HOW I ALMOST BECAME THE THIRD CHAMPION MUSHROOM OMELETTE MAKER OF FRANCE

We were in the ironmonger's, for some reason, in Maurs, buying something important for the Mill - light bulbs, I think it was, or it may have been something to do with the apple press bought a year ago at great expense -when it occurred to us that we had nothing planned for Sunday - and Sunday was tomorrow. "Let's go and look in the tourist office," said B, who is the most practical person I know. So we did.

The Cantal Departement is off the beaten track at the best of times. You wonder why they bother having a tourist office at all, but they do and its Maurs outpost is quite a handsome affair of wood and glass that squats on the pavement of the Place d'Europe among the speckled trunks of plane trees. The week's events are pasted on an A board outside, a bewildering array of activities to cater for every taste.

Unfortunately, when we had eliminated those events that were too far, or too expensive, or which ended yesterday, or which involved boats or large animals, there wasn't much left. "So it's the mushroom fair then," I concluded, trying to sound enthusiastic. "The mushroom fair at Prunet."

Now as you probably know the word mushroom in France covers the whole gamut of edible fungi, some of which are greatly prized by folk who appreciate their food. There would be stalls and sideshows, said the tourist bumpf and the event would begin with the induction of new fellows into the sacred mushroom brotherhood and end with a championship, the winner of which would be declared French national amateur mushroom omelette making champion.

So after Sunday breakfast we set off under a grey sky and spots of drizzle to see if we could find Prunet which, according to the map, lay about forty minutes drive to the north east. By the time we had arrived the spots had turned to a respectable drizzle, but there was music - of a strange Celtic kind - playing from a loudspeaker on every lamp post, lots of bunting and men walking about strangely clad in cloaks of yellow-green and tudor style squashy hats. As they looked eminently knowledgeable about mushrooms we presumed them to be the mushroom brotherhood and watched our step lest they deigned to turn us into a can of Campbells soup.

Now in case you are thinking that Prunet must be a fair size to host a national omelette championship, you would be wrong. Prunet turned out to be just about a small a place as you could find that qualified for a name on the map - a sort of French, Little Puddletown on the Marsh. It had a church, with an enormous belfry, a few houses, one or two farms and that was it. The much trumpeted mushroom fair seemed on the same scale.

A few stalls sold cheese, sausage, wine, vegetables, bread - but unaccountably no mushrooms. Elswhere, an earnest young man was trying to show a film about mushrooms in a tent, while another earnest young man with an encyclopaedic display of 'mushrooms' on a table, bent the ear of the few passers-by to explain the botantical differences between a bracket fungus and an oyster mushroom and that was about it.

The young farmer selling his Salers cheese also possessed an earnest looking air as he told us that it took 450 litres of milk, from his own Auverngnat herd, to make one 25 kilo truckle the size of a mill wheel. He was selling the cheese for a song - a kilo for 12 euros - so we took a great hunk and two bundles of little dried sausage to go with it.

Of course, no fair is complete without a beer tent, which in this case wasn't a tent at all but one of those round wooden contraptions favoured for fairground sideshows. One lot of young men were inside this contraption and another lot were outside. The men inside were dry and the men outside were wet, for by this time the drizzle had matured into common or garden rain. Yet the men outside seemed not to mind because they were knocking back something provided by the men inside. It was called 'Bolée du Satan.'

We tried one very small plastic cup of this and I have to say it was very good. Indeed, I was reflecting how a few of these might make one impervious to all sorts of precipitations, when our attention was diverted by the antics of two bullocks yoked to a bullock cart in a way that made it appear that this was something of a first time experience both for the bullocks and whoever was in charge of the yoking.

For whenever the cart encountered an obstacle the bullocks kicked and skipped causing the cart to swerve violently. Fortunately, it was empty. If it ever had a cargo that would have fallen out long before. Maybe that was why there were no mushrooms at the fair.

Not far away hummed an old field bake-oven, an enormous wheeled affair that looked as though it might have done service in World War One. From this came a number of different breads, samples of which were set before us in little bowls.

Some contained fungi, though whether it was this or whether it was the mobile bake-oven, none tasted appetising. Slightly more appealing were the bun shaped loaves, sliced in half, the middle scooped out and filled it with mushroom soup. These were selling for 2 euros, which seemed a bargain. Surprisingly, they didn't leak.

Sadly, we found that we had brought sandwiches and therefore decided to eschew the loaves filled with mushroom soup. Besides I had the feeling that the soup and the Bolée du Satan might not mix too well. So we decided that it was time to retreat to the dry safety of the car.

On our way we passed the omelette making championship tent, sadly deserted in the rain, but complete with a yellow podium on which the numbers 1, 2 and 3 were marked out in black.

To tell the truth I was rather attracted to the idea of becoming a mushroom omelette making champion of France, even if amateur. To judge by the number of people in Prunet who had not succumbed to the embrace of the Bolée du Satan, I reckoned that I must have been in with a very good chance of making at least one of the podium slots. What would being the third champion amateur mushroom omelette maker of France counted for at Purple Coo I wondered?
"Oh do stop dreaming, Fennie" came a voice from in front. Ahh - it was ever thus.

SIGHTS, SOUNDS, SMELLS

I grew up on a small pig farm in what was then a Berkshire village by the River Thames. Not surprisingly, many of the scents and sounds I hear and smell today remind me of that glorious time when the world, and I, was new and each season almost appeared differently to my maturing eyes. I loved everything in that great physicality around me - sights, sounds, smells……

I even fell in love with the pigs, quaint and vaguely disgusting as that may seem. I adored the squeal of the piglets and the way they wriggled, and their grimy milky smell. I loved the way the eyes of the older ones lit up when the pails clanked and I loved the sound of their contented grunts as they played the clean straw.

These sounds and smells, the dull clunk of the snapping of a bale wire, the mustiness of the straw inside, mingled with the raw energy and pungency of the animals themselves. Even today whenever I catch a whiff of pig dung on the breeze, or hear a grunt and snuffle, I am instantly transported back to those times.

At the age of eight one of my holiday tasks on the farm was to stoke the large boiler with orange wood. It stood vertically on spindly legs, like a moon lander, with a firebox underneath. We used this for boiling swill, collected daily from the restaurants of Oxford.

The swill had to be boiled for an imprisoning length of time. But when you are tired and hungry, with an autumn frost settling in the black darkness of the surrounding countryside, I can assure you that there is no more appealing smell in the world than that of swill boiling away like some great Irish stew.

And when that eclectic mix of potatoes, cabbage, meat, fruit and custard had cooled and been mixed with barley meal and poured into their troughs, you could tell from the happy faces and delighted squeals, just how much the pigs enjoyed it too. Many's the time I would have gladly exchanged my own supper for theirs and for their uninhibited company.

The farm was littered with evocative scents, too numerous to recall. The tractor, with its oily exhaust, for instance - never, for some reason, the same smell as any other diesel engine. The rich smell of ripening apples in the apple store and of apple wood burning in the hearth (peat and especially peat smoke has a similar evocative effect), was another. And burning generally - bonfires in the autumn - the rich snap, crackle and pop as the fingers of flame take hold, the blast of heat, the blue, clinging smoke, always in your lungs or in your eyes; that, too, is an evocative smell.

In summer there was the sweet cut of lawn or field grass and the lazy drone of the mower in the distance. And by the summer river, another thousand scents: from the stagnant bottom mud to the rich blossoming fragrances of the river plants, to the unique, mild and biological aroma of fresh river fish and the creaking antique odour of the wooden boats.

I used to travel to school each day by a train drawn by a steam locomotive. I don't believe anyone can remain untouched by the heavy whoosh and clank of a steam engine or by its glorious miasma - a combination of sulphur and hot oil.

A living metal dragon belching fire and pulling a rake of carriages, all brass knobs, leather straps and horsehair benches with, on the walls, exotic images of far flung destinations like Torquay, Hereford or Penzance. The carriages, too, had their own distinctive odour, metal polish from the daily cleaning, dust from the horsehair, steam that oozed from under the seats on a frozen winter morning.

Many places provided such complex scents. Theatres, for instance, have their own special thespian smell, especially backstage - a witches' brew of sawdust, damp, clothes moths, paint, make-up and mice, all roasted by 1000 watt bulbs and all rolled together in one evocative fantasy of make-believe.

Aeroplanes also have a collective smell - have you noticed? From the smallest piston-engined crop-sprayer to a jumbo, straining its 400 tonne bulk down a mile or more or runway - all have an similar - and to my mind not particularly pleasant - aerial smell.

But the sound of engines spooling up at the end of the runway, the rising note as the throttles are banged home, the lurch forward as the brakes come off, is like a first kiss, - a tingle factor - and always a leap into the unknown. Those sounds, those smells stand you on the edge of a void.

In fact, I suppose, complex smells abound wherever there are people - a London pub, for instance, happy and bright despite the stale smell of sweat, beer and tobacco. Or a café, somewhere on the Mediterranean, where the elegant aroma is of fresh coffee admixed with the faint, but not always unpleasant atmospheric scent of drains and garlic.

You sit in the sunshine, now breathing in that coffee, or anticipating the biting touch of that first mouthful of ice-cold beer. Or you may be broaching the crackling crust of a baguette with a gleaming water-sparkled pat of butter and fresh golden apricot jam, out of which the scent of that delicate fruit leaps to kiss you on both cheeks like a long lost friend.

Later in the market you may move among the vegetables, again assaulted by the odour of freshness. You will pick up a tomato, picked that morning and filled with energetic goodness and a flavour that rubs off in your hands. It cries out to you for a slice of sweet buffalo mozzarella, a tranch of salami, a few Greek olives and the whole to be softly dribbled over with luscious walnut oil.

I smell these walnuts and I am back again on the farm, for we had walnut trees, even if the fruit, thanks to the Berkshire climate, ripened only rarely. I am wandering again around the long empty pig sties. A door left unlatched, swings mournfully and bangs in the breeze. The rich smell of dung has faded to a tame compost. I have aged. Like an ancient cartridge case picked up in the woods, that exciting fresh reek of cordite has disappeared, into the air like the shot it once held. Only scent-filled memories remain.

Rich experiences on the recent Town Twinning visit to Clisson. The Chouteaus, who we normally stay with, were on holiday so I stayed with the Pasquiers; just me this time, J having elected to remain to 'keep an eye' on the labels business.

The Pasquiers have a beautiful house, built or rather rebuilt, during the reconstruction of the devastated town around 1800. House and garden descend in a series of stories and terraces from street level to the River Sevre, 40 feet or more below.

This produces a very curious effect. Sitting by the river, the 'terrasse' cantilevered out of the back of the house, is almost as far above you as it is distant, giving the garden a feeling of depth and space altogether unmerited by its physical dimensions.

On Saturday night the Pasquiers entertained us with 'cotes de boeuf' grilled over culled vine trunks in the open fire in the kitchen. Bernard produced an extraordinary device for this purpose: an enormous species of double grill with two iron holes set in the handle at 45 degrees. These fitted over an iron rod mounted vertically on a moveable stand by, or rather in, the fire itself, the weight of the grill holding the rings by friction, thus allowing an infinite variety of cooking heights and positions.

He said that he had bought the device, made by a blacksmith apparently, in the market one day but, much to his chagrin, had never seen another one since.

As usual on these trips there is too much both to eat and to drink and the sheer length even of the simplest buffet meal compels you to eat more than you should. Another problem is that you never quite know what is coming. One course follows another, salad, meat, cheese, desert, coffee etc all accompanied, naturally, by delicious bread begging to be eaten. When you add that wine bottles outnumber their water filled counterparts by at least two to one, it is not surprising that one returns heavier than one goes.

Best of several visits was that to the Chabotterie - a manor house some half-hour's drive to the south west of Clisson - restored inside and out to something resembling how it might have appeared 200 years ago.

It has a history in that Charrette, the last of the leaders of the Vendéen counter-revolution, was caught not far away in March 1796 and brought wounded and bloody into the house, where he was laid out (Loufoque chronicle style) on the same oak table that graces the kitchen today. Whether the cook then went about preparing supper around about him is not recorded.

Indeed all the furnishings in the house date from that period and are designed to show how the house might have looked had its occupants suddenly deserted it - in Marie Celeste fashion - without pausing to put on their coats or collect their belongings. Game therefore still hangs in the kitchen - presumably someone having had the foresight to stuff it sometime in the intervening two centuries - while the range with a curious mechanism for turning a spit based on descending weights - is still burning too.

The Charrette connection has provided the excuse to turn the outbuildings into a vivid depiction of the history of the Vendéen wars, suitably packaged for sensitive spirits with the bulk of the atrocities removed, though it remains a pretty horrific tale by any standard to anyone with imagination. The uprising, which began in 1793 as a protest against conscription, had always the characteristics of a doomed rural revolt, mirroring, in its internal dissensions and the reluctance of the peasantry to march on the capital, the British Jacobite rising of 1745.

At the final dinner on Sunday night I asked my old friend Jean-Pierre Garot why he had shaved off his trademark luxuriant moustache - the model, many years ago now, for Zebedee. For the Magic Roundabout and its enchanted characters were originally created in a studio in Clisson, with Dougal appearing under the rather less than enchanting name of Pollux. Jean-Pierre was one of the illustrators.

It was becoming too much trouble, he said, which I suspect is a shorthand for it was turning grey. None of us are immune from the ravages of time. Besides it has its advantages, he added archly, in that I am no longer pestered by women.

Be that as it may it didn't stop him wrapping his arm around me all through the singing of the Marseillaise, with his wife seated not six feet away and giving us both evil looks. But I confess I hadn't quite the heart to disentangle myself.

WHY LEMON IS THE SOLE OF LOWESTOFT AND NOT OFFSIDE

"Of course, the offside rule has changed recently," said Elder Daughter as she carefully turned the fish fillets in the frying pan.

I am not sure what prompted this remark. Certainly nothing that I had meant to say for I have as little to do with football as is wise in her household, headed as it is by an Arsenal supporter straight out of the pages of 'Fever Pitch.'

Left to my own devices I suppose I should never have attended a football match in my life but on the renowned principle that one should sample everything once - except incest and folk-dancing - I allowed myself to be 'taken' a couple of times on the basis that it would be an education. So is prison they tell me.

Most recently my sister insisted I should accompany her to watch Ipswich playing Manchester United. I found that conditions had improved, now at least we had seats, even if nothing else had, but I felt it would have been churlish to pull out a book.

Elder Daughter however is built of sterner stuff and proceeded to demonstrate the multi-tasking skills of an Arsenal supporter's wife by cooking fish and explaining the offside rule at the same time. Commandeering our glasses of Pinot Grigio 'Frizzante' she turned them into attacking players and defenders after the manner of the scene in 'Bend it like Beckham.' You know the one where a youthful Keira Knightly does much the same thing, putting her football wild oats behind her before getting properly stuck in to a more interesting game of bodice ripping with Johnny Depp.

I stood, or rather sat, amazed. Even I, for the first time in my life, understood. Is there nothing that Elder Daughter cannot do? Or, for that matter, doesn't know? Yes, there is.

"Why is lemon sole called 'lemon' sole," she asked, turning the fish again and reluctantly returning the glasses to their thirsty owners? I thought for a moment. Dover sole is presumably called after the port from where it is caught - so Lemon……….."is a port on the Sussex coast between Littlehampton and Worthing, I said."

But already she could see the dimples in my cheeks and a twinkle in my eye. It was ever thus. Besides which disbelief in anything a parent says is rooted deep in my children's psyche for a reason that I have still quite to fathom.

Had I had more time I might have plausibly suggested that lemon was a cockney contraction of Littlehampton - the yesteryear porters of Billingsgate wishing not to lose good drinking time in mouthing four syllables where two would do. This might have sustained the pretence a little further.

But my 'esprit d'escalier' conclusion was that I should have spun a story about two species of sole, the one from the Channel and the other from the North Sea, Lowestoft for preference, whence it travelled to London care of the old, but interminably slow Great Eastern Railway, and for want of ice on steam trains, had to be preserved with slices of lemon.

This I felt she might have bought and retailed to her own children in due course. Facts, I have always felt should never be allowed to spoil a good story.

And I do know that very good sole comes from Lowestoft - or did - when the North Sea was actually populated with fish rather than the accreted garbage of Eastern Britain and Western Europe. In my younger days I found myself regular turning up in Lowestoft like a species of bad penny to visit the Government's Fisheries Research Laboratory.

That may by now have gone the way of the fish, for all I know, but in those distant times I remember stepping into an old world of charm and courtesy whenever I set foot on Lowestoft station. A world in which everything moved slower and more gently; and where the fish were the size of monsters and tasted better than I have ever known before or since.

As with all things, the real reason for the lemon name, now that I have looked it up in that most essential of reference books 'Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,' is of course entirely prosaic and unromantic. The elegant descriptor 'lemon' has nothing to do with the fruit, but comes instead from the Latin 'limus' meaning mud, in or on which these fish live. The French expanded this into 'limande' and the porters of Billingsgate - no I am speculating again - shortened and anglicised this to 'lemon.'

I must email Elder Daughter directly.

WHAT THE NEOLITHIC PEOPLE MAY HAVE DONE FOR US

The Vale of Glamorgan is rich in Neolithic remains. I have lived here for 30 years now and am always stumbling across something new. Unfortunately, these days sites are destroyed with increasing frequency. Especially minor artefacts of which people do not appreciate the significance.

The Neolithic people lived here for some three thousand years - from about 5000 BC to about 2000 BC. We think of them as 'stone-age' - primitive folk who lived in animal skins and went around butchering each other. This is because we think that humans have developed technology at an even rate, starting from primitive beginnings and inventing new things every year.

Not so. All the evidence points in the other direction: that civilisations develop technology which subsequently dies with the civilisation itself, and so technology develops saw-tooth fashion. Just look at Ancient Egypt, for example, and how their technology has been lost to us. So it appears to have been with the Neolithic people. Stonehenge may appear just a pile of old stones, but a closer look shows how elaborate the site really is.

Even if you discount the purpose of Stonehenge - whether it was an astronomical calendar or whatever - there can be no doubt that it was actually built very carefully and precisely. The circumferences of the circles and the areas of the stone circles are in precise ratios to each other. The areas for example give ratios of 1:2:15:50 - something unlikely to have happened by chance.

I have always pictured the Neolithic people, not as 'cavemen' but as sophisticated and intelligent people living communally in insulated and well-designed houses. From the sites they have left behind it appears that their civilisation loved order, precision, straight lines and regular curves. So I see clean well-kept houses, with mannerly children, good herbal knowledge, a fair number of elderly people.

This, of course, is speculation, but my interest in these folk was triggered one day when I was looking at an Ordnance Survey map of the western Vale. My children were then at primary school in the village of Colwinston. It was a church school and the parish extended to two neighbouring villages, Llysworney and Llandow. It occurred to me from looking at the map that both Colwinston church and Llysworney church were equidistant from Llandow church. So I measured the distances and found it was so. Odd, I thought.

Even odder when I drew a triangle through these churches on the map and found I had an arrow head that pointed to a prominent coastal point. When I drew a shaft to the arrow this aligned with another church at Llanharan. But what was even more significant was that the distances between Llanharan and Colwinston and Llanharan and Llysworney were both exactly 10 kilometres.

All these churches are medieval and we know that medieval churches were frequently built on ancient sites, so it seemed likely that these churches marked Neolithic remains.

Next I noticed that if I drew a line exactly east-west through the Llandow church site it aligned with the Neolithic Tinkinswood Burial Cairn, a giant stone structure, reputed to have the largest capstone in Britain. What was more on this line also lay two other churches. But was really significant was that these sites were equally spaced along this exact east-west line and that the distance between Llandow and Tinkinswood was exactly 15 kilometres.

From these early findings my research developed bit by bit. I found that these Neolithic sites tended to be built at regular distances and on straight lines of a pre-selected length and anchored to prominent geographical points. You can trace these lines today.

To define the ends of the line the builders would, it seems, draw a circle and place other sites on its perimeter, so that by defining the circle you can find the exact point where the line ends. As some of the lines end in river estuaries for instance this is extremely useful.

Some of these 'marking' sites have been lost. One disappeared a few years ago beneath the extended M4. I fear another one - marked today only by a patch of gorse but still marked on the map as an 'earthwork' - may be 'tidied-up' by the council. Other sites could be moved. But it is not the physicality of the site that is important, it is its position.

The Neolithic people did not measure in kilometres of course, but the fact that their distances can be measured in kilometres suggests they were using a measure whose base is identical to the kilometre. This has to be the circumference of the earth.

I believe that measure was the pole. The Imperial pole of 198 inches is equivalent to 5.03 metres. However, if we suppose that the Neolithic pole was slightly shorter - at 5 metres exactly then we find an exact correspondence. Thus 10 kilometres becomes 2000 poles and 15 kilometres becomes 3,000 poles.

Could the Neolithic people have measured the earth? That indeed is a question for debate. I believe they could have done so. Interestingly enough the 'hump' in the middle of the Bristol Channel caused by the curvature of the earth is (depending on where exactly you measure) about a pole in height. Again we are speculating but it is not beyond possibility to measure the circumference of the earth by reflecting sunlight from one side of the Channel to the other.

Of course to do this you need mathematics; even more importantly you need to be able to write. Could therefore writing have been invented here in the Vale of Glamorgan (among other places) some six thousand years ago?

IN DEFENCE OF TWEENESS

The 't, 'w' and 'e' keys on everybody's laptop have been getting extra use since Kate Muir's 'Dark Ages' article in The Times Magazine last Saturday. Twee it seems is the word of the moment. 'Well, some are born twee, some achieve tweeness and some have tweeness thrust upon them, to borrow one of the Bard's memorable constructions. Thanks to Ms Muir we Purple Cooers suddenly find ourselves in the thrust upon camp, to great consternation all round.

I am such an un-twee person that even tweeness thrust upon me would surely need a good length of knicker elastic to hold it in place. Nevertheless one can aspire. I should love to live in an elegant cottage, surrounded by nasturtiums and hollyhocks, a couple of Labs docilely playing with my flaxen-headed children on the lawn, while Boden-clad I whistled up summer puddings gleaned from the Waitrose magazine.

In fact I should love a thousand accomplishments to which a truly twee person should aspire, but as I have yet to collide with a fairy godmother on a civilising mission, I can only make do with using the right words, such as hollyhocks and Labradors. By selecting the correct buzzwords (and leaving out others) we can all make our lives appear insufferably twee to others. To this end I shall make myself available should Ms Muir want an interview.

For tweeness is in the eye of the beholder. Tweeness is the swan gliding effortlessly over the water, its furiously paddling feet hidden from view. Tweeness is the lamb gambolling in the field or the rich dark rosemary laden chop on your plate; it is not the transport, the abbatoir, the meat plant.

Tweeness can be suggested by a single word like Boden, which then becomes the leit-motif of everything we are. Even Joan of Arc can be made twee, with this slight of hand - just think of her linen shirts, her love of horses, her avant-garde hair and her 'voices' (clearly charming) from heaven.

What could be more twee than our little 65 seat theatre nestling 'au fond' of what was once a bustling cattle market. Or the four 'Deckchair' playlets by Jean McConnel, that we staged there last week, finishing with the traditional end of show supper, the tables decorated with a seaside theme of shells and wooden fish?

Or after that again, the midnight glass of Muscadet under a gazebo in someone's garden, surrounded by geraniums and petunias; or the next day's wrap-up lunch for cast and crew, decked out in our summer finery, in another garden where the dragon flies swooped in the sunshine?

Very Midsomer Murders, very Rosemary and Thyme you might think; the apogee of tweedom - but a glance at the television while ironing soon brought me down to earth. Beside the fictional theatre offering in Rosemary and Thyme's new series last night, our efforts were mired deep in stone age unfashionableness.

Yet such celluloid tweeness is an impossible illusion that can only exist in the overheated mind of high budget television. In real life, we can suggest tweeness, but we can't really make it happen. Reality gets in the way.

Tweeness is an artificial construct: it doesn't exist. It is a sanitised and sectioned view of life, a fraction of the story, an illusion in other words. Thus the hollyhock cottage will be draughty; its roof leaking. One of the dogs will have been sick on the carpet; the oven will be on the blink and the (not so gorgeous) food will have come mostly from a packet.

Even worse, though the world may portray you, twee-ly, as doing 'something frightfully clever' from home - you know you are always only a hair's breadth away from joining the great army of the self-unemployed.

Still provided we recognise that tweeness is a face presented to the world after appropriate and lengthy complexioning at the dressing table, where's the harm in aspiring to its elegance? Living in the gutter, as the poet said, should not prevent us from looking at the stars. Is tweeness really any different to beauty - something to be worked on, and even suffered for, to produce elegance? A game that we play to make us feel nicely grander than we really are.

We can accept that clothes and make-up are veneers, so why can't we accept aspects of tweeness in the same way? Is it wrong to sweep dust under the rug or to shelter our ragged selves behind some attractive artefact? We are not denying that our feet are clay and our lives are drab, we just want to inject a bit of colour, to rise above the ordinary, to become a little more civilised. Despite the cliché, we are really worth it.

BAOBABS AND BREAKFAST

I think that in a past life I must have been a lizard, struggling out into the morning sunshine to throw off the night's torpor, for I feel quite moribund until I have had the benefit of breakfast.

Invariably I am first up and so breakfast alone, white bathrobe around my shoulders, half-listening to the early edition of the Today Programme on Radio 4 while half-catching up on yesterday's papers.

If this seems complicated then at least breakfast is simple and unchanging: tea, made properly with leaves in a pot - my own special blend of Assam and Earl Grey. Next a bowl of porridge, cooked on the hob with milk and demerara sugar, followed by some of Danone's plain Activia Yoghurt, full of micro-bacterial goodness and flavoured with a teaspoonful of Bonne Maman jam, the only jam with exactly the right consistency and strength of flavour to blend perfectly with yoghurt.

With brain and stomach thus stoked I find the energy to commence the day. But don't speak to me a moment before! For as Oscar Wilde once memorably put it, 'Only dull people are bright at breakfast.'

This morning was no exception. I opened yesterday's Times2 to see a picture of a Baobab trees - you know those great African trees that often look like a chimney sweep's brush: great thick trunks topped with a little bit of spiky thatch.

If you've read St Exupéry's beautiful book for children, 'Le Petit Prince,' you will have a fictional view of the Baobab as an evil and invasive weed. The Little Prince who hailed from a tiny planet far out in the Universe had to hunt for germinating Baobab seeds lest they grew into mature trees that would overwhelm his planet.

It's a metaphor, of course, as is the whole delightful book, born from the feverish workings of St Exupéry's mind as he lay dying of thirst after crashing his aeroplane in the Sahara desert. He didn't die, of course, or at least not then, otherwise we should never have had his beautiful 'thank-you' to the world. Improbable as it may seem he was rescued by a passing Bedouin caravan.

But back to the Baobabs. Rather than being the pernicious weed of fantasy the poor Baobab is rather endangered. The Times tells me that an area of 800 acres in Madagascar (now there's a name - Zanzibar is another - to set a child's imagination racing!) has been declared a protected zone in an effort to conserve the ancient trees, supposed to be among the oldest living things on earth.

What!? Only 800 acres - in the whole of Madagascar? I know the country has many problems but you'd think the authorities might be persuaded to do a little better than this. Besides you don't exactly get many Baobabs to the acre, as it were. I think I shall have to raise the matter at the next meeting of our UNESCO committee.

The Times illustrates the conservation effort with a picture of a (rather handsome if you ask me) Madagascan, slim and elegant, walking barefoot along a dirt road beside which a few of the more chimney brush species of Baobabs happen to be growing. In another example of today's lax journalistic standards, the road is described as an avenue, which may be romantic but is hardly accurate.

I would reproduce the picture here if I didn't fear the long reach of News International's copyright men upon my collar, so you'll have to look it up for yourself. Besides our African friend is holding upwards in his right hand, like a miniature candle, that most politically incorrect of all objects - a cigarette, and this would never do.

So I have included a picture of a somewhat fatter species of Baobab culled from the friendly pages of Wikipedia, just in case you were minded to confuse it with an acacia or garden holly.

And just in case, also, you were feeling grumpy - as indeed I was this morning after a virtual and Kafkaesque battle yesterday with my internet service provider and the vacuum cleaner expiring in a cloud of oily black and evil smelling smoke - and so need something to cheer you up, let me conclude with one last Baobab thought - an African legend, according to The Times.

"When the Baobab saw the palm tree, it wanted to be taller, when it saw the flame tree, it was envious for its blossoms. When it saw the fig tree it prayed for fruit. So the gods became angry, pulled it up by its roots and then planted it upside down to keep it quiet."

Poor Baobab! But I fear, it is a lesson to us mingers everywhere. Shut up and enjoy life or you may find yourself planted upside down.