pumpkinstrokemarrow

Some of you will be familiar with the punnets of green stuff, called cress (and which my father firmly believed was actually rape shoots, rape seeds being the stuff with which you make margarine), which one buys to tart up egg sandwiches. And which pubs buy to tart up the dish they call a ploughman's lunch. And some of you may have wondered what happens to the cress after you harvest it. Well, experiment reveals that the cress stubble does not regenerate very well at all. Some of the seeds which never shot in the first place do shoot when given some air. And some of the cut stalks have a go at starting over, with wannabee leaves appearing around the rim of the decapitation. But essentially no go. Cress shoots do not coppice in the way of a nut tree. Presumably the more intelligent part of the shoot has gone into the sandwiches with the base of the stalk not being able to do much more than pump water up towards the now absent growing tip. The tip being the bit which knew how to grow and how to make leaves. Not like the stalks of trees at all.

And do not confuse punnets with punnetts on the way. Being unsure of the spelling I asked Mr G. who informs me that Punnett is the name of a statistical device called a punnett square used in plant breeding experiments and which was invented by one Reginald Punnett. You would not want one of these being delivered by Tesco Direct.

The second experiment is a little more complicated. The idea is to determine how many units of alcohol one can consume while still being able to make sense of an Agatha Christie drama on telly. The units of alcohol being calculated by summing the product of the volume and the alcoholic content by volume over the drinks taken and then applying a correction for the time over which the drinks were taken. I use 1/(1+logT) where log is the natural logarithm and T is the time in seconds but there are other views on this point.

The occasion was a screening of an adaption of a story called the 'Pale Horse' and starring the latest incarnation of Miss. Marple. And I failed miserably. Despite interrogating the BH the following morning I still can't make any sense of it. The thing seemed to have been made in two halves but which had not been properly joined in the middle. This despite a high powered supporting cast, including the likes of the admirable Bill Patterson in a cameo role. Would such people have been seen dead in such stuff in the olden days? Whereas now it seems that more or less any popular TV series can pull serious folk in in supporting roles. Are they truly proud to appear on such shows - admiring the professionalism with which they are put together - or do they need the dosh? Enquiring of the Daily Mirror web site, I was mollified to find that this story did not start life with Miss Marple on-board at all - she had been popped in by the TV people who believed in the power of the Marple brand. The Mirror thought that the result was more or less incomprehensible, alcoholised or not. So I have deleted this experiment from the record. Have to start again and while waiting for a suitable opportunity, I have ordered up a second hand copy of the tome in question to see if I can make any sense of it in print. Plus, it will, as ever, be interesting to peer at the detail of how the TV drama is derived from the printed drama.

PS: amused by EDF energy invitation which arrived over the aether today to 'Watch our video on how to read your meter reading'. Perhaps, along with the people who hire the doctors who look after us after four o'clock in the afternoon (and all day weekends and bank holidays), EDF should make its IT contractors take an English test.