I seem to have developed a twitch around my eyes. At first, it was just a small twitch of the muscle at the outside of my left eye — annoying but intermittent. Then it got more frequent, and my right eye occasionally joined in. Last night I was looking in the mirror and realised that the muscle underneath my left eye is continually fluttering. I didn’t know because I can’t feel it, but it’s pretty obvious when you see it.

As I looked in the mirror, I thought that my twitching reflection reminded me of someone, and then it hit me: I look like Herbert Lom as Chief Inspector Dreyfus in the Pink Panther films, when Clouseau’s incompetence starts to get the better of him. It’s not a great look to be honest. Next thing you know I’ll be accidentally amputating my thumb with a cigar cutter. Perhaps it’s just as well that I don’t own a cigar cutter.

This whole twitching thing is starting to get really irritating. It’s almost certainly just tiredness and stress, but it is proving remarkably stubborn, and seems to be resistant to the calming effect of listening to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington while sipping a gin and tonic. If anyone has any suggestions for how to still my misbehaving facial muscles, I would be very grateful for them.

A couple of days ago, I came across this review of Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’. It’s an album I like very much, and have found very calming at various points in my life. One particular description struck me as being perceptive:

This is music, not just sound. There’s structure there, melody. But it’s
also something of a hologram. There’s a three dimensionality about this
piece. Listen, and you can walk around in the music. Listen, and you can
imagine and see space, the architecture around you. Listen, and become
completely centered and aware of yourself.

He also mentions in the review that the original vinyl album (which I also have) has 30 seconds of silence at the end of each piece. This is an important part of the work, and one that you should listen carefully to.

I’ve been thinking a lot about silence recently. Most of us live in a noisy world. In cities, silence is an exceedingly rare and treasured quality, because there is always some background (or foreground) noise: traffic, music, alarms, aeroplanes, sirens, ringing mobiles, and raised voices. I also seem to be getting what I think is probably mild tinnitus, so it’s hard for me to find silence even in a quiet environment. But true, enjoyable silence isn’t the complete absence of sound, but deep quietness in which you can feel the space around you.

One of my favourite activities on trips to Brazil was to go out on the river in the dark. On recent trips, we have got up well before dawn to go out in the boat, looking for jaguars. We never actually saw one, but for me, that was only a small part of the experience anyway. The quality of silence on these trips was beautiful. As we set off into the darkness, the roar of the outboard motor and the slap of the water on the hull overwhelmed everything. Eventually we reached a particularly good spot (or so the guide said) for spotting jaguars, and he would cut the engine for us to listen for their calls.

The river at this point was extremely wide, with low trees and shrubs on the bank. There is little light pollution at night in the Pantanal, so the stars are overwhelming, and the great bow of the Milky Way was above and below us, reflected in the still water of the river. It was disorienting: I began to think that I was looking at the sky, until a gentle breeze caused the stars to shiver. Sitting in the dark in a boat in the middle of the river felt like floating on a plane between two gigantic dark mirrored bowls.

The silence on the water was incredibly rich. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like it before. There was no noise of human activity at all, so the background silence was a deep, velvety black. However, we could hear sounds of other life. On the banks, herons and egrets were beginning to rouse in their roosts, grumbling and squabbling in their harsh, croaking voices. Around the boat we could hear the watery popping of fish surfacing or caiman submerging to the depths. Bats returning to their roosts after a night of hunting gently flicked the air, soft as a moth’s wing. All of these sounds served to intensify the silence, giving it space and texture, in the same way that shining a torch beam into the night thickens the darkness around the light. It wasn’t oppressive. On the contrary, it was an extraordinary, contradictory experience. I felt excited but serene, aware of the space around me but also taken out of myself.

We made a few of those trips over the years, and I always cherished the experience, and felt rather bereft when the guide started the engine again to take us back. I would love a bit of that silence and darkness right now.

Coffee is an amazing drink, isn’t it? I can think of few other drinks that can take on such a spectacular range of flavours and change so dramatically in character with tiny changes in preparation method. And that’s before you think about changing the way in which the beans are roasted.

I have been steadily learning how to get good espresso from my Rancilio Silvia, but while the coffee has become much more consistent and pretty good, I knew it could be better. The fruity, acidic, winey flavours of the beans were too dominating, so that the coffee tasted a bit unbalanced. It wasn’t unpleasant at all, but I personally like the more earthy, chocolate, caramel and spicy kinds of flavours to be a bit more prominent. I had got to the point where I could produce the same quality of coffee pretty consistently, which when you consider all the variables involved (grind, dose, distribution of grounds in the basket, tamping pressure, water temperature, extraction time and so on), is something I view as quite an achievement in itself. How could I get more of the rich and sweet flavours in the coffee?

After reading what felt like every article ever written on the internet about coffee¹, I stumbled on a suggestion that higher brewing temperatures can bring out the ‘darker’ flavours, while lower temperatures emphasise the more delicate, fruity ones. I had to try it out. Keeping all the other variables as constant as I possibly could, I changed the set point of my PID to 3°C higher than its previous setting. I did this in the evening before going to bed, so that I wouldn’t forget to make the change in the morning. It’s an indication of how sadly nerdy, I mean, deeply fascinated I have become with the whole process that I fell asleep thinking about what the coffee was going to be like, and bounded downstairs the next day like a child on Christmas morning.

Well. It was like night and day. I could tell it was going to be good from the way it was rolling languidly from the spouts of the portafilter and by the heavenly smell, but the first sip confirmed it. It was rich and spicy with lovely bitter chocolate notes, but that was balanced by the fruity tang I had before. It was even a different texture, with much more body and viscosity. All that transformation from a change of 3°C. This morning I even managed to produce the kind of crema on the top that you see in all the coffee pr0n photos and videos: a deep, caramel or hazelnut coloured gloopy liquid, spotted with paler colours. I was so excited that I yelled at Mr. Bsag, “COME AND LOOK AT MY CREMA! LOOK AT IT!”. He humoured me with a ‘yes it’s a lovely crema darling’ look, but I could tell that he just wanted to drink some coffee. He does agree that it’s dramatically better than before though, so I know that it’s not just my wishful thinking.

Next, I will conquer microfoam!

Oh dear. I think I may be hooked. On the positive side, it does make getting up at a stupidly early hour much more interesting.

Edited to correct the temperature difference, because apparently I can’t do arithmetic when highly-caffeinated.

Some introductions

Aren’t they a handsome couple? That’s Rocky on the left (all young and shiny and energetic), and Miss Silvia on the right. She’s not in the first flush of youth, as you can see. Her logo is a bit worn, and she doesn’t have the fancy steam knob and drip tray patterns of these newer models. But inside she’s as strong and well-made as any new machine. She’s seen a few shots and she’s experienced.

How it all began

A few weeks ago, our Krups grinder died. It had been a bit inconsistent and unreliable for a while, and despite careful cleaning and care, it didn’t seem to be improving. It has always introduced a lot of static into the grounds, but recently it had seemed to turn into a fully fledged Van de Graaf generator, so that removing grounds from the hopper was a really messy business. Then it failed completely and we had to think about getting a new grinder.

I had been pondering trying to get an espresso machine again. We had a Krups machine some time ago, and while it wasn’t a semi-professional level machine, we enjoyed using it and the coffee it produced. After a few years, the pump failed and we had it repaired, then the pump went again a few years after that, and we couldn’t really justify getting it repaired (fairly expensively) yet again. It was clear that it wasn’t made using good quality, long-lasting components. So we switched to using the Aeropress. I love the Aeropress to bits. I think it’s a great, fun and best of all cheap way to brew really decent coffee. I recommend it to a lot of people, and we’ll certainly continue to use ours when we’re in a rush, on holiday or when making coffee for one in an espresso machine seems like too much trouble. However, it has two drawbacks: it doesn’t make real espresso¹, and you need to use roughly double the amount of coffee that you use for espresso. Since we buy fairly decent coffee beans, this was beginning to get a bit expensive.

Rocky

So when the Krups grinder failed, I decided to replace it with a model that was going to be much longer lasting², and which would also be suitable for making espresso if we decided to get a new machine. I did some research and the Rancilio Rocky grinder seemed to be one of the best models I could get on my budget. It’s made of solid, heavy components, and is sometimes used in small-scale commercial settings, so it can withstand heavy use. We’ve been really pleased with it, and after the hash our failing Krups made of beans, it’s a bit of a revelation: a fine, consistent grind with no static in the grounds.

I spent ages trying to decide whether to get the version with or without the doser. There are advantages and disadvantages to both forms: with a doser you can leave the grinder running for a while unattended, which is particularly useful if you also use it to grind coffee for something other than espresso, and the vanes of the doser help to prevent the coffee clumping. On the other hand, you get stale coffee sitting in the doser, and it’s harder to clean. In the end I went for the doser version. I confess that this was — in part — because I have always thought that flipping the lever on the doser to dump the coffee in the portafilter looked like fun when I saw people using them in cafés. I was right, it is fun. When I was a kid, I thought being a librarian must be brilliant, purely because they got to use the date stamp on the library cards. I loved the ritual of clunking it down on the ink pad and then on the card. When I told Mr. Bsag this recently, he said he’d always wanted to be a librarian as a kid for exactly the same reason, which goes to show that I picked the right man to marry. But I digress…

At the same time, I had ordered an espresso starter pack from Has Bean Coffee, which was wonderful but made me acutely aware of how quickly we were romping through the 250g bags with our Aeropress. When I was doing on research on grinders (and having found out about Rancilio through the Rocky), I came across the Rancilio Silvia (or “Miss Silvia” as many call her³).

Miss Silvia

The Rancilio Silvia espresso machine is a very sturdy unit, made of stainless steel with a brass boiler and other components. It’s a single boiler unit (that is, one boiler provides water for the group head to brew coffee and also the steaming wand), so it isn’t ideal if you mostly drink cappuccinos or lattes (I don’t). However, what you get is a machine with almost commercial-level components in a small, easy to maintain package which is ideal for home use. They have been making the Silvia (with only minor changes to the design) for many years, and as it is a popular model, there is an enormous amount of information available about how to use it, care for it, and how to modify it to improve performance.

Most of the reviews and articles agree that the Silvia can be very exacting. You can make excellent espresso, but your technique needs to be good and consistent. While it is bound to lead to a little frustration, I think that’s a great quality in a machine to learn on, because it forces you to understand all the variables involved in making espresso, and how to control them. The articles also agree that one of the most difficult aspects of the Silvia is the rather broad ‘deadband’ in the boiler heating cycle. Rancilio used a fairly cheap thermostat, and in consequence, the water temperature can vary by as much as 10°C while brewing, which makes it difficult to get consistent results. As a consequence, many Silvia owners end up fitting a PID controller, which greatly reduces temperature fluctuations. It also allows you to read the temperature of the top of the boiler continuously, so you have a good idea what the water temperature is at every stage. I was pretty sure that I would want to fit a PID at some point, so I decided to look for a second-hand machine which might already have one fitted. I would be getting the machine at a bargain price (and since the longevity of the machine is good, buying a used one isn’t a problem if it has been well cared for), and I would save the money and hassle of fitting a PID myself.

By chance, I saw an advert for just such a machine on one of the coffee forums. It had been posted a while ago, but when I enquired it was still available. After seeing it working (and more importantly, drinking a coffee made with it), I bought the machine last weekend, and have been having an enormous amount of fun with it ever since.

Experimentation and over-caffeination

On the first day, I drank too much coffee. Far too much coffee. I was engrossed in trying out the machine, tweaking the grind and the dosing and tamping and before I knew it, I had gone a bit over the top. At some point, I wondered why the world was jiggling around, and then realised that it was actually me. Perhaps I had drunk enough coffee for the day.

It is addictive though: not just the coffee itself, but also the experimentation and the pursuit of the perfect espresso. I know that some people think making espresso is too much of a hassle, but I’m really enjoying it. Even on the days when I’m rushing to get to work, I like the meditative aspects to the routine of turning on and warming the machine, grinding the coffee and evening the dose, then tamping and pulling the shot. I’m a geek and a scientist and I love measuring and tweaking and trying different things out. The Silvia is a pleasure to use in this respect. It’s solid and heavy, and you get that indefinable satisfaction to be found in using well-made things.

Amazingly, I’ve made very few shots fit only for the sink. Some have been really lovely, and I’m gradually improving all the time. I’ve got the grind right now, so that a 1oz shot takes about 25 sec to pour. I’m working on getting a more even distribution now, because I’m getting ‘blonding’ a bit early. That usually happens when fissures or holes open up in the puck of coffee, allowing water to rush through without extracting properly. I could do with developing a slightly thicker crema too, but I’m sure it will come. Sorry, but I’ve been boring Mr. Bsag to tears with all these geeky technical details all week, so now it’s your turn…

Anyway, I’m really pleased with Miss Silvia and her partner Rocky. I’m learning all the time, and enjoying some really great coffee, which is the ultimate point of the exercise. In time I hope to be on first name terms with Miss Silvia, but I’m not quite there yet.

On Monday, I watched a really wonderful documentary: The Real Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. There’s still time to watch it on iPlayer, and I heartily recommend doing so, even if you have no interest in microlights. It was the kind of documentary I love, in which you let people with a passion for something tell their own story.

In this case, the cameras followed several participants in the ‘Round Britain Rally’, a gloriously Wacky Races event, in which the aim is to rack up the most points over three days by flying over designated waypoints dotted around the UK in a microlight aircraft. Some of the microlights looked quite fancy with semi-rigid wings and enclosed cabins, but all of the aircraft piloted by the three teams mentioned were rather more basic in design. Indeed, the vintage model flown by Antony Woodward and his team-mate appeared to feature rather alarming quantities of gaffer tape and string. Antony described a microlight as “essentially a chainsaw attached to a deckchair”. Or in their case, a chainsaw attached to a deckchair with string.

Anthony had suffered a dreadful crash in a microlight some years before while participating in the same race when his machine hit a powerline. I can’t help thinking that he was a bit crazy to want to get back into a microlight and compete in the same rally, but that’s what he did. Anthony and his team mate (whose name I can’t remember) were simultaneously hilarious and terrifying. Anthony cheerfully admitted that he has absolutely no aptitude for flying, and demonstrated that rather ably with a series of ‘interesting’ landings and haphazard map-reading skills, much to his team mate’s fury. In the end, they decided not to take the competitive aspects so seriously, and had a wonderful time. Antony even managed a good landing to end the race.

Paul flew his microlight with his teenage son Mikey from their home in Ireland across the Irish Sea to the start point. Mikey was determined to go with his Dad, but was visibly (and quite understandably) terrified by the prospect. Their relationship and the way they bonded during the rally was such a touching thing. Paul tried to take Mikey’s mind off the possibility of plunging to a fiery death by singing some rather excellent bawdy songs at top volume or playing ‘I Spy’, and Mikey was determined not to let his Dad down.

The final competitor was Richard Meredith-Hardy, for whom the rally must have seemed like a stroll in the park. He has flown a microlight from London to Sydney, and even flown over Mount Everest. Richard is brilliant. He’s a quiet, smiling man with an extraordinary pair of eyebrows, who does absolutely insane things in a microlight. At one point, he demonstrated his mid-air refuelling technique. When Air Force pilots do this kind of thing, they have millions of pounds worth of military hardware to help them. Richard had a few jerry cans full of fuel where his co-pilot would have been, and a bit of tubing. In a scene that I watched through my fingers, he undid his seatbelt so that he could twist around and fiddle with the cans and tubing, all while trying to hold the craft steady. Microlights — it hardly needs saying — don’t have autopilot, just a wibbly bar that you have to try to keep steady while the open cockpit in which you sit hangs and sways from the wings. Terrifying.

The views from the microlights were stunning but the pilots seemed so vulnerable. I can see the appeal, though — you really experience flying in a way that’s just not possible in any other kind of powered aircraft, but I don’t think I’m brave enough to actually try it.

It’s not news to regular readers of this blog that I dislike buying clothes. I have no interest in following fashion, and tend to wear clothes until they literally fall apart. Sometimes I continue to wear them after they have fallen apart, if the structural integrity of the garment is sufficient to keep the weather out or to avoid showing too much flesh. My rules for buying clothes are as follows:

1. Do not buy clothes unless it is absolutely necessary.
2. Never buy clothes from a bricks-and-mortar shop unless it is strictly unavoidable (see previous debacles here).
3. When buying clothes from online retailers, try to stick to companies you have bought from before and buy the same items in the same sizes as your current (now worn-out) items. That way you know they will fit.
4. If feeling daredevil, buy the same items in the same sizes, but in different colours.

My jeans are on the verge of falling apart, so I had to think about buying some new ones. Of all the clothes to buy, jeans are some of the worst because the current fashion dictates the shape of them so strongly, making it difficult to get what you want, or to judge what size you need. Still, I thought, fear not! I bought my last couple of pairs online, and it seemed as if the company still stocked the same style. So all I needed to do was order another couple of pairs in the same style and size (see Rule 3) and everything would be fine.

The package duly arrived, and I tried the jeans on. Horror. They had changed the style and the way it fitted, without making it at all clear on the site. The waist was lower¹, and the fit was much tighter on the seat and thighs. I know that the old pairs had shrunk (because the inside leg was 1 inch shorter than when I bought them), but even so, they were a looser fit than the new pair which were ostensibly the same size and style. Grrr.

I’ve returned them and tried another company that I’ve bought jeans from before: another style/size that is apparently the same as a previously purchased pair. I hope that they really are this time, but I have a bit more confidence in this company, which stocks other items they have been making for years. My point is that I wish there were clothing companies that realised there is a market out there for basic, well-made clothes in reliable sizes, which don’t change with the fashions. If a company made exactly the same, classic clothes, year-in, year-out, I would happily keep buying them. The only other alternative is to do a Steve Jobs: when you find an item of clothing that suits you and fits you, buy a supply that will last you a lifetime. However, it’s not easy to justify the expense or the storage space unless you are very rich and have a huge house.

The idea of a company continuing to make the same styles from year to year only sounds crazy because the clothing world is so driven by fashion. Other companies make a good living out of this strategy (and have it as a key selling point). For example, the shelving company Vitsoe (designed by the iconic Dieter Rams), has been making the same modular shelving units since 1960. They are proud of the fact that people who bought the very first units still have those pieces and mix them with their current stock. They add a few new items now and again, but they all work perfectly with the units made since the beginning. This solves the ‘having to stock up’ problem. If you are confident that they will still be making the same shelves in 20 years time, you just buy the bits you want now and add to it as and when you need to expand your shelving (a practice which Vitsoe actively encourages). They are not cheap, but I would happily pay a premium for having this kind of confidence, and would do the same for classic, well-made clothes if I knew I could buy exactly the same pair of jeans in 5 years time.

This may be of some use to anyone else who is thinking of moving comments from ExpressionEngine to Disqus (or to me, if I ever have to do it again!). Over the past few days, I have been moving comments from the Tracks site (which used ExpressionEngine) to Disqus. I had some difficulty trying to get a format exported from ExpressionEngine which I could use to import comments into Disqus, and eventually settled on the code above after looking at Disqus’ own import format and trawling the ExpressionEngine forums to adapt other solutions which exported to Movable Type format.

You need to start off by creating a new template group called ‘export’. Inside that, you make a template called ‘index’ and paste in the following, making sure that you replace the channel name and template group name to those appropriate for your setup. This needs to be the index for the template group.

Next, create another template called ‘comments’ and paste the text below, again, replacing the channel name as appropriate.

Now visit http://yoururl.com/export and you should see the exported entries. Wait for the whole page to load, which may take some time with a lot of entries. Then use your browser’s ‘View source’ command to view the source of the page, copy all the text and paste into a text file with the extension ‘.xml’. Now you should be able to upload to Disqus using their ‘Generic (WXR)’ importer.

You may find that you encounter errors and have to try uploading several times. For example, you need to make sure that the xml declaration is the very first line of the file (the template will insert some whitespace).

I can’t believe that it’s already 4th January — time seems to have flown since Christmas! I was so exhausted when I was finally on holiday that we’ve had a fairly quiet (but wonderful) Christmas. Mr. Bsag and I spent Christmas Day and Boxing Day together (eating and drinking too much, as is pretty much the law at Christmas), then I travelled to my parents for a couple of days while Mr. Bsag took care of the cats. We’ve had some lazy times and some great walks, and I’ve also been listening to the great albums I got among my Christmas presents.

June Tabor and Oysterband - Ragged Kingdom

This was a present from Mr. Bsag, and I love it more each time I listen to it. It’s a mixture of covers of modern songs and versions of old folk ballads, but they all sit alongside one another very comfortably. I like all the tracks, but I think my favourites have to be an incredibly powerful version of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, and ‘The Leaves of Life’, as well as the mournful ‘The Hills of Shiloh’. ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ is such an iconic song that it must have taken a bit of courage to cover it, but they bring forward the lyrics by making it into a slow and deceptively simple duet between June Tabor and John Jones. There are some superb musicians on this album, and June Tabor’s voice is as pure and deep as ever.

Gillian Welch - The Harrow and the The Harvest

Perhaps it’s a personal failing, but I really like sad, mournful songs. I’m generally a very cheerful optimistic person, so I think I need to season it with a bit of melancholy in musical form just to balance things out and to make life taste sweeter. Maybe that’s why I love Gillian Welch so much. The song ‘Revelator’ (from the album Time (The Revelator)) ranks as one of my all time favourite songs (rubbing shoulders with many of Kate Bush’s), and I think this album is also destined to be a classic.

There is hardly an upbeat, optimistic track on the album, but I find the whole thing completely beautiful. David Rawlings’ guitar playing, and the way that Welch and Rawlings’ voices mingle and harmonise so thrillingly makes this an incredible album. Again, it’s hard to pick out just one or two tracks, but I could listen all day to ‘The Way It Will Be’, ‘Tennessee’ and ‘Hard Times’. This album is really worth a listen, particularly if the current financial and political situation makes you feel like listening to music evoking The Great Depression¹.

Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow (vinyl)

Yes, I know, I already bought this album when it came out as a download. However, I was so bowled over by it that asked my brother if he could get me the vinyl version for Christmas. I’m glad I did, as it gets even more delicate, layered and spacious when you hear it on vinyl. I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised than an MP3 file (even the relatively high bitrate files you get from the iTunes Store) sounds rather compressed when compared to the analogue version, but I was slightly startled. I was also rather pleased that I can still tell the difference so easily.

I’ve already sung the praises (at great length) of the album in my previous review, so I’ll just add that the attention that a double vinyl album forces you to pay to the music (by making you get up three times to turn the disc over) adds even more to the experience. However, Bella dislikes vinyl. You see, when I sit on the sofa downstairs, she almost immediately settles down on my lap, and she was not amused at me turfing her off every 20 minutes or so to attend to the disc.

And finally…

Before I finish, I’ll mention one more thing (which has nothing to do with music). Mr. Bsag and I had a lovely walk in the sunshine on Monday, out to a country pub that we both enjoy. As we walked down a lane, I could see something flapping in a tree by the side of the road.

It made me smile and really piqued my curiosity. There just has to be an interesting story behind the deposition of an item of lingerie in a tree by a quiet country lane, doesn’t there?

I’ve written about how much I love my Tom Bihn Synapse rucksack a couple of times before. I’m probably boring everyone stupid with my adulation, but I really can’t say enough good things about this bag. I’ve had it now for nearly two years, I use it every day, and it still surprises and delights me.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to take two bottles of champagne¹ to work. In case you’re thinking that the life of a biologist is a great deal more glamorous than you had previously suspected, this is certainly not an everyday occurrence. One of the PhD students who I co-supervise with a colleague was having her viva, so I wanted to get some bubbly for a bit of a celebration when she emerged, blinking, after several hours of grilling by the examiners.

Bottles are pretty heavy and I was travelling by train that day, so I wondered if I could carry them in my Synapse on my back, rather than in a bag held in my hand. Given that my Synapse was already filled² with a considerable quantity of stuff that I take to work every day, I seriously doubted that there would be room. I already had my MacBook Air in a neoprene case, an A5 notebook in a leather case, a pencil case, camera, glasses in a hard case, a couple of pouches stuffed with random odds and ends, a packable shopping bag, wallet, keys, a large pair of headphones, and various other bits and pieces in there. Two bottles of wine would be at least another 1.5 L of volume to fit in somehow. However, in the spirit of giving it a go, I unzipped the bag and shifted the contents of the main compartment a bit before trying to slip in one of the bottles. After a bit of jiggling, it slipped in comfortably. I tried the other bottle, wondering if I could pull off this magic trick again. The second bottle was swallowed by the bag. I zipped the bag up, not really believing that it had worked. As usual, the Synapse sat there insouciantly, looking as if it just contained a couple of notebooks and thin jumper. It was pretty heavy as I was hauling it on to my back (as you would expect), but once there, it felt very comfortable.

When I removed the bottles from my bag later on in front of an audience, it was with the smugly mysterious air of a conjurer pulling a brace of rabbits from a hat. I’m pretty sure this bag breaks all sorts of laws of physics, but it’s remarkably handy.

I look very like my my mother, and have done since I was a girl. Whenever people who knew me met my mother for the first time, or met me having only known my mother, they would invariably exclaim (to me), “Don’t you look like your mother! You’re the spitting image of her.” I would then traditionally roll my eyes in exasperation and disbelief. I couldn’t see it at all. I thought people who said we looked alike were loopy. I suppose that I knew both our faces so well that I couldn’t see the resemblance among the small details I knew to be different. Since then, I’ve seen a few photos of Mum in her teens and early twenties, and I have to admit that I can see the likeness, but it didn’t seem that extraordinary.

A few weeks ago, Mum mentioned that Dad had come across an old photo of my Granny (my Mum’s mother) when she was a girl, looking uncannily like me, and she said that Dad would email me a copy. I thought it would be like looking at photos of Mum: somewhat like me, but nothing to write home about. I was wrong. When Mum said it was uncanny, she wasn’t kidding.

I should tell you a bit about Granny. All my other grandparents died before I was born or when I was very young, so she is the only grandparent I actually remember. She also died when I was in my teens, but I really loved her, and have very fond memories of staying at her house overnight on occasion. By today’s standards, she wasn’t that old when she died, but from my perspective as a kid, she was an old lady, and that’s how I remember her.

Opening the photo was a genuine shock. It was as if someone had wrestled me out of my jeans and into a period dress, put a pair of round, wire-framed glasses on me and then taken a photo which they had processed to look like a scratchy black and white period print, all without me having any memory of it happening. Or as if I’m some kind of inadvertent time traveller, and have visited other time periods without knowing about it.

The photo shows a girl (perhaps in her early teens, but it’s hard to tell) sitting in a leather armchair with her legs tucked underneath her. She has a hardback book open in her hands (I wish I could see the title on the spine), and is reading with some concentration. Mum and Dad have a photo of me as a girl in a similar pose (not difficult, since I had my nose in a book most of the time). If you ignore the style of the glasses, her face is my face. The eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth and even the damned chubby cheeks are mine. I’ve even taken to wearing my hair longer in a bob in the past few years, a style very like hers in the photo. I also note that her hair has the same ungovernable waves as mine (thanks for that, genetics!). It’s a perfectly normal photo, but the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.

I think that I’m going to frame a print of my ‘time travel photo’ (as I’m now thinking of it) and hang it somewhere in the house to discombobulate visitors, though I’ll have to stop it freaking me out first.