My boomerang won't come back

"You got your fingers in the wrong place again," Susan tells me, as she's giving me a lesson out in the open air, now that Spring has come.

"I haven't done this before," I say. "It's not easy."

"Do exactly what I say and you'll be fine," she says. "Curl your fingers around and hold it at an angle to the vertical. That's it. Now throw."

The two of us watch the little boomerang soar over the grass then plummet into a cowpat. "This isn't easy," I say, as we set off to retrieve it. "Are you sure they ever come back? Maybe it's one of those urban myths for wee boys."

"The big boys on Bondi Beach had no trouble with their boomerangs," she says. 

"That's just tacky," I tell her. "And tactless. Just because I have skinny legs and don't know how to hold a boomerang. It's not a survival skill in the West of Scotland. I can dance, dribble a ball and solve differential equations. What more do you want?"

She raises her eyebrows in a manner that says way more than words. "It is a beautiful object," I say, studying the images of Australian animals, painted on the polished wood. "But it's very annoying. My hunter's instincts, honed by millennia of male evolution, should make this easy for me."

"Your hunter's instincts?" she says.

"The ones that make me good at throwing a javelin and parking a car," I tell her. "While you can cook, sew and find things in cupboards. That's your gatherer's instincts."

"Shut up and throw the boomerang," she says.

"I'll try one more time," I say. "Then I'm going to the pub. Why couldn't you get me a present from Australia that wouldn't make me look an idiot?"

"I was only there three weeks," she says.

"Very good," I say, grabbing the shit-covered shaft. "Read the instructions again, will you please?"

"Stand at an angle to the wind," she says. "Hold the boomerang with one of its aerodynamic arms pointing away from you. Throw overhand and snap your wrist to make it spin. Once it's in flight do not look away. If you lose sight of it, adopt the 'mystery boomerang position'." 

"I love that bit," I tell her.

"Turn your back, cover your head with your arms and crouch down," she reads. "If the boomerang hits you in the back it was a good throw."

"Last chance for one of those," I say, throwing hard, snapping my wrist and watching with pleasure as the little flying-machine soars through the air and starts banking left. The ground comes up and smacks it some distance away from us, but it's the first sign that I'm getting the hang of this.

"Always stop on a high when learning a new skill," I tell Susan in the pub later. "Makes you keen to try again. What was the best part of your holiday in Australia then?"

"My boy took me out for dinner on the last night, to the Melbourne restaurant where he's chef. I got him all to myself for the first time in years and we chatted for hours. It was a lovely evening."

She studies the bubbles in her beer. "He will come home," I tell her. "In a year or two."

"I'm not so sure," she says. "They've a great life out there. I think it'll be a long time before I see him again." 

"Family's too important to him," I say. "He'll return, same as you. You went all the way there and flew home again. You're a bit of a boomerang, yourself."

"Elegantly curved and aesthetically pleasing?" she says. 

"Comes back covered in sh...," I start to say, when my hunter's instincts sense her intention, I swiftly adopt the mystery boomerang position, and her raised hand passes harmlessly over my head.

Potted guide to particle physics

CERN terrasse

Just as my son and I are headed our separate ways from the Òran Mór, I get a phone call from the University to say the profs I'm meeting are half an hour behind, so we head back inside and order a couple of orange and sodas. 

"You've been to CERN," he says. "Give me the potted guide to particle physics. But none of your jargon. Keep it simple."

"Well let's see," I say. "There are twelve elementary particles. First you got quarks, squarks, protons and squotons. Then there's electrons, neutrons, matrons, cisterns, grains of sand, steel girders, dark matter and belly button fluff. Everything in the universe is made out of those."

"What holds them together?" he says. "What gives them shape and structure?"

"Good question," I say. "The four fundamental forces do that - gravity, electromagnetism, rock music and sex."

"I'm wondering how they know all this," he says. "Experiments I guess. They couldn't just make it up." 

Source of protons for LHC

"Course they couldn't," I say. "At CERN they mostly use protons from a little red bottle on the wall. But they can't just shoot them straight into the Large Hadron Collider, because they'd get trampled to death by the big guys already in there. So they do it in stages.

"First they give them a wee boost in the Booster, then a physicist on a Harley Davidson picks them up and does the wall of death around two circular machines, called the Proton Synchrotron and the Super Proton Synchrotron, before tossing them at high speed into the Large Hadron Collider. 

CERN accelerator complex

"Sometimes this is too much for one of the protons, which gets over-excited and tries to exceed the speed of light. But that means it could travel back in time and stop itself coming out the bottle. Nature won't permit a paradox, so it surrounds the proton with a little bubble universe that floats away over the Jura Mountains. It's how our own universe began, 13.8 squillion years ago."

"What's a squillion?" he says.

"Part of the numbering system used in physics," I say. "You got thousands, millions, billions, squillions, gazillions and infinity."

"How am I supposed to remember that?" he says.

"There's a mnemonic," I say. "Three Mad Badgers Sail the Galaxy Inaspaceship."

"That took a lot of thought," he says. 

"It's what physicists are good at," I say.  

"Carry on," he says. "This is exactly what I wanted."

"Well some scientists think the bubble universe stays attached to ours by a piece of string. Others say there's no evidence for string, and the stuff gardeners tie up straggly plants with is a figment of imaginations clouded by too much contact with fresh air and creepy crawlies."

"I thought a figment was the smallest dried fruit in a packet," he says.

"It is," I say. "Some are so small they're imaginary."

"Right, carry on."

"Well the objections to string are strong," I say. "Calculations show you can make 10⁵²⁰ different universes out of string. That's a lot more than you can create out of quarks, squarks and girders. It's bigger than any known number, including infinity. So they've made a mistake somewhere."

"I bet they multiplied instead of dividing," he says. "I did that all the time at school."

"Me too," I say. "I'll check their sums and get back to you. Will that do for now?"

"That's great, thanks," he says. 

"Next time will you do the potted history of art for me?" I say.

"No worries," he says. "Do you want me to go right back to Mammoths in a Cave? Art historians often start later, with the Smug Bastard in a Mustache school. That's popular. So is the Big Naked Women Eating Fruit period."

"Whatever you think," I say. "You're the expert."

"Depends how much time we have," he says. "We need to leave plenty for Nailing Shopping Trolleys to a Wall. That's the prevailing school nowadays so it's the most important." 

"I look forward to that," I tell him. "See ya."

"See ya," he says and buggers off out of my life for another week.

The eyes have it

My niece Cathy is a fine photographer, with a nice eye for composition, and since you learn that by starting young, I'm going to claim some credit for her proficiency. Because I bought her her first camera when she was eight. 

It wasn't a great camera but that's not the point. No doubt her mum and dad bought her better ones as she got older. But I was the one who got her started. 

But here's the thing. I've noticed a certain expression on the faces of the guys in her photos. Puzzled, perplexed, bewildered. Take a look at Brian holding the little dog in pyjamas. 

Believe me, that's a very smart guy you're looking at. And Brian has brains too. But you wouldn't think it, would you? So what's going on?

Well I've seen that expression in the mirror and on the faces of a hundred strangers on the street, and I have a theory. Modern life is too complicated for the average male brain. 

"I mean look what it evolved to deal with," I tell my son, as we're having a beer in Òran Mór, the former church that's now a licensed arts venue with its own ale. "Grass, trees, shite and zebras.

"And what does it have to contend with now? Mobile phones, tax returns, speed cameras and coalition government. Is it any wonder we look perpetually perplexed?" 

"What worries me is the guys that don't," he says. "You see them striding around in their dark suits and camel-hair coats, looking manly and purposeful. Where do they get that air of certainty from?"

"Two possibilities," I tell him, taking a sip of the hoppy, refreshing ale. "One, it's an act and soon as they're out of sight their expressions revert to bemused, like ours."

"And two?" he says

"They're a different species."

"Not that old conspiracy theory," he says. "Aliens running the world. Tony Blair is a lizard from Alpha Draconis."

"He might be but that's not what I mean. I'm talking human but different. Convergent evolution. Happens all the time in nature. The beaked sea-snake, the white marlin and the roundscale spearfish, David Cameron and Oswald Cobblepot."

Always willing to give ideas an airing, my son starts nodding. "You could be right," he says, looking around the high-ceilinged room. "It would explain all those young couples who check out fine but can't have kids together."

"That's right," I say. "Different species can look similar but they can't breed." 

"There might be ten different species of human in this room right now," he says.

"There might," I say. "You and I could be different species."

"How does that work when you're my dad?" he says.

"Good point," I say. "Well spotted. We must be the same species. But we might be the only ones in this room."

"So is there some test, other than trying to have kids with people?" he says. "Which isn't always convenient."

"Family are the same," I say. "Me, you, your brother, my mum, my sister."

"Cathy and Brian?" he says.

"Same species, definitely," I say.

"What about strangers?" he says. "How can you tell?"

"Switch your brain off," I tell him. "Trust your instinct. Try it around the room," I say nodding in the direction of the next table. "Guy in jeans."

"Same," he says.

"Woman next to him."

"Different. You do get a feel for it, don't you? Have a go yourself," he says, pointing. "Her."

"Same," I say.

"Him," he says. 

"That's a dog," I say. "That's a different species, obviously."

"Well is it, though," he says. "Is it obvious? If things that look the same can be different species, why can't things that look different be the same species?"

I stroke my beard and ponder. "You're right, of course," I tell him. "This puts a whole new slant on things. Makes the world even more confusing than I thought. How can we be sure of anything now?" 

"It's got to be expression, hasn't it?" he says. "Never mind all that DNA bollocks. Anything that looks puzzled and perplexed is the same species, I'm thinking."  

"That's good thinking, son," I say, as he and I rise to leave, headed respectively for an art school lecture and a meeting on molecular biology at the University.

"So was this science or were you making shit up again?" he says.

"What do you think?" I say.

"Sounded like science to me."

"There you go, then. Trust your instinct."

Guys on bikes

"Most cyclists aren't cyclists," my son tells me, as I'm driving him to his Tai Chi session, near Byres Road. "They're just guys on bikes."

Focused on a couple of kids on the pavement, who look like they could dive into the road, my brain is fuzzy about what he's just told me, while feeling it's the kind of remark he has always enjoyed - a blend of paradox and his own sideways slant on the world.

"Have you any idea what you're talking about?" I ask, but instead of answering he starts pointing people out and classifying them as cyclists or guys on bikes. 

"It's just whether they're wearing a helmet?" I venture, after studying a few. 

"Nah, there's more to it than that," he says. "It's a culture thing. It's how seriously they're into it all."

"Have you noticed how selfish cyclists are?" I say. "The worst are those clowns that pelt along pavements to avoid traffic and don't give a toss about the pedestrians they mow down."

"I've never seen that," he says. "And I walk everywhere."

"I get it all the time."

"How many?"

"Three - once just yesterday."

"In sixty years?" he says. "They are at it all the time, then."

"They are. And every Sunday they're out on the winding, country roads down our way, driving six abreast at ten miles an hour with a queue of forty cars behind them. Selfish bastards. I'd melt down their bikes and make them buy cars." 

"You're starting to sound like a Daily Mail reader," he says. "How do you feel about immigrants, homosexual marriage and hoodie scum?"

"I love them," I say. "It's just cyclists I can't stand. Good thing is Nature has a way of punishing those who flout her Laws."

"Turn here into Creswell Street," he tells me. "Nature's Laws? Now you sound like a hippy."

"This is science," I tell him. "The human body isn't designed to be load-bearing at the crotch. There are sensitive parts down there that you press on at your peril. Male cyclists get all kinds of problems with their equipment."

"Like punctures and slipped gears?"

"Like low sperm counts and erectile dysfunction."

"Bugger," he says. 

"Not to mention nodules, furuncles and other 'extratesticular disorders'."

"I wish you hadn't," he says, squirming in his seat. "What causes these extraterrestrial disorders then?"

"Pressure and shock, according to a paper in the Lancet, which found 96% of mountain bikers had scrotal abnormalities." 

"You don't want those," he says.

"Normality of the scrotum is what we aim for," I say. "See this is why your average cyclist hates motorists. He can turn women on with his tight, lycra-encased arse, but that's all he can do. His wife is perennially unsatisfied so she's having passionate affairs with guys who keep their scrotums healthy by sitting on soft, comfy seats in cars. All that makes him a borderline psycho." 

"And this is all in that Lancet paper, is it?" he says

"I'm reading between the lines now."

"I thought you scientists chappies were supposed to stick to evidence and not make shit up," he says.

"Yeah but I'm a writer too. We have to make shit up."

"That's us here," he says. "Pull up outside the church. Hey, look at that one - cyclist or guy on a bike?"

"He's got a pointy helmet," I say. "So I'm guessing cyclist." 

"But he's wearing fancy shoes and carrying a newspaper and he just smiled at those kids," he says. All that makes him a borderline cyclist."

"Very good," I say. "You do know puns are the lowest form of wit?"

"Sorry I spoke," he says. "Don't get cranky. Gimme a bell next time you're in town.

"On yer bike," I tell him.

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.

Douglas the Hippo

You'd think enough had recently gone wrong in my life to satisfy the most vengeful of Old Testament gods. 

But no sooner have I caught up with all the back admin, whose omission had plunged me into a cold bath of chaos, than another thunderbolt strikes.

Douglas has changed sex again.

Hang on a minute I've lost you, haven't I? Let me step back a pace and see if I can get a little logic and sound story sequencing into this one.

A few months ago, Glasgow Science Festival kindly helped me adopt a baby hippo, which had been found orphaned last February, at just two weeks old. 

It's a process that is easier and carries less responsibility than you'd imagine. You don't actually have to raise the little guy, teach him the difference between right and wrong and get him into a good university. 

All you do is send £5 to £65 a month to help with his care, protection and, if all goes well, reintroduction to the wild. In return you get photos, an adoption certificate and regular updates on the progress of young Douglas - for that was his name - at the Chipembele Wildlife Education Trust, on the banks of the Luangwa River in eastern Zambia.

But a recent update came as shock to me and his other adoptive parents. They had chosen the wrong name for the little hippo, they told us. Henceforth he was a she and her name, god help us, was Douglina.

Around this point I began to lose confidence in the assorted vets and conservation people in Douglina's entourage, having previously assumed they knew what they were doing with young hippos. If they couldn't even tell the boys from the girls, how expert were they?

So I did a little research and found a good reason for their failure. Male and female hippos are hard to tell apart, even for experts, and especially when they're just little shavers.

As you know there are lots of lies, damn lies and statistics out there on the internet. An oft-repeated claim about hippos is that they're the most aggressive and dangerous animal in Africa, responsible for more human deaths than lions, leopards and other big cats combined. It's an assertion that raises plenty of questions in my mind. 

What are the relative numbers of these different groups, how close do they all live to humans and, critically, what were the humans doing to provoke the attacks?

Most often, it seems, the attacker is a mature bull hippo or a mother, because the bulls are aggressive in the mating season while the females are "quite protective of their young calves."

Show me any male and female mammals who aren't.

Another blindly-repeated claim is that hippos are not sexually dimorphic, which means males and females are identical in all observable respects. It's not true. The behaviour of male and female hippos is quite different, and so too are some aspects of their size and structure.

Mature male hippos tend to be larger and heavier and have longer teeth than females. They also have undescended testicles, no scrotum, and penises they keep in their pants till the time is right.

All of which brings us back to Douglas or Douglina, as they've been encouraging us to call the poor little bugger. 

The latest news, believe it or not, is that the experts now admit they've got it wrong again.

Douglina has been having an "amorous encounter with a water barrel", and they have the photographs.

During this episode it became evident to onlookers, they tell us with restraint, "that boy bits were involved." So Douglina is Douglas again and will remain so, they insist, for all time. 

I have my doubts. Watch this space. 

I will keep you posted.

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."

Chaos attractor

Amano Tatsuya

There was a time when friends and relatives used to welcome me into their homes, enjoy my company for days on end, and seem to be sad when I left. Those days are gone. Now even my sister makes me feel I've outstayed my welcome, half an hour after I've arrived.

I suspect the signs have been there for a while. But not being particularly perceptive I hadn't twigged that the true meaning of "Will you still be here on Tuesday?" is "Can you bugger off today?"

The suspicion that my charms are waning penetrates my carapace of confidence the day after I've filled my petrol car with diesel and Helen and I are starting to tackle the full veggie breakfast she has just cooked for me.

"So what chaos are you planning to bring into our lives this morning?" she asks, and I look up in surprise from a succulent-looking mushroom I'm about to skewer.

"I didn't plan yesterday," I say. "It just happened. Thanks for your help by the way."

"It happens ... mumble, mumble, mumble," she says, turning her back to reach for the dish of tomatoes and lowering her voice at the same time.

"I didn't catch that," I say, popping the monster into my mouth and getting that lovely 'shroom-flavoured juicy squirt as I bite.

"I don't want to hurt your feelings," she says.

"You can't hurt my feelings," I say. "I'm not a big girl."

"All right then," she says and hesitates. "Things like that happen around you all the time?"

"Well that is hurtful," I say and her jaw drops.

"I'm kidding," I say. "Things like what?"

"Like the time they thought you were a terrorist at the airport," she says. "You got body-searched and we missed our plane."

"How was that my fault?" I say.

"You were wearing a T-shirt that said 'I found Jesus in the Qur'an'."

"Well I did," I say. "I thought it was an interesting fact people should know about."

"Then there was the time you went missing when you were testing a nuclear submarine in Barrow, and they thought the Soviets had got you."

"How was that my fault?" I say.

"You went for a drive, didn't tell anybody and only got back the next day," she says. "Then there was that time, wearing a green and white top, you got into Ibrox through a small side door, and nearly got lynched by the security guards."

"How was that my fault?" I say. "Oh never mind. You've made your point. I wasn't always mature and sensible."

"That is not my point," she says. "My point is you're still not mature and sensible. Isn't there something called a chaos attractor. That's you."

"No there isn't," I say, putting my fork down and reaching for my mug of coffee. She is clearly unhappy and since Helen usually bottles up bad feelings about people, it seems serious that they're all coming out now. I'm going to have to be soothing, tactful and diplomatic.

"That's a common mistake among the scientifically illiterate," I tell her. "There is something called a strange attractor, a structure in phase space often associated with chaos, which is an inordinate sensitivity to initial conditions. 

"Then there's a song called Chaos Attractor by a Japanese metalcore band with an amazing madman drummer. But I am clearly none of those."

She is shaking her head now. "You also tell people stuff they don't want to know," she says. "And you have a seriously misplaced sense of humour."

"Some folk like it," I tell her. 

"Not many," she says. "Listen to me. You remember I asked if you would still be here on Tuesday?"

"Yes. I said I didn't know."

"Well I'm going to ask you again," she says. "And this time the answer is, 'No, I'm leaving after this delicious breakfast you just cooked for me."

"Go on then," I say, putting the coffee mug down on the table and studying her expectantly.

"Go on what?" she says.

"Go on ask me," I say.

She sighs. "Will you still be here on Tuesday, Douglas?"

I suck my teeth. "I don't know," I say.

"Ahhh!" she screams and bangs her head several times on the table.

Later that day I relate the whole incident to Susan, looking for a little sympathy and wondering if I should get medical help for Helen. "She seemed very overwrought when I left," I say.

"Trust me, she'll be much better now," Susan says. "Do you think she'll have you back?"

"I'm not sure," I say. "Maybe not for a long time."

"That's bad," she says, looking concerned. She knows how much Helen means to me. "What are you going to do now?"

"I thought I'd stay with you a few days," I say.

She turns away so that I don't see how delighted she is. Then she turns back again. 

"Will you still be here on Tuesday?" she says.

Relatives and relativity

  

"See that makes me feel stupid," I say, as I sip an iced gin and tonic, with two slices of lime, out on the patio in Susan's garden, and lose the thread of yet another story about someone's sister's husband's brother-in-law, who's been caught cheating on his wife with his young secretary, the bastard.

"It would take me three hours with a pencil and paper to work out how all those relatives are connected," I tell her. "My brain hurts just listening to it."

"It's not complicated," Susan says. "You know Gillian, the psychiatric nurse who's married to David and has a house in Livingston?"

"Yes," I say.

"Well her sister Paula has a husband Tony, who has a half-sister called Bernadette, who is married to Phil, who is shagging his secretary in the local Travelodge every Friday evening after work."

"I don't know any of those people," I say, feeling the familiar panic rise in my throat, as I desperately try to follow the long chain of convoluted connections and wonder why I have to.

"Everyone I know can figure out who's related to whom in that kind of story better than I can," I say. "My brain can't do relatives. It's defective."

"No more than most guys'," Susan says, patting me patronisingly. "Male brains get confused by relatives. Doesn't make you inferior. You, for instance, are great at changing tyres, opening jam-jars and tightening things with your forty-piece socket set."

"I am," I say, slightly reassured and trying to sip slowly. But my tall glass is almost empty already. "This is a lovely G and T," I say.

"Hendrick's gin and Fever-Tree tonic," she says. 

"Slips down easier than a greased weasel in a rabbit-hole. What makes you feel stupid then?"

She hesitates, squirming slightly. "I'd have to say science. I know it's you're specialist subject and you love it. But it doesn't interest me and I don't understand it. So it makes me feel kinda stupid."

"I could teach you to like it," I say.

"I doubt it," she says. "Could I teach you to know who your mother's sister's nephew is? Or watch a film with more than four characters, without pausing it every five minutes and going, "Who the hell is she?"

"Probably not," I say.

"Well then," she says.

"But I would like to talk to you about science," I say.

"Go on then," she says. "But make it interesting. Tell me about the people."

I take a tiny sip and wonder where to start. There's Richard Feynman, of course, who chased women, played the bongos and invented quantum electrodynamics.

Then there's Rosalind Franklin, who died young and was cheated out of the greatest scientific discovery of modern times by two young punks called Crick and Watson.

  

But it's no contest really. "Listen to this," I say. "All powers of mind, all force of will may lie in dust when we are dead, but love is ours, and shall be still, when earth and seas are fled."

"That's lovely," she says. "What's it got to do with science?"

"The man who wrote the poem to his wife that ends with that verse was James Clerk Maxwell," I tell her. "Scotland's greatest scientist. He also died young. But not before creating the science that Einstein used to figure out the Theory of Relativity."

"Relativity?" she says. "How long did it take them?"

"From Maxwell to Einstein, forty years," I tell her.

"They should have asked their wives," she says. "They'd have figured it out in four seconds."

Come the Apocalypse

"So what you up to?" my son asks, once we've got Glastonbury out of the way, the fried egg rolls have been dispatched and we're on to our second cup of coffee.  

"Got a grant from the people who fund particle physics and astronomy research," I say.

"What for?" he says.

"It's this Three Minute Learning," I say. "It's going well. The teachers like it and so do the scientists."

"Getting cutting-edge science into schools is a cool idea," he says.

"But not easy," I say. "Scientists overestimate what kids understand. Often they haven't a scoobie what they're on about, but are too polite to say so."

"Kids too polite?" he says, with a raised eyebrow.

"Sure," I say. "Most of them do their best to please the adults in their lives, most of the time. But we keep moving the goalposts."

"Yeah," he says, clearly unconvinced. "So what makes you good at it?" 

"Dunno," I say. "Maybe it's because I listen with the ear of a scientist one minute and a teenager the next."

"I hate to point out the obvious," he says. "But you don't have the ear of a teenager. Or the eyes or nose. Every bit of you is 90."

"See that's where you're wrong," I tell him. "I got an inner teenager I can tap into anytime. In fact it's not even a teenager. It's an eight-year-old. And when I was eight I was crap at school. Tapping into your inner idiot is handy, when you're helping people learn."

"I never knew you had an inner idiot," he says.  

"There's plenty about me you don't know," I say, but I've lost him momentarily.

"Hi," he says to a slightly-built, effeminate-looking character with long, curly hair, walking along Woodlands Road. "Now he is hard," he says, turning back to me.

So I glance again and he still looks like a powder-puff to me. "That guy couldn't break the skin on a custard tart," I say. "I could take him with one hand."

"You couldn't take him with six hands and a bull terrier," he says. "Your inner idiot has got out. That guy does Tai Chi and cage fighting and he's good."

"Seems to be a lot of your martial arts buddies in these parts," I say. 

"It's where we hang out," he says. "Come the Apocalypse we'll all be milling around Woodlands Road, beating the crap out the zombies."

"Not if there's 40 million of them and three of you. Which reminds me of something my dad used to say."

"Your dad was a smart guy."

   

"He was. Prone to deep insights into the human condition. So there was this street corner in Cumnock, where people used to hang out, smoking, chatting and watching the girls go by."

"What did he say about it," he asks, as the waitress drops the bill on our table.

"'If everybody in the world stood on Ayr Road Corner, how would the rest of the folk get past?'" I say.

"That is very profound," he says. "Very Zen."

"You're the first person to say that," I tell him. "Everybody else stares at me with blank incomprehension."

"Yeah well, there's something you maybe don't know about me," he says. 

"What's that?"

"I have a bigger inner idiot than you."