (also Important) for inspiration.

For several years now, sports fans too mean to pay for a Sky subscription have been familiar with the ‘live blog’ school of sports coverage, a handy way to experience live sporting events second-, or even third-hand.

Pioneered by the Guardian’s infamous ‘over-by-over’ cricket coverage of the 2005 Ashes, the genre has diversified to the extent that there is barely a sporting event that isn’t being covered by a sweaty journo somewhere, hunched over a laptop in a darkened room, hammering out 200 words a minute while trying to maintain the live TV feed on a Sky box held together with gaffer tape and spit.

‘Over-by-over’, ‘minute-by-minute’, ‘rally-by-rally’, ‘dart-by-dart’. Nothing is immune.

I’m looking forward to ‘snatch-by-snatch’ coverage of the weightlifting in the 2012 Olympics.

So how would this translate to Classical Music?

Glad you asked.

Always at the forefront of technological advances, Runny Thoughts is proud to bring you the first ever note-by-note (NBN) coverage of a classical music event.:

Proms 2010 live blog

Preamble

It doesn’t get bigger than this.

Plagued by its history of underachievement, Dutch classical music finally gets a chance to redeem itself after twenty-five years of hurt tonight, as the Concertgebouw Orchestra tackles one of the ‘Titans’ of the repertoire: Mahler’s First Symphony. Guess what its nickname is?

At the helm, Austrian maestro Heinrich von Shlumpff.

The orchestra has an unbeaten record against Mahler this season, subjecting the ‘titanic Teuton’ to some gruelling defeats on home soil.

But this is the Proms, and Dutch courage has been in woefully short supply here in Kensington since the glory days of ‘total music’ in the 1970s.

As for Maestro von Shlumpff, he comes to this fixture in dreadful form, desperately in need of the confidence boost that a good Proms run can bring. He’ll be looking for an early breakthrough.

The players have tuned up and here comes Maestro von S.

Toi toi everyone.

1 min: shaky start there, the violin harmonics not speaking properly. Always tough in damp conditions.

3 min: this is unimpressive so far from von S. He’s unsteady in tempo and missing cues left right and centre.

6 mins: the woodwinds beginning to get into the game gradually. Some nifty interplay between flutes and oboes.

8 mins: ooh that was shocking. Late challenge from the 3rd horn. Split it like a banana.

12 mins: I’m sorry but this is desultory stuff. Bad ensemble, dodgy intonation and no sense of adventure. Stodgy tempi from von Shlumpff who, in all honesty, is having an absolute shocker. Niggly conducting - why can’t he just let them play?

14 mins: Mahler says ‘frisches, belebtes Zeitmass’. Von Shlumpff says ‘not on your nelly, Gustav.’

16 mins: at last an injection of enthusiasm from the unlikeliest source: R.T. Thvack, the bespectacled timpanist. Pity it came too late. No use getting your game together in the coda.

End of first movement: Gus 1 Schlumpff 0.

An email!

“von Shlumpff is a notoriously bad starter, but has a great record in last movements. Don’t give up on him yet!”

Well I’m sorry, NLebrecht66, but so far it’s pisspoor, and some of us may have changed over to Andrew Graham-Dixon’s art docco by the last movement.

Peep! We’re off for a thigh-slapping Scherzo with some strudel in the middle.

2nd movement:

1 min: This is much more like it. Snappy articulation from the woodwinds in the opening phrase and excellent dynamic contrast throughout. it’s like listening to a different team.

2 min: you’ve got to love Mahler’s showmanship - bells in the air, everyone! And not a cracked note in sight.

4 min: ouch. How fragile it all is at this level. Principal horn Jean-Yves Embouchure makes a total hash of the linking solo and all that good work in the scherzo is undone. To be fair he’s having an indifferent season, but life is harsh at this level, and he will fear for his place in the next concert.

5 mins: it’s all fallen apart now. And I’m afraid the players must take some of the blame. The conductor can’t play the notes for them, and he looks horrified at some of the stuff going on out there, to be honest. These are professional musicians, but they look all at sea.

6 mins: the end of this movement can’t come soon enough for the demoralised musicians of the Concertgebouw. They’ll be looking to principal double bass Ferdinand van Roojsen to restore some pride early doors in the slow movement.

NLebrecht66 won’t give up. Here he is on the conditions: “don’t forget that the humidity and heat inside the Albert Hall are light years away from the air-conditioned comfort of their home concert hall. It’s so easy to underestimate the effect of the prevailing conditions if they haven’t had the chance to acclimatise properly.”

Sorry, Norm, that’s a load of guff and you know it. No excuses at this level.

That’s it for the 2nd movement, and this orchestra’s got a mountain to climb.

3rd movement:

1 min: you have to hand it to van Roojsen. That is a world-class double bass solo. The man is showing his pedigree. Can his colleagues respond?

2 min: no.

5 min: you still there? Mind if I join you?

7 min: get on with it!!!!

11 min: well that’s a small patch of my life I’ll never get back.

4th movement:

I’d like to say it’s nearly over, but the last movement is 20 minutes long.

1 min: Wow where the hell did that come from? Amazing opening to the last movement - daring, edge-of-the-seat tempo, pinpoint precision in the strings, and barnstorming brass playing. Perhaps von Shlumpff’s reputation as a coming-from-behind merchant is well-deserved after all. But has he left it too late?

5 min: this is magnificent stuff now. It’s as if they’ve suddenly remembered who they are. Either that or they’ve got a train to catch.

7 mins: that little luftpause was perfectly executed with magnificent understanding of the unique acoustic in this building. Conditions shmonditions. Take that NLebrecht66.

13 mins: this is turning into a procession. They have the symphony totally under control and are beginning to showboat, with breathtaking extremes of dynamic and devastatingly virtuosic passage work. Hats off.

14 mins: easy lads. Don’t get over-excited.

15 mins: ok I take it back. They know EXACTLY what they are doing. Who cares about the rubbish in the first three movements? The heart of the symphony is right here, in the finale, and they know it.

18 mins: slight over-confidence there from the horns, but calmly corrected by von Shlumpff. He’s proving himself a true Mahlerian. I was down on him early on, but what do I know?

20 mins: quite simply staggering stuff in the finale. They were all over the coda like a rash and ultimately produced a performance that will take some beating. All the reservations I had in the earlier movements were swept away by the sheer perfection of the finale, and it was exhilarating to hear an orchestra grow in stature right in front of you.

They’ve laid down a marker for the rest of the festival in the sweltering Albert Hall tonight.Are you listening, Berlin Phil?

Thanks for following it with me. Don’t forget to download the post-concert analysis podcast, including exclusive interviews with some of the key players. Night all.

Higgs Boson a la CERN

It’s a commonly held misconception that the creation of a Higgs Boson particle is the province only of the professional particle chef. But it’s quite simple to rustle one up at home. Here’s one of my favourite recipes.

Higgs Boson a la CERN (feeds 0)
For this recipe you will need:
Everything You Thought You Knew About Physics
A Window
Most Of Switzerland
A Great Big Bag Of Cash
1 Large Hadron Collider
1 Linear Particle Accelerator
1 Proton Synchrotron Booster
1 Super Proton Synchrotron
1 Super-Duper Synchromesh Tronatron Da-Doo-Ron-Ron Dustbuster
6 Particle Detectors: ATLAS ((A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS), TOTEM (TOTal cross section, Elastic scattering and diffraction dissociation Measurement), ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), BOB (Big Old Bugger), CAROL (Crap AcROnym Lunacy), TED (TEDious list of stuff)
Some Particles
A Rubber Spatula
A Lot Of Very Clever Men Probably Wearing White Coats

1. Take Everything You Thought You Knew About Physics.
2. Throw it out of the window. Make sure window is open first.
3. Make sure you have your Great Big Bag Of Cash ready.
4. Take Most Of Switzerland. You don’t need to be that careful with it - it stands up to rough treatment, especially if you dip into your Great Big Bag Of Cash.
5. Dig up Most Of Switzerland and build a very big Circle Line.
6. Install your Large Hadron Collider in the Circle Line you have built.
7. Fire that baby up.
8. Oh.
9. Ah.
10. Magnetic quench in your superconducting bending magnets. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
11. Fire that baby down.
12. Set aside for a year or so to cool.
13. Fire it up again.
14. You need to prepare your particles for injection into the Large Hadron Collider. First pass them through the Linear Particle Accelerator, then through the Proton Synchrotron Booster, then through the Super Proton Synchrotron, and finally through the Super-Duper Synchromesh Tronatron Da-Doo-Ron-Ron Dustbuster.
15. Now the particles are ready for collision. This is the fun bit.
16. Crank ‘em up and smash ‘em together. You are looking for a force of up to 7 TeV.
15. Don’t ask me what TeV means. I thought you were the particle physicist. It’s a lot anyway.
16. At this point there is a danger that the particles may curdle and that the entire known universe will be sucked into a black hole, meaning the end of existence as we know it. There is no need to panic, though. Simply take your spatula and carefully fold the particles back into the collider. Adding another egg yolk may help stabilise it, too.
17. You should now have a Higgs Boson particle. As it will only be in existence for a fraction of a nanosecond, serve immediately.

Not Waving But Drowning

Imagine you have a hobby. Maybe you do. Perhaps you like to paint. Or play netball. Or build models of San Francisco out of toothpicks.

You get the idea.

Most of the people I come across in my regular working life have a hobby: they play a musical instrument.

Incidentally, before I get on to the main business of this blog, I must urge you, if you haven’t already done so, to seek out and befriend an amateur musician. Two or three, why not? If you can steer them away from subjects like Bruckner symphonies, awkward fingerings in Sibelius tone poems, and the relative merits of recordings of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, they are extraordinarily invigorating and enjoyable company. What’s more, the standard achieved by amateur orchestras and choirs in this country is little short of staggering - as if I, a dedicated but limited Sunday cricketer, were taking on a County attack and scoring fifties, if not hundreds, on a regular basis.

If you are neither a cricket nor a classical music fan, you may not have made it through that last paragraph. Sorry about that.

Anyway, let me return to my muttons, as the saying very nearly has it.

My hobby is standing in front of the aforementioned musicians waving my arms, all the while hoping that my efforts will in some way improve the sound they are making. Luckily for me, I also make my living from it. I understand this is what is known nowadays as a win/win.

You may not know anything about classical music. Even if you do, it’s probable that you’re ignorant about exactly what it is that conductors do.

Yes, that’s right, we collect the fares.

Ha ha.

Well done.

May I continue?

The art of conducting (and yes it is an art, but this is the last time I will take it seriously in this post) is so complex that several widthy books have been written about it, a lot of them as off target as this penalty kick. They will typically include diagrams of what we in the trade call ‘beating patterns’ - ‘different ways of waving your arms around’ to anyone else - the practice of which can cause the budding conductor severe muscular and frontal lobe injuries should they not exercise due care and attention.

These very gestures, finely honed over decades of intensive and draining study, are the selfsame ones that are ignored by orchestras the world over, from Aalborg to Zanzibar (both now permissible in Scrabble, incidentally).

This is the natural way of things. Orchestras know best.

But what do these gestures mean?

Well it’s complicated. Let me talk you through some of the gestures that make up the average (and believe me, we’re mostly average) conductor’s stock-in-trade.

The All-Purpose ‘Starting-Everyone-Off’ Gesture
Otherwise known as the ‘upbeat’ (a misnomer if ever there was one), this is usually a nervous upwards jerk with both arms, somewhere during the fallout of which the benighted orchestra is expected to play together. The conductor, sensing an ominous silence of the kind not experienced since Marcel Marceau and Harpo Marx went on a day trip to a trappist monastery, then jiggles his arms about a bit on the way down, in the hope that someone, somewhere, will interpret it as an invitation to play.

This renders the meaning of the gesture, already oblique, completely impenetrable.

The ‘Oh Bugger I’ve Started Too Fast’ Flail
The trouble with this one, which resembles little more than a flightless bird trying to defy gravity and evolution simultaneously, is that it simply gets in the way. The damage is done. The orchestra, which, remember, always knows best, has already gone off at the speed you gave them with your first gesture (see above). Too late now, mate. If you wave your arms slower, half of them will go with you, and the other half will stay the same speed. The music will die, and it will be your fault.

Music-murderer. Blood on your hands. Shame on you.

The ‘You Shouldn’t Have Played There’ Shimmy
Usually directed at a player who has been sitting around doing nothing for a while, like a trombonist (and before all the trombonists reading this start complaining, and you know who you are, just take a long hard look in the mirror and then tell me I’m wrong).

Where was I?

Oh yes. The shimmy. The way it works is this:

1. The player, whether trombonist or not, has not had anything to play for a while, and has lost track of where they are. This is emphatically the composer’s fault for not giving them enough to do.
2. Thinking they recognise the bit the second clarinet has just played, they hastily stop playing ‘Words For Free’ on their iPhone, pick up their instrument and start playing music instead.
3. Loudly.
4. In a quiet bit.
5. The conductor, sensing something is wrong, but not sure exactly what, looks up, sees guilty trombonist (let’s say - it’s just a hypothetical example, for God’s sake, don’t be so touchy) and gives ‘em the shimmy.

The shimmy requires co-ordination: the left hand must clearly send the message to the errant player ‘you’ve come in two bars early, but it’s ok we all make mistakes, now all you have to do is keep calm and start the next bit, you know the one starting with the rising diminished fifth...HERE!’; the right hand must continue conveying flowing rhythm and expression to the rest of the orchestra as if nothing untoward was going on. The effect should resemble an expert maitre d’ removing a fly from a customer’s wine glass while diverting his attention with a well-directed compliment about his tie.

It usually looks more like a startled man hiding a pornographic magazine from his wife.

The ‘More Expression’ Left-Hand Flemble
A cross between a flap and a tremble, this gesture is designed to encourage a more expressive style of playing (usually, for some reason, from the first violins. Probably because they’re nearest). Unfortunately, as the co-ordination required to execute the gesture takes up all of the conductor’s available RAM, it usually results in stasis of the right hand, and the music, more often than not, falls apart just a teensy bit.

This can engender a modicum of panic in the ranks, which in turn leads to:

The ‘Getting-It-All-Going-Again’ Thrash
The conductor is under the impression that faster and larger gestures will be clearer.

Wrong.

It just looks as if he is drowning.

Eventually everything settles down, and the musicians remember that the conductor is like the national speed limit: everyone ignores him, but it's kind of comforting to know he’s there. They can then get on with the business of listening to each other and playing together (driving safely) while very occasionally slowing down to sixty-eight miles an hour (watching the conductor) when they see a police car (when they think he's looking).

After a while we come to:

‘The Wrapping-It-All-Up’ Lung
Somehow, the music needs to stop. Regardless of how they negotiate the final bars, the conductor must do one of two things, depending on the circumstances.
If the music finishes loudly: stiff outstretched arms, open mouth.
If the music finishes quietly: exaggeratedly long silence after the final chord, closed eyes.

NB These are not optional.

As the applause begins, a relieved smile and nodding head are usual. These purport to mean ‘well done everyone, you were great' but actually mean 'well done me, I'm great, aren't I?'

So there you have it. A crash course in conducting. Why not give it a go yourself?

Next week: the rehearsal, including 'Stopping After You've Made A Mistake And Pretending You Heard A Wrong Note In The Woodwind Section’ and 'Anecdotes - How And When To Tell Them'.

Like wow the sun

The realisation that the second episode of ‘Wonders of the Solar System’ was on tonight sent me scurrying to the iPlayer to watch (belatedly - I’m a slow watcher but I will get there) the first. And staggering stuff it is too.

Prof Brian Cox (an opportunity missed, I feel, not to have the show co-presented by his namesake in his role as the original Hannibal Lecter) is clearly a TV natural, and far too young to be a Prof of anything, let alone clever stuff like planets and galaxies. It turns out, from extensive research, that he once played keyboards in D:Ream, which I’m not sure qualifies him for anything much, but during that period he obviously put his copious spare time in between learning keyboard parts to good use.

Anyway, regardless of extra-curricular skills, he communicates his love of his subject with an engaging naturalness that I found utterly...well, engaging and natural. Unsurprisingly for a programme about the sun, we were treated to an eclipse (from the Ganges, where these things are a bit more regular than on the Thames, and the audience significantly more excitable about the whole process). Slightly more surprisingly (to this scientific ignoramus) we also got the Aurora Borealis (from just a tad further North). Both scenes offered copious opportunities for the presenter either to lose it big time like a normal-bloke (“omigod that’s just so amazingly cool!! Wow. Wow!!! The sun...is...disappearing..behind...there it is!!! It’s gone!!! Oh wow. That’s amazing!!”), or to stand unmoved while reeling off science (“Unfortunately we are unable to witness the auroral kilometric radiation except from outer space, because of ionospheric absorption. And there it is. A fine sight”). Prof Brian, eschewing both options, maintained the perfect balance. He was clearly moved by it all, but kept his sangfroid enough to tell us what was going on (Making It All Understandable, or MIAU), even lending his 3-D specs to a slightly bewildered local who clearly hadn’t been to see Avatar yet, and who was wondering why this bloke who looked slightly like Neil Morrissey wanted to lend them to him.

There were facts and figures galore. Not sure if I can remember them all, but bear with me. The core of the sun is really really hot. And the solar wind is hot too, but not when it gets here because there’s a magnet in the way. Oh, and the sun is old, too. Like really old. And it’s going to die some time. But not yet. And when it does it’s going to eat us up and go orange.

I learned a lot.

Loads of magnificent camera work of the sun and the planets (very clever of them to get the cameras out to Saturn at all, if you ask me), and mildly-irritating-but-not-so-much-so-that-you-wanted-to-turn-it-off solar-system-documentary music were the hallmarks of all the programmes of this type that you think you’ve seen but probably haven’t. And, to my delight, some of the usual reference points were used. Voyager I is the size of a double-decker bus, the accepted unit in the world of Explaining Stuff To Unknowledgeable People (ESTUP). Disappointingly, the other ESTUP units were ignored - football pitches, once a staple of this genre, seem to have fallen into abeyance in recent years, and there was a golden opportunity, sadly passed up, to represent the altitude of the observatory-up-a-mountain-in-Chile in terms of Nelson’s Columns.

But of course there were a lot of millions and billions, which is inevitable in a programme whose base unit of distance is 93 million miles (see, I can remember some of it). Bit of a shame he didn’t say gazillion at any stage though.

But imagine my unbridled joy when Prof Brian, explaining how the sun’s gravitational pull extends far beyond the edge of the solar system, got a box of jelly beans out (yes!) and used them to demonstrate (with a zippo representing the sun - yes! yes!!) first where the earth is (green jelly bean - 1cm), then Saturn and Jupiter (pink and yellow jelly beans - some more cms), then Pluto (which he disparagingly referred to as ‘the former planet’ - even more cms). And then the coup de grace - into the car he got (yes!!!) and away he drove.

Even I got the point. Space is really really big. When 1cm = 93m miles, and you have to get into a car to demonstrate anything, that - to me anyway - is perfect MIAU/ESTUP TV.

Thanks Brian. Loved you in Troy.

A Brief Paean To Nige

Where would I be without Nigel?

Today my thoughts turned to the celeriac that has been lurking for the last few days. I shan't say where - it's just been lurking.

I've been dipping in and out of Nigel Slater's latest magnificent octopus: Tender (btw please don’t buy it from Amazon. Go to your local independent bookshop and order it. It will cost a bit more, but they will appreciate you, and if you don’t appreciate them, they will close down. Here ends the lecture.)

This book has a concept so stunningly obvious that I'm amazed it hasn't been done before. Well, it probably has, but I doubt if it has been done as well as this.

It's about growing, cooking and eating vegetables (at least part one is - part two will be about fruit hurrah). It is written in his usual style, every syllable lovingly imbued with the care of the professional food writer, but the whole equally saturated with the enthusiasm of the amateur.

Above all, I get the feeling that Nigel is fundamentally 'just like us' when it comes to food. I just know that he has hardening dog ends of Parmesan (beginning, frankly, to smell a bit like vomit) and a mouldy jar of capers at the back of his fridge, just like me; that, just like me, he ignores the pile of bananas from his organic delivery box in favour of more glamorous fruit like mangoes or pineapples, and they sit in the bowl, steadily browning, until well beyond the point of no return; and that sometimes, just sometimes, he says 'fuck it' and makes himself a meal comprising six chipolatas, a packet of Kettle chips, three-quarters of a bottle of red wine and a mars bar.

Just like me.

But he is also the master of 'giving you permission to make things up'. Hence tonight's meal. Sausages, grilled and sliced; celeriac, sliced and boiled; a simple dressing of mustard, lemon juice, oils, parsley. Mix together in a bowl. Eat. Wipe juice from chin. Watch quite-good-ish film about John Lennon.

Safe.