Cool science

"Have you noticed how women always comment on the temperature when they enter a room?" I ask Rachel, as we're sat in the physics library at Glasgow University, trying to make progress on our educational project, while ventilator fans in the wall blast out cool air. 

"No," she says.

"That's because unlike me you are not a trained observer," I tell her.

"You've got your jumper on inside out and are wearing odd socks," she says. "I have a PhD in nuclear physics. Which makes me the trained observer, I believe. We don't just make stuff up."

"Quarks, gluons, colour, strangeness and charm?" I say. "Course you make it up and I'll tell you how I know. You can't buy any of that stuff on eBay. So it doesn't exist."

"For once there's a tiny particle of sense in your wittering," she says.

"There is?" I say.

"You're like a machine-gunner on a firing-range having an epileptic fit while standing on a turntable," she says. "One bullet in a million hits the target. Women do feel temperature differently."

"Is that because they're robots planted on Earth by aliens running experiments on pain and suffering?" I say.

"No it's because they have extra insulation," she says. "So their core temperature stays high at the expense of their extremities. They are also smaller on average so they lose heat faster. Pygmy shrews have the same problem."

"But don't complain about it nearly as much."

"They have to eat every four hours or die of cold," she says. "Elephants have the opposite problem. They struggle to keep cool. It's why they have big ears."

"I thought that was because Noddy wouldn't pay the ransom," I say, and she ignores me again. 

"Small objects have more surface area for their size than large ones," she says. "It's why you shouldn't eat the tasty little chips at the bottom of the bag. More surface means more grease for the same potato." 

"I heard frogs freeze solid in winter," I say, keen to keep her distracted from my progress on the forty actions she gave me last week, only three of which I've done. "Is that true?"

"The North American wood frog does," she says. "Completely solid. Then when the thaw comes, its little heart starts beating again and it gives itself a shake."

"And wanders off to look for female frogs," I say. "Who go 'It's bloody cold around here. Why can't you do something about it - call yourself a frog?'"

"I have no knowledge of the conversational habits of amphibians," she says, turning to look through the tall bay window behind us. 

"See that building up the grassy slope?" she says. "A man called William Thompson laid the foundations of the science of heat and energy when he lived there. He was the first scientist to be given a peerage for his work - Lord Kelvin."

"I remember studying heat and energy when I was young," I tell her. "We had a Three Laws of Thermodynamics for dummies that went like this:

1. You can't win. You can only break even.
2. You can break even only at absolute zero.
3. You can't reach absolute zero."

She nods. "Basically you can never make a perpetual motion machine," she says. "But things work better the colder they get."

"Except women," I say.

"Except women," she says, standing up and reaching for her jacket. "It's bloody freezing in here. Let's go get a coffee."



More science:

• Temperature perception in men and women. 
• Frozen wood frogs: a) video b) research. 
• Three laws of thermodynamics.

A big boy did it and ran away

Stout denial is one of the first survival tactics you learn as a kid growing up in Scotland. "It wisnae me" is an ancient cry that can still be heard in our streets, homes and schools.

It rarely worked when I was a boy, since parents and teachers then had no qualms about punishing the innocent and often used a deterrence method from the football field, known as "get your retaliation in first."

But it can be effective in soft modern times, as my son demonstrates over a late breakfast in Charlie Rocks, when Rachel starts talking about the time he spent, on first moving to the city, as a tenant in her Glasgow flat. 

"Do you remember leaving that half-eaten meal in your bedroom drawer for weeks?" she says. "We got complaints from all the neighbours and a bunch of cats camped outside your window and partied all night long." 

"It wisnae me," he tells her firmly. 

"Of course it was and what's more ... " she says, then shakes her head and takes a diplomatic tack. "Did you know they've found a connection now between creativity and poor memory?"

"I didn't," he says. "But it makes sense. They tested me at art school and said my short-term memory was crap. Can't remember what they said about my long-term memory."

"They also said you were highly intelligent," I say. "So what do they know?"

"Yeah, yeah," he says. "Can I borrow your vacuum cleaner? Mine's broke."

"It's not Spring. Why do you need a vacuum cleaner? You having guests?"

"Might be," he says, looking away. 

"Who?" I say.

"None of your business," he says.

"Is it a woman?"

"No it's a Thai lady-boy. Of course it's a woman. You think I'm going to hoover my flat for Michael Gibb and Jamal Khan?"

"I was only asking. Tetchy little bugger, aren't you?"

"No I'm not," he says. "I just don't like being interrogated about hoovers, women and old breakfasts. How's your porridge, by the way? It looks kinda camp to me."

"I was thinking that," I say, lifting a sprig of green leaves from the centre of the summer fruits the Charlie Rocks chef has sprinkled over the surface of the good old Scottish staple. "When I was young, porridge was a much more manly meal."

"You and your ten brothers share a tin bath full every morning, before going out to fight the Vikings?" he says.

"We did. And if it turned out too thick to eat, because my mum never looked at recipes, we'd fasten it to the end of a hazel branch and use it as a club. The vikings never stood a chance. Versatile stuff, porridge."

"That is true," Rachel says, bringing us back to a reality neither of us has much time for. "Oats are a kind of superfood according to the research. They help prevent cancer, regulate your immune system and lower your blood pressure and cholesterol levels."

"That's interesting," he says. "I know I feel a lot better if I eat oats instead of wheat." 

"They're also great if you're trying to lose weight," she says. "They release energy slowly in the body, which makes you feel full for longer. A lot of the benefits come from a soluble fibre called beta-glucan."

"Fascinating," I say. "When my Dad was a lad, Scots mums in the country, he used to tell us, would fill their dresser drawers with porridge and cut big slices off, for the men to stuff in their pockets and take to work in the morning."

"Aha!" Rachel says, turning sharply to my son and making him jump. "That must have been what you were doing with your breakfast in my flat."

He meets her gaze with studied calm. "It wisnae me," he tells her.

I hope I didn't brain my damage

My dad had a great saying, the exact wording of which I can't remember now. Something like full-blown insanity being rare but stupidity being all around us.

Frank Zappa reckoned there was more stupidity in the universe than hydrogen. Einstein said only the universe and human stupidity were infinite. "And I'm not sure about the former."

You've maybe guessed by now that I'm playing for time with this preamble, because today's topic is one I'm reluctant to delve deeply into. Stupidity. Specifically mine.

As the first graduate in our family I used to be told I was clever but lacked sense, an allegation I dismissed at the time as sour grapes. The suspicion has grown since that the grapes were fine. 

And yet it's not sense that's been lacking all these years. It's the close connection with ambient events that ordinary folk take smugly for granted. I walked in front of a swing when I was three, into a lampost when I was ten and through a plate-glass window when I was 25, in all cases sustaining cuts, bruises and contusions but lasting damage only to that aura of sophistication I aim at all times to project.

"Of course I don't think you're stupid," Rachel tells me in Waverley Station, as we're headed home from a morning meeting we have travelled to Edinburgh to attend, only to discover that the day was accurate but the week was only approximate.

"You are fairly smart most of the time,"  she tells me. "But every now and then you become - what's the word? - challenging. You don't seem to know what's going on around you. You're annoyingly dopey."

My mind wanders back to a lovely, dark-haired woman called Rosemary, who often called me that. "It's loveable," she said. No one since has found it so, assigning my dopeyness instead to various places along the annoying spectrum, from 'challenging' all the way to 'infuriating'. 

"You are doing that stupid act again," my wife used to say. "It drives me insane."

Little did she know how hard I found it, all those centuries we were together, to seem nearly normal sometimes. The relief when we split was immense, like taking a tight-fitting bra off at the end of the day.

"Watch where you're going grandpa!" a young punk shouts, as I bump into him in the information centre, stepping on his foot and dislodging one of his essential earpieces.

"See what I mean," Rachel says, taking my arm and leading me towards the cash machine in the corner. "Stand there," she says. "I won't be a moment. Then I'll show you where the platform is for the train back to Glasgow."

Suddenly I'm the one who's annoyed. "You're talking to me as if I'm a ten-year-old," I say. "I've been all over the world without you. I've interviewed astronauts in Houston and eaten fruits of the forest from tall, slim glasses in Helsinki boardrooms. I don't need you leading me by the hand and showing me the right bloody platform in Edinburgh, thanks very much."

She steps aside and I push my card into the slot, punch the code and press the option to withdraw £50 in cash. When the card reappears I shove it in my back pocket, turn on my heel and flounce off towards Platform 7. 

"Hey!" Rachel shouts at my departing back.

"What?" I turn, still annoyed with her.

"Don't you want this money then?" she asks, waving the five ten pound notes I've left in the jaws of the cash machine.

It's possible to be too attractive

The firm conviction that no animal is ever going to hurt me would, if I lived in some parts of the world, be a fatal error.

I don't believe for instance the stories about hippos being deadly killers. They live on leaves, bark and vegetation, for heaven's sake, which is pretty much what I eat every day. Vegetarians aren't dangerous.

I like spiders and snakes, having had a tarantula walk on my hands and an African rock python wrapped around my neck. 

The snake smelled my forearm with a darting tongue before nuzzling the back of my hand with its head, as a cat would, while the spider touched my palm softly with her foot, feeling for danger and finding none, before planting her surprisingly heavy body and raising another tentative leg for the next step. In both cases I got a strong feeling of shared sentience. 

All this, I'm guessing, has its origins in a childhood spent in Scotland, a country devoid of dangerous animals, except for the female Homo sapiens, which will attack when provoked and has been known to bite the head off the male after mating. 

So when the biggest pig I've ever seen comes lumbering out of the New Forest at me, I stand my ground, certain I won't get hurt, despite the huge disparity in our weights and probably intelligence. 

Sure enough the quarter-tonne sow stops short of trampling me into the dust and contents herself with nuzzling my groin with a wet and substantial snout. 

The civilities satisfied, she hangs out with me for a while on the grass verge before, like an oil tanker at sea, turning majestically into the wind and setting off into the woods again, on a mission that Rachel explains to me, as we stroll back to the car. 

"It's called pannage," she says.  

"What is?" I say, furtively wiping my trousers and hoping sow slobber doesn't leave stains.

"What you've just seen," she says. "The owners release their pigs in the autumn to wander around the forest, eating the acorns that could otherwise poison horses and cattle. It's a practice that goes back centuries. It's even mentioned in the Domesday Book."

"Fascinating," I say. "My Mum thought pigs were great. Her grandparents had smallholdings in Shropshire, and she'd often spend holidays there as a child. They kept pigs, hens and ducks, she told us, and she loved them all. The pigs, she said, were especially affectionate."

"They are sociable animals," Rachel says. "And at least as smart as a three-year-old child. They're very clean too, contrary to their image. Newborn piglets leave the nest to go to the toilet within a few hours of being born."

"Impressive," I tell her. "It took me years."

"What's more, pigs don't eat like pigs," she says. "They take it slow and savour their food. I'm with your Mum. Pigs are gorgeous. According to one biologist, no other animal is as curious and willing to explore new experiences. "Pigs are incurable optimists," he says, "and get a big kick out of just being."

"Are they ever dangerous?" I ask.

"Only if you threaten their young," she says. "Or look like competition to a dominant male for the affections of a female."

"What?" I say in sudden alarm, ending the fruitless trouser-wiping and looking up to see another pig, even bigger than the first, emerge from the trees, sniff the air and fix an undeniably irate eye on the two of us.

"Tell me something," I say, lengthening my stride and trying to estimate our chances of reaching the car before this big boar gets to us. "How attractive, on a scale of one to ten, would you say that sow just found me?"

"Ten," she says.

"Run!" I tell her.

Pigs and pannage in the New Forest

Top Ten Fascinating Facts About Pigs

Subtle humour sucks

"I've stopped reading Twitter in the morning," Rachel tells me, as we're trying to work in the physics library at the University, and I'm wondering if it can get any chillier in here. The heating system seems to think it's mid-summer and is blasting cold air through large vents in the wall. I'm icing up fast. 

"It's relentless," she says. "It makes me feel everything is far worse than I thought. Sexism, homophobia, Tory cuts, terrorism, climate change, ocean pollution, cold feet, badly-fitting bras, the hierarchy problem in particle physics.

"Twitter tells me stuff I can't do anything about. But once you start reading you can't stop. You're fascinated and appalled. You desperately want to do something to help, but you can't because the world's problems are enormous."

"Don't stand there gawping - help me out here."

"You sound like my son," I say, pulling the collar of my jacket up and sinking my head down, to get some heat into frozen ears. "He avoids the news because it makes him feel bad."

"That's going too far," she says. "You have to force yourself to face stuff or you're not living in the real world. I just don't want it coming at me too early and all at once. It ruins my day."

"Follow some funny guys then," I say. "It's what I do. Lightens my mood in the morning. Paul Bassett Davies makes me laugh. He does these offbeat one-liners on Twitter and writes a blog. 

"I like his advice to aspiring writers: 'Begin with a sex scene. Then do some writing.'" 

"I don't know him," Rachel says. "But what puts me off Internet humour is the brainless boy-jokes. Mostly visual and slapstick, and often cruel. It's like Mel Brooks says: 'Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.' I don't like that. I like subtlety."

"I don't," I say. "I like Mel Brooks. You can't beat a good fart joke. Then there's that scene where the black sheriff shouts 'Hey, where the white women at?' to the Ku Klux Klan.' That was funny."

"Hilarious," she says. 

Scottish humour

"Subtle humour is just a way to flaunt your superiority," I say. "Then you laugh again at the people who don't get the joke. It's not funny. It's peacock posturing."

"And crude stand-up isn't?" she says. 

"I don't like that either," I say. "So is there a science of humour?"

"Not so much a science," she says. "More a bunch of theories that go back to Aristotle."

"Did he do stand-up? Aristotle at the Apollo?"

"No but he had theories about everything, most of them wrong. He reckoned all humour had its origins in that feeling of superiority you mentioned. So did Thomas Hobbes, much later. 

"It was Francis Hutcheson, the father of the Scottish Enlightenment, who first pointed out that humour is multi-faceted and often arises from the convergence of two mismatched ideas."

"Interesting," I say. "So do you want to hear a subtle, multi-faceted joke?"

"Yes, please," she says.

"Two philosophers meet in a bar. 'How did you get so wet?' Descartes says. 

"'Turns out I was wrong," Heraclitus replies. 'Can I get you a drink?' 

"'I think not,' says Descartes and disappears."

"Ha ha," Rachel says.

"I rest my case," I say. 

Science of humour
The good sense of humour (GSOH) everyone's looking for might be different for men and women, according to research. "To a woman, 'sense of humour' means someone who makes her laugh; to a man, a sense of humour means someone who appreciates his jokes."

Prof Sophie Scott regularly tweets and laughter is one of her research interests.

Sex hormones and satnavs

People have strong feelings about satnavs. I love mine and couldn't function without it, even switching it on when driving roads I know well. It frees my mind for thinking and tells me when to turn. 

I'll use it just to drive to the village shop and back, if I'm thinking about a particularly tricky problem. It saves me suddenly realising I'm in Swansea and wondering how the hell I got there.

Rachel hates satnavs and stops talking when mine starts giving me directions. "I don't want to compete for your attention with another woman," she says.

"You're not," I say. "It's a machine."

"It's a woman's voice," she says and she's right. I have my satnav set to Jane who, judging by her accent, comes from somewhere in Surrey, rides to hounds and wears high heels and tight jodhpur pants that .... Ahem.

"Thing is I don't want some guy telling me how to drive my car," I tell Rachel, as she goes silent mid-sentence again, while Jane's mellifluous tones tell me to turn right at the next roundabout and somehow invest the instruction with inviting innuendo. 

"That's interesting, isn't it?" I say.

"What is?" she says.

"The whole opposite-sex appeal, same-sex competitiveness thing. You even get it with a machine."

"It's biological programming," she says. "Your body and feelings respond to the female voice, even if your brain knows there's no female there. Male hormones are more powerful than male brains. But we knew that."

"There's no call to be sexist," I say. "It works with women too. My sister has her satnav set to Sean, who oozes Irish charm, the slimeball."

"No, you're right," Rachel says. "I have a colleague who's convinced it works across species too." 

"What does?" I say.

"Being a man," she says. "He reckons he can charm the females of any species, especially mammals."

"What like lions and tigers?" I say. "Is he nuts?"

"Could be," she says. "But he's a biologist so there might be some science behind it. He says it's chemistry."

"Like test-tubes and bunsen burners?" I say.

"Like chemicals in the body," she says. "Especially hormones. They have a huge effect on behaviour and lots of animals have the same hormones as us."

"Ah, right," I say. "I think I read that one of the hormones in HRT comes from horse piss."

"Used to," she says. "You're talking about oestrogen, the female sex hormone. Which is a good example because it's one of the oldest hormones in the world. So you find it in every kind of vertebrate, from trout, seals and salmon to giraffes, gorillas and Lady Gaga."

"And that means they all act the same way around anything with male hormones?" I say. "Sounds far-fetched to me."

"Me too," Rachel says. "But that's just his hypothesis. What he knows for sure, he says, is that he can get females of any species to like him, by being sensitive to what they're doing and feeling - and by letting them smell him."

"Before I let a lioness that close I'd need to know I didn't smell like a gazelle," I say.

"You have reached your destination," Jane tells me and I give her a little pat, then look around and realise that once again my favourite female has got me to my destination with the minimum of fuss. She is fantastic. 

"I wonder if satnavs have oestrogen in them?" I say. 

"No they don't," Rachel says, reaching up and switching Jane off sharply. "She's never going to feel the same way about you as you do about her. Get over it, pal."

Satyagraha

See all that stuff about a problem shared being a problem halved? Not in my experience, it isn't. More like a problem shared is a good laugh for your mates.

"So you don't have mice now but you do have slugs?" Rachel says, over a pizza in Gambrino's.

"Maybe just one," I say. "Found it on the kitchen floor a coupla times when I came down in the night for a glass of water. I think it lives under the sink. Leopard slug. Quite pretty when you look close."

"If it's only one that's not so bad," she says. "But if you've an infestation you should get rid of them. Your visitors won't think they're pretty."

"I know how to tell if there's more than one," my son says, lifting a floppy wedge of pizza and lowering it into his mouth."

I give him a moment to chew then ask him how. "Write a name on its shell one night," he says. "Like 'Bob'."

"Slugs don't have shells," I say. "You're thinking of snails."

"Use post-it notes then," he says. "Point is if it says 'Alice' the next night, you've more than one slug. Then you can start to worry."

"I'd be more worried about the psycho who lives under your sink and writes "Alice" on slugs," Rachel says. "I take it you're not going to kill them?"

"I am not," I say. "Why would I?"

"Some people think they're disgusting," she says. 

"I think some people are disgusting," I say.

"What are you going to do with them?" my son says.

"Same as I did with the mice and the fruit flies," I say. "Satyagraha."

"Passive resistance?" Rachel says. "Sounds wimpy and pathetic."

"That's not satyagraha," says my son, ever the expert on Eastern philosophy.

"No?" Rachel says.

"No," he says. "Passive resistance is a weapon of the weak, Gandhi said. It could be violent and didn't always stick with truth. Satyagraha is only for the strong. It insists on truth and never uses violence. Big difference."

"What did Gandhi say about slugs in your kitchen?" Rachel asks him. But his mouth is full of chilli-topped pizza, so he gestures at me and they both wait for my words of wisdom.

"Not much, obviously," I say. "But we're talking principles here. If you understand those you can apply satyagraha to anything. It's about truth, firmness and non-violence."

"So you're going to take the slugs outside, like you did with the mice?" my son says. "And as soon as you turn round they'll be back in the house again."

"And I'll put them out again," I say. "And again. In the end I'll win, because I understand the principles of satyagraha. So I'm strong. I'm persistent."

"Remind me how long it took to get the mice to stay outside," he says.

"Five years," I say. "But in the end they got the message."

The two of them nibble their thin pizzas thoughtfully and sip their coffees, and I begin to think I might have convinced them. "There's a fatal flaw in your plan," Rachel finally says, and my stomach sinks. 

"I was afraid there might be," I say.

"It works only if the slugs don't understand satyagraha too," she says. "If they do they'll be as persistent as you are. It'll be a standoff. You'll never get rid of them."

My son is nodding. "She's right," he says. "Which means it's more important than ever to check their name-tags. If one of your slugs is called Mahatma, you're screwed."

Pinot Noir and the Philistines

"Wine isn't as complex as whisky or enjoyable as ale," I tell Rachel, as we're sat in the Drake Bar, drinking a Williams Brothers beer.

"Oh it is," she assures me. "You're wrong."

"Wouldn't surprise me," I say. "Happens all the time these days. I'm certain about something, argue it adamantly, then suddenly realise I've got it round my neck."

I take a swig of the Birds and Bees, a floral, hoppy little number I particularly enjoy in summertime. "It's making me feel stupid," I say.

"No, no," she says. "You have to be intelligent to realise you're wrong. Plenty of people hold daft ideas forever."

"I never used to be wrong all the time," I say.

"You probably were but didn't notice," she says. "You're getting smarter."

"Being always wrong means I'm getting smarter?" I say. "Only you could think up an argument like that. Or would want to."

The Drake calls itself a gastro bar, so they serve omelettes in little frying-pans and the beer is £4 a bottle. It's a likeable place though, with quirky, friendly staff that welcome young and old, kids, dogs and families.

"So why am I wrong about wine?" I ask, wondering how to attack the omelette.

"Because you drink mass-produced stuff from hot countries," she says.

"It slips down nicely," I say.

"But that's like drinking blended whisky and pontificating about malt," she says.

"So enlighten me," I say. "But spare me the bollocks about wet dogs, sweaty saddles and caramel-coated autumn leaves."

"Would you prefer ethyl 2-methylbutanoate and t-anethole?" she says.

"Yes," I say.

"No you wouldn't," she says. "And even if you did, most people would rather hear about hints of plum and aniseed. The vocabulary of taste and smell is a lot more limited than sight and sound. Art and music critics have it easy."

"That's true," I say.

"When you talk about wine you have a choice," she says. "Use science vocabulary and no one understands you, or make up metaphors and Philistines like you take the piss."

"Funny you should mention them," I say. "The Philistines were into booze in a big way. They had breweries, vineyards and shops that sold strong drink."

"You'd have been right at home then," she says. "Science has pretty much confirmed that the flavours wine-tasters bang on about come from chemical compounds. They're real. They don't make them up."

"Oh yeah?" I say. "What about the faint aroma of flat-footed gecko, basking on a rock on the shores of Lake Como?"

"I've tasted that one," she says. "Mock all you like, pal. It's science. It's chemistry. Big wine companies understand and control that. So you get to slurp sun-drenched Shiraz at £5 a bottle. It's drinkable and you know it won't taste like weasel. But it's short on subtlety, complexity and the element of surprise."

"I don't want to be surprised," I tell her.

"From what you were just telling me, your life is full of surprises."

"Most of them unpleasant," I say. "So if I took a chance what would you recommend?"

"You could do worse than a red Burgundy," she tells me. "Pay at least £20 and see what Pinot Noir can do."

"What can I expect?" I ask, scraping the last pieces of omelette from the frying-pan and decanting them into my mouth. 

Her eyes search the middle distance for inspiration. "Drinking a mass-produced red is like being wrapped in a duvet filled with the soft down of a Canadian snow goose," she says.

"I've often thought so," I say.

Her eyes are closed now, her brain mulling metaphors. "But a sip of Pinot Noir is like a light touch on the nape of your neck, from the lips of a young Pacific porpoise, newly weaned from its mother's milk."

I shake my head in admiration. "Very fine bollocks," I tell her.

"Thank you," she says, opening her eyes. "Now get me a beer."

Brain drain

Wouldn't it be nice if brains came with a detailed set of instructions? Been using mine for longer than I care to mention, but I still have no idea what it's doing, most of the time.

I mean you buy anything these day, from a motor-car to a packet of cereal, and it comes with a manual in 40 languages. "Verser les corn flakes dans l'assiette, et puis le lait sur ​​les corn flakes."

But the most complicated machine in the world arrives in a box you can't open, without even a basic set of operating rules - like don't try scratching it with a knitting-needle through your ear.

So occasionally I get mine working like a well-oiled machine, but often it's more like the rusty old bangers you find in farmyards. And that's strange because if my pals were struggling at school I'd often pretend I hadn't got it either. Made them feel better and got on the teachers' tits at the same time, which was always a bonus.

Nowadays I do the opposite, using nods and smiles, as people speak, to conceal the fact that they could be talking Swahili, for all the sense it makes to me. In an earlier post I mentioned that my son and sister's chat often goes over my head. But I have to admit it's not just theirs.

Instead of ageing gracefully into the wise, fatherly figure I've been aiming for all these years, I seem to have matured into a moron, although I think that's one of the words you can't use now, because it's offensive.

It's a word, incidentally that comes from the Greek moros, which meant dull. Sharp was oxys, which is where oxymoron - sharp-dull, a contradiction in terms - comes from.

See, I know stuff. I just don't understand anything, anymore.

So when Diane sends an email that stretches to several pages and makes only sporadic sense to me, I panic at first, then phone a friend, a trusty translator, fluent in both Diane and Douglas.

"Explain it to me, Rachel," I beg, phone in one hand, small Highland Park in the other.

"Which part don't you get?" she asks.

"See where it says 'Hi'." I say.

"Yes," she says.

"I get that," I tell her. "Then the next sentence goes on for three lines and my brain goes blooey."

So she talks me patiently through the email, explaining the acronyms, reminding me of stuff I'm supposed to know, but have misplaced somewhere in the crinkles of my cortex, and after an hour a little light shines in the darkness.

"She wants my ideas for a proposal on engaging with science researchers?" I say.

"Yes," Rachel says.

"Why didn't she say so?"

"She did."

"Not to me she didn't," I say and a stray thought strikes. Maybe my brain isn't the problem. Maybe it's everyone else's.

"Let me run something past you," I say, sipping the sweet, slightly-peated malt.

"Will it take long?" Rachel asks. "I have dinner to cook in six hours."

"I'll give you the condensed version," I say. "Chat forums, blogs and emails have taught people to do a brain dump when they want to communicate. Quantity is what counts online. So where a newspaper article is tightly edited, anything online is a baggy, bloated bunch of bollocks.

"That means editing has been transferred from the writer's brain to the reader's, and mine just can't be arsed. What do you think?"

There's a pause before she speaks. "It sounds to me like another version of the two billion people are wrong and Douglas is right theory," she says, gently. "And what are the chances of that being true?"

"Roughly two billion to one against," I say, swallowing the last of the whisky. "But that's not zero, is it?"

As dragons play

"You can't beat a nice cup of tea," Rachel tells me in Tchai-Ovna, the house of tea, overlooking the River Kelvin. 

"Yes you can," I say. "Tea's too dry. So is wine. I like my drinks wet, cool and thirst-quenching."

"So that would be beer," she says.

"Correct," I say.

"Tea is thirst-quenching," she insists, lifting the blue china bowl of oolong in both hands and sipping daintily."It's why it's the most popular drink in the world, apart from water."

"I've heard that," I say. "It's baffling."

"Two billion people drink tea every morning ," she says. "Two billion people are wrong and you're right?"

"Wouldn't be the first time," I say, taking a sip of my Dragon's Eye, the tea she's chosen for me. "How can liquid be dry?" 

"I know this," she says. "Give me a minute."

So I pick up the chunky menu and browse, while she dredges her memory. Dozens of teas are listed, each with its own story. Dragon's Eye, would you believe, is "a good quality tea to calm the nerves and sharpen the senses, while relaxing under an ancient, gnarled tea tree, as dragons play in the air with plumes of fire."

"Got it," Rachel says, bringing me back to earth with a bump - I always fancied myself as a dragonrider. "It's the tannins in the tea," she says. "They combine with stuff in your saliva to give that dry feel on your tongue."

"You learn something new every day," I say.

"Especially if you don't know much," she says, smiling to soften the sting. "Tannins combine with milk, if you put it in your tea, which leaves less to make your mouth dry."

"Fascinating," I say, slightly disengaged, since part of me is still up there, playing with plumes of fire.

"Am I boring you?" she asks.

"No, no," I tell her, and try to think of an intelligent question. "Would it be tannins that make wine dry too?"

"Yes and no," she says.

"See I've always thought that's a stupid answer," I say, forgetting to smile. "It must be either yes or no. Can't be both."

"That's because you crave certainty," she says. "You don't like fuzzy grey areas."

"Not true," I say. "I pretty much am a fuzzy grey area." 

"You are," she says. "But you need to open yourself more to uncertainty. Embrace ambiguity. It makes life interesting."

"I'll try," I promise. "Why yes and no about dry wine?"

"Yes, wine has tannins, especially red wine. No, that's not what they mean by dry wine."

My attention span is starting to struggle. But the dragon's eye has calmed my nerves and sharpened my senses. "Go on," I say.

"Dry in wine just means not sweet," she says. "All the sugar from the grapes has turned to alcohol. So you can have dry wine with any amount of tannins, or none - or sweet wine, come to that."

"Why are they there?" I ask, since she's clearly enjoying pulling this stuff out of her head.

"They come from the grapes," she says. "Lots of plants use them in their leaves and unripe fruit to stop getting eaten."

"But fruit wants to get eaten," I say. "It's how seeds spread."

"So the tannins get less astringent - softer - as the grape ripens," she says. "Also during winemaking, which changes them in lots of complicated ways."

"Well, well," I say.

"Lesson over,"  she says. "You know what I like most about tea? 

"That it lets you air your vast knowledge in public places," I say.

"Of course," she says. "But mostly that it's a thread of culture connecting me to a long line of tea-drinkers, right back through history. It's a civilised activity that brings people together in an oasis of calm, no matter how hard life is for them."

I stare at her over the china. "And I thought it was just brown stuff that feels like socks in your mouth."

"Would you like another pot of tea?" she asks.

"Yes," I tell her. "And no."

Robins revisited

"I've decided the two robins on your bird-table aren't gay," Rachel tells me, over a coffee in her office at the university.

"I never thought they were," I tell her. "They're just good friends."

"Maybe more than that," she says. "I have it on good authority that male and female robins are pretty much identical. Robins are fiercely territorial, so if yours are getting along fine, they're probably Mr and Mrs."

"When you say you have it on good authority, you mean you've been talking to some guy in the pub again, haven't you?" I say.

"Yes he was a guy. And yes we were in a pub at the time. But he knew what he was talking about. He was a real geek."

"Means he can't tell the difference between male and female humans, never mind robins. How come you don't believe anything I tell you, but you'll take any old tosh from random punters in pubs?"

"He was a bird expert," she insists. "Kept budgies and canaries and knew about bumblefoot and psittacosis."

"Bumblefoot?" I say, slightly louder than I intend.

"Keep your voice down," she whispers. "There's people in here trying to work. We should go outside if you're going to start an argument."

"I'm not going to start an argument. I just like to get the facts right. Whereas you are just a teeny bit gullible."

The two lines between her eyebrows tell me I've said the wrong thing. But before I can dig myself out Diane appears at my side. "Are you upsetting Rachel again?" she says.

Tall, decisive, good-looking, Diane is head of the group Rachel works for. Takes no nonsense and makes strong men cry. Also me. "Be nice to her," she tells me, slapping me on the back and walking away.

I glance at Rachel and notice with relief that the lines are gone. Quick to forgive, she stays annoyed with me less than anyone I know. Usually. Means it concerns me more that she might, though.

"Are you all right?" she asks. "You look worried."

"She's cracked a couple of my ribs," I say. "Ah, it hurts."

"Don't be such a girl," she says.

"So if my robins are male and female, they'll be starting a family soon?" I say, giving her a soothing chance to share more geek-given info.

"Then making their nest," she says. "Which robins do just about anywhere - sheds, kettles, boots, coat pockets, car bonnets, hanging baskets. They're not fussy."

Diane strides past again and nods slightly when she sees we're in calm waters. "She's like a protective mum, isn't she?" I whisper to Rachel, who goes quiet for a moment.

"You should use that," she says. "Arouse her maternal instincts. Robins are fierce but they're great parents. They often feed other birds' chicks. Act like a chick and Diane will treat you better."

I stroke my chin. "Maybe," I say. "But taking lessons from nature is risky. She might be a praying mantis, not a robin. The female bites the male's head off."

"Only after mating," she reminds me. "If you don't mate with Diane you should be safe."

"I'll try hard not to," I tell her.