A Little Testosterone Please, We're British

In my position, which is often vernacular, sometimes inclined forward and rarely absolutely horizontal, you tend to hear a good deal. Sometimes it's absolutely rivetting, at others moderately yawning, occasionally utterly disgusting. Last week I semi-overheard some locals tucked into an oak panelled corner in one of the several bars of our most respectable and elegant hotel in the main street of North Driffield, talking about a survey for a particularly nameless men's magazine. Apparently, British men are among the greatest enthusiasts for having a sex life and among the 20 countries in the survey, men in the USA are among the least keen, only being pipped to this position by the Malaysians and the Germans. About one Britisher in seven has had an affair, whereas one in four Italians has. At the same time the Italians, apparently, are the least satisfied with their sex lives, whereas the British men are the happiest, sexually, in the world. What does this tell us, apart from the fact that over half the Britons toddle around all day with a dazed smile on their faces not giving a pink floyd about anything? F * * * all, according to my postie.

Grass Up Your Lid in Germany

Which reminds me. In Germany turf roofs are extremely popular. They seem to be flat roofing every fifth new house and turning the top into lawn. Campaigners in Britain are encouraging householders to do the same. Green mortgages can be taken out. There are rumours that golf can be played across certain city blocks. Take care though. My uncle Silas Aarbon took a swing and mis-hit. That little golf ball fell 17 floors and disembowelled a dachshund being taken for a walk by an elderly spinster who was so distraught at the sight of his chitterlings she had a heart attack in the street. I have heard a more dramatic cautionary tale from campaigners in the other camp. Old roofs don't always support new lawns. After three tons of turf had been placed unstrategically on the roof of the old bakery in Wold Lane North East Driffield, the arrival of an early morning flock of barkpecks proved too much for the timber struts. Timber, turf and barkpecks all fell into the space below, felling twelve bakers and filling the dough mixture for something over 400 loaves with birds of a feather.

Green Solution Feeds Flat Battery

The good news is that there is a solution to the perennial problem of the car battery going flat just when you're in a hurry, aunt Gemima is in a tizz, the cat has a tick on his whisker, the dog a distemper and young Harry's ear has been gored by the most gigantic earwig.
The solution apparently is urine. I have it on good authority that in the USA they've been pouring human sweat, blood and not tears but urine into a paper-thin battery. It's made of about 90 per cent cellulose. I don't quite know what that is but it sounds like that wafer cone you eat the ice cream out of. They use it in the making of paper, apparently. And they kind of cook it into these tiny batteries, which you can fold, roll and cut up into slices like lasagne. Only, don't pee into the cook pot once you've made the lasagne, because this battery is activated by the urine, just as by sweat and blood. You may have given cook a shock but when you touch the pan, the mixture might give you a shock too. Once the sparks begin to fly, the wee battery starts to become attractive at that moment to car manufacturers. You may even have the people who make those heart pacemakers queueing at your door.

Intelligent Bras To Offer More Support

This business of intelligent design is baffling. I'm struggling with an unlikely article in the Journal of Biomechanics. This contains the information that scientists at the University of Wollongong, Australia, have designed a brassiere made from intelligent fabric with inbuilt sensors that will fit women more adequately. I'm sure half of you knew that a poorly designed bra is uncomfortable and may even injure you, the wearer that is, not the person alongside her. Apparently, even a bra in the correct size can dig into the skin at the straps and damage the nerves so seriously that the fingers go numb. This is particularly likely when vigorous movement takes place, which can cause the chest to move up and down 70 cm at a time. It comes about partly because the female breast contains no bones or muscles to support it. The rather puzzling bit is that in the experiment a woman aged 30 with a 36D brassiere and another aged 39 with a 38D walked at 4.3 miles (7 kilometres) an hour and jogged at 10 kilometres an hour. The vertical movement on the younger woman was 11 walking and 53mm jogging and on the older woman 25mm walkiing and 68mm jogging. Fascinating. So what? What the researchers are trying to do is use polymer science to enable sensors to be inserted into fabrics to monitor the motion of the breast and how the bra responds to it. Designers will in future be able to use fabric sensors work out how each part of the bra responds to movement.
I admit to scratching my pate about this. How does this help the person wearing the bra? I mean, 'Don't worry love, we know it's hurting. Here's why. We hope one day people won't build bras with buckles and straps. They'll be stick ons. I can promise that whatever sport you indulge in, they won't hold you up.'

The Turkish Angoras of Korea are brighter than ever

This is to scotch rumours of my electrocution by an ultra violet lamp, which have at the very least been advanced, if not brought forward. I have to acknowledge that I shall be dead eventually, like most, if not all of you, but let's dwell here on the present rather than speculate on the probability of the inevitable. I admit though I can surmise how the UV lamp story about me began to flash round the newsrooms of the world. Indeed, I can almost glimpse the beckoning glamour of celebrity, a temptation that sometimes it's difficult for even me to resist.
The thing is, this UV business is becoming popular. In Gyeongsang National University in South Korea, at which unlike at least several of you I've never studied, scientists have introduced a fluorescent protein gene to the DNA of three cloned Turkish Angoras, which are a breed of cat with extremely fine fur, probably originating in sixteenth century France - the breed that is, not the fur, though if you leave them out in a tropical storm it can become rather matted, the fur that is, not the storm.
Anyway. They put these cats under the UV lamp and they change colour. And guess what, the USA were there first. Kids can have their guinea pigs, hamsters and jerbils glowing like isotopes. Those scientists must have been bored because next they took a butterfly, would you believe it, and added some DNA from a jellyfish to it to genetically modify its whatever. Then they shone the UV lamp up its posterior and Bingo! the internals of the butterfly lit up in the dark. This sounds like the Icarus syndrome to me, because I can imagine that when the butterflies are released and they fly out into the hot summer sun, their jellied wings will soften and they'll flop to the ground in little molten heaps. So much for genetic manipulation. Don't anybody come near me with a jellyfish. I'll stick to my torch battery.

A Waste of Daylight Saving Time

I am reminded by glancing from the yawning awning over my lounge at Havertrope Hall - part of the wing of this ageing pile which fell into the North Sea in last winter's gales - that dawn rises late and dusk early at this stage in our Earth's annual orbit. Daylight Saving Time (DST) changes to Winter Time (Standard Time) in 70 odd countries at this time of year. I've been ruminating on daylight saving, flattered as I am to be asked to be consultant to the local government of North East Driffield. The Borough Council has spent the past century, on and off, since the introduction of daylight saving to save fuel in England during World War One, investigating the possibility of changing daylight saving to bring the people of this locality of East Yorkshire into line with global climatic changes. Every time Driffield has been on the cusp of making a decision about the town hall clock and the clocks in the public conveniences at the end of the small market square, there's been a delay for some reason. I recall an incursion into the council chamber in 1973 of a particularly large and irritating swarm of bees. There have been other less dramatic but no less effective distractions. During the past decade the pace of debate has increased. The fact is the rest of England doesn't have the fog and gloom which blows down off the wolds into Driffield. Our local debates have acquired global resonance. Rumour has it that various recent changes among the countries which already use daylight saving have been influenced by our deliberations. Venezuela has decided to put the clocks back half an hour. The president has announced that this should encourage the people to work harder because they'll be getting up when it's light. I couldn't claim the dignitaries of Driffield are entirely responsible for this, but they and I may have semi-influenced our South American demi-cousins. I admit to a few moments of hesitation and rather debilitating flatulence when I heard that the local council of North West Driffield have followed the impeccable research by the Korea Development Institute, Korea Energy Economic Institute, the Korean Transportation Institute and the Korea Culture and Tourism Institute, who all conclude that the benefits of daylight saving are hard to prove and that they shouldn't join the rest of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries in doing it. I admit also that when Australia adopted daylight saving in 2000 during the Sydney Olympics there was no evidence that electricity use benefited, or athletes moved faster I might add. I further admit to sending the president of Venezuela a message by pigeon post detailing our arguments in North East Driffield for putting back the clocks forty three minutes last year and seventeen minutes this year. Although I can't prove the pigeon ever arrived, I surmise our demi-cousins have spotted the arithmetic average is 30 minutes and gone for it. This is more likely than the scurrilous rumour they've gone for the half hour purely to distinguish themselves from the USA.
The whole business is complicated and takes some remembering when you're a globetrotter, which I somewhat freely admit I'm not. There's been confusion in the USA for literally months about whether they're in or not. The daylight saving arrangements were in during the First World War and out after 1919, in from 1942 to 1945, subject to local State arrangements from 1945 to 1966, till nobody knew what time it was anywhere. Imagine, a coach driver on the 35 miles between Moundsville WV. and Steubenville Ohio had to stop 7 times and make sure every passenger had changed the time on all the watches, in case anyone was taken short and needed to use the local conveniences. Since the 1980s they've somewhat regularised the position and people can go to the toilet without this additional worry. In countries such as Canada, Mexico, Russia and the USA in the Northern Hemisphere, the clocks in public conveniences are put back in late Autumn, whilst in Southern Hemisphere countries such as Australia, Brazil and Chile they're all put forward. I admit to a typo in my message to Venezuela, in which I said we put the clocks forward in the Autumn. The confusion at the president's press conference early in December when he announced the changes can almost certainly be laid at my door. It obviously doesn't weaken the case for North East Driffield appointing a part-time astrologer from the Centre for Error and Repetition at the University of East Yorkshire, to estimate the odds on an asteroid zooming across our Earth's above-mentioned orbit and rendering this entire debate irrelevant. Which is where I come is, as Professor of Irrelevant Studies in that same university, of course. But that's another story.

A Sticky Subject in Rhine and Humber rivers

Which reminds me of a semi-tacky idea that came to me when trying to seal an envelope which had been lurking in my study so long that the glue had lost its lust for life. I had been reading of the discovery of a Roman helmet near the River Humber with a tea tray firmly stuck to its upper crest, the cristae of which are so often composed of a sticky mixture of ostrich feathers and decidedly public hair, I seem to recall from my local history classes. Very similar, apparently to one found near the Rhine in 2007. The glue, apparently, still works after 2000 years, give or take. There's semi-certainty between archie and the other ologists about most of the ingredients - tallow, bitumen and tree sap - but beyond that they're pretty well foxed about what causes the stuff to cling on after all these centuries. They've been speculating about whether the mystery legionary was walking across the Humber with the makings of tea on his head, so as not to get them wet. He'd be able to brew up at the other side. This strikes me as typical off the wall stuff. The trouble with the ologists is they set their sights too low, with depressing consequences for the ancient Mediterranean working man, woman or eunuch. And typical of them not to remember there weren't tea bags in those days. Much more likely, wages being what they were, he was working part time as a waiter and wanted to keep his goblets sparkling. An extra blob of glue under each should do it, provided on the far side he scraped it off before it dried.
Living in the real world of now, as one does, and naturally being of an enterprising turn of mind, I'm eager to turn historical insights into commercial reality and start manufacturing the gooey stuff. My hand trembles with excitement such that I can hardly grasp the pencil as I write. There's the little acknowledged market of wealthy and bald pilgrims wearing wigs which won't stay on as they traverse a number of extremely windy spots, from the Falkland Islands to Baffinland. I recall the distress of one Texan billionaire when his hairpiece blew off at our little animal park just north of north Driffield and was plucked from the air by a passing polar bear who mistook it for an Arctic skua and ate it forthwith. The bear was constipated for 22 days and was only relieved when the enterprising keeper administered a plateful of mackerel soused in castor oil, from the plant ricinus communis, I am semi-certain. Seven minutes later the bear excreted a stool weighing seven hundredweight which it took four men and a trailer to carry to the garbage tip.
I also have it on good authority from a certain senior citizen who holds a gong from our gracious Queen and balances habitually in a rather lucrative if uncomfortable position in Westminster, that ladies performing ritual dances in Soho will pay a fortune for a glue which will hold sparkly bobbles and triangles of tinsel in place.
Finally, of course, there is Granite, our indefatiguable butler at Havertrope Hall in the tundra-strewn outback of East Yorkshire. It's well known that his false teeth and his social standing have hung by the same thread for decades. On one occasion he coughed at silver service and they had to be fished out of the rissoles and on another he was completely rat-arsed, threw up after a particularly late lunch with a series of liqueurs with whisky chasers, flushed the toilet and there went his dentures. What he wouldn't pay for oral security isn't worth a crested serpent eagle's eyeblink.
These are but a foretaste of the great unexploded marketplace lurking out there, waiting to be stripped bare. Excuse me while I pause for a moment, count to nine and restore my centre of gravity.