EINSTEIN NEVER HAD THIS PROBLEM

Hello dear reader and may I wish you a belated very happy new year. Please accept my apologies for my non-appearance last week. I think British Telecom got its wires crossed at the local Exchange and left me off its internet supply. I have now had notification from my provider that my supply will have to be 'interleaved' to improve my broadband connection. I have no idea what this means but I hope it works and that I stay connected.

   Which brings me on to the subject of astro physics. Ha, I bet you never thought to hear those words drip from my keyboard, did you?  Well, I have been listening to a science programme on BBC Radio 4 about gravitational waves. Apparently they waft through us and bend and stretch us all the time. Well, fancy that!  Yet another phenomenon I am going to have to chew the fat over and try to understand. Mastering the internet and my IPhone stretched the old brain cells enough and now I find gravitational waves are doing it as well.

   You will by now my dear reader, have appreciated that I am no scientist, but I do share some common traits with the astro physicists mentioned above in that I observe all sorts of phenomena that occur in my daily life and for which I can provide no reasonable or logical explanation. These phenomena puzzle and exasperate my by turn. For example where do all the bell pepper seeds come from?

   Yes, I know where they come from - they come from a bell pepper obviously, but why do they make their appearance with monotonous regularity on my kitchen floor? We eat a lot of peppers at Chez Comb. I throw them into everything in the course of my domestic goddess culinary duties, along with a variety of other vegetables. I am a tidy cook and am careful to capture and dispose of the seeds from the peppers in the course of my clearings up. When all is done for the night and I look around my clean and tidy kitchen there is not a pepper seed in sight - not on the worktops or the floor. So how is it and here I would be most grateful dear reader, if you could enlighten me, that every day and I do mean every day, I will find a little white errant pepper seed lodged in the dark grouting of a kitchen floor tile - showing up as plain as day? Where has it come from? If it wasn't there yesterday and no peppers have shown their faces in my kitchen in the interim, how did they get there? I would have seen them, as I am now so attuned to these events, saddo that I am, that I walk into the kitchen and 'sweep the floor with my eyes'. Ouch.

   Particles of cooked rice are the same. I cook it, drain it, serve it, clean up and don't have rice again for some days to come. And yet and yet - as sure God made little apples,  grains of rice will magically appear in the kitchen when my back is turned. Grains that were not there before. Again,  scattered about the worktops and lodged in the floor tiles. Maybe there are night-time house elves at work - I would welcome them if they did something useful rather than leaving the detritus of their supper behind.

   And don't get me started on lemon pips. Well, I have started and this is just another phenomenon amongst the many in our universe, never mind gravitational waves, that I don't understand. Just how many pips can one lemon have? I have a kitchen gadget that squeezes the juice from the lemon for me. Which is wonderful and I love it to bits. But no matter how carefully I de-seed my lemons before slapping them on to the squeezer, that contraption will seek out the most deeply buried pips and out they fly in all directions, slapping me in the eye, crunching under my feet and leaving a sticky trail all over the floor for me to slip and slide over.

   Never mind gravitational waves stretching and squeezing me, I can't feel them but I would like this evil kitchen genii or unseen house elf identified by the scientific community and dealt with.  I bet if Einstein had done the cooking this problem would have been solved long ago. He shouldn't have spent so much time on E=mc2. A spell slaving away in the kitchen would have been a lot more helpful to me right now.

   Happy days dear reader. I hope you enjoy your Sunday. I am off back to the kitchen to prepare Sunday supper and not a bell pepper in sight today - I don't think my sanity could stand it....