If we in Britain were Ancient Egyptian, we would be about to celebrate the Feast Of The Tail.

Or, more succinctly: Sed. The celebration of fifty years of a Pharaoh’s rule. And while we are celebrating sixty, the principle of marking the milestones is still there.

Every Pharaoh had special ceremonial robes. And these robes had a tail.

Ancient historians have speculated whether this indicates that originally the ruler would have worn animal skin, with tails outstretched behind.

The feast to celebrate a ruler’s continued reign replaced a much darker affair. For in the mists of time, they would ritually sacrifice a ruler after fifty years.

The very idea. Our English Kings wouldn’t stand for being bumped off after fifty years of service. Not after handling five decades of the disgruntled, acerbic inhabitants of this strange group of islands which fights so very much above its weight.

Henry III spent his 56 years of rule battling belligerent barons over the contents of the Magna Carta; he was just nine years old when he began his rule. 1266 was his jubilee year: 50 years of trouble and strife. I wonder if he felt like celebrating.

In 1277 Edward III crossed the fifty year milestone. The founder of the Order of the Garter was 14 when he became king, and  celebrated his jubilee year by shuffling off this mortal coil.

It was George III who saw fit to celebrate the coming and going of the fifty year mark. He hated the stifling ceremonial of the London Court, and instead came to his beloved Windsor Castle to mark the passing of the decades, holding a quiet service at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, followed by a firework display at Frogmore House, and an ox roast on Bachelor’s Acre.

He almost made it to his sixtieth year of rule, dying just months short of his diamond jubilee.

But Victoria made it to her sixtieth year, indeed trotted past it. A strange business, the service outside St Paul’s Cathedral with the Queen sitting in a carriage: but it was gratifyingly public, for a queen who had disappeared from the public eye to such an extent. The country went jubilee bonkers, and the modern jubilee tradition of festooning buildings and taking over the  streets for parties was born.

Our monarch is the fifth to reach fifty years. And it’s easy to underestimate her impact: a spine to the governments which arrive and depart, a familiar face even when there’s a new prime minister; the person you sit down to watch after roast dinner and christmas pudding on December 25th; the solemn figure in designer pastels who walks the streets to speak to crowds, who has begat a dynasty which captivated the world with its stories, both glorious and scurrilous.

We, here in Britain, have been very fortunate. Our Queen shares with Elizabeth I and Victoria a sense of duty rare even in women in this day and age: for a wide and grandmother she is still, like Oriana, wedded to her country.

I was a child for the celebrations of her 25th year, bedecked in blue flares with white t-shirt and a red jumper. My mind lives in the present and has trouble with my own memory: the seventies are a haze of muddy brown and dreary pop music. I believe everyone got a coin, and we all partied accordingly.

And now I am bringing our children to celebrations, thirty-five years on.

Felix and the Princesses dressed in clothes corresponding to the decades of Elizabeth’s reign. Felix bagged the seventies. Phil found a little shop in Pimlico which sold psychadelic Huggy-Bear-suits, and brought one home, and his son went proudly into the seventies, enjoying it much more than we ever enjoyed the real decade.

And Al? I pottered off with him to his jubilee celebrations yesterday. It was a games-only extravaganza, outside and inside, with a slap-up royal picnic and jubilee hats and mats and flags to wave enthusiastically. We played hard and Al sported the hat with something which looked like national pride, though it may have simply been that he could not see under the rim.

We are on the edge of our weekend to fete sixty years of one woman sticking with us through thick and thin, in times of press coverage favourable and unfavourable, of public perceptions sometimes respectful, sometimes critical.

We wait. And there is something jubilant in the air.

Dear Diary.

That urge to write a life down: it has come to most of us. Circumstances drive us into the act of recording details from our lives: Anne Frank responded to the stress of incarceration in a tiny secret hideout by writing, eloquently, evocatively. Samuel Pepys was a systematic archivist at heart, recording the details of a life full of event at a fascinating time.

And Joe Average has his share of diary writing. Take the fabulous introduction written, ostensibly, by Charles Pooter in Diary of a Nobody: “Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see – because I do not happen to be a ‘Somebody’ – why my diary should not be interesting.”

The details of the Nobody invented by George and Weedon Grossmith prove totally engrossing: from his affable friends who pop round for chats, to Sarah the cantankerous maid, to their headstrong son Lupin: the whole diary is a romp around the fine detail of a happy existence.

Highlights include Lupin’s pony-and-trap road rage; and his spectacular avoidance tactic when he loses Charles and his friends money on a ‘sure thing’: he jumps out of the drawing room window and runs away.

I keep my eye on the new bloggers coming through on WordPress. That first post after the generic ‘Hello World’ is so often a variation of Pooter’s introduction. It is a tentative toe into the world of diary writing: and a few go on to make it part of their day-to-day existence.

Why do we do it? Share the detail of our life with anonymous readers?

Dr Matthew Lieberman, a psychologist from the University of California in Los Angeles, thinks he may have the answer.

It is roughly three years since he and his team got together a group of people and scanned their brains before they wrote. Half were asked to write about neutral experiences: half chronicled a recent emotional incident.They wrote for 20 minutes a day, for four consecutive days.

And the scans revealed more than any diary could: it concluded that those who wrote about their emotions were unconsciously using a part of their brain which helped to reduce strong emotions.

Dr Lieberman told the Guardian: ”Writing seems to help the brain regulate emotion unintentionally. Whether it’s writing things down in a diary, writing bad poetry, or making up song lyrics that should never be played on the radio, it seems to help people emotionally.”

So writing a diary can overcome emotional upheaval, and actually make you happier, it seems.

Which is a good thing, especially if you’re the reigning monarch of a country and an empire. Queen Victoria wrote diaries throughout her 64 year reign. She wrote to the diary alone: a private audience with a notional reader.

She started her diaries at the age of 13, and tailed off just weeks before her death, creating 141 volumes and some 43,000 pages. The tales chronicle her meeting, marriage with and mourning of Albert, her many struggles with matters of state, and issues great and small.

Initially they were very private: latterly one could get to see them by special appointment at Windsor Castle.

But to celebrate our present queen’s milestone 60-year reign, Oxford’s Bodleian Library and The Royal Archives have collaborated to put the whole glorious lot online.

We can peruse Victoria’s words, some written in Victoria’s hand: and soon transcriptions of pages will also be available.

You can find them here. An unbelievable window into history in which one can read about the events of the last Diamond Jubilee, courtesy of the present one.

But it’s only for a short while. From July 2012, the diaries will be available only to those in the United Kingdom, and to specific libraries elsewhere.

So here are your starters orders as we in Britain head into our weekend of Diamond Jubilee celebrations: Ladies and gentlemen, these diaries are historical gold dust. They have been available to a chosen few academics for a very long time. And unless you live where I live, you have a month –  a precious window –  to read the diaries of the lady who gave her name to the Victorian era.

On your marks.

Get set.

Go.

The ant farm is not working out quite as we had hoped.

This is mainly due to the fact that Felix has lost a small but vital part of it: the door.

Thus, it is an open-door ant farm.

The very idea.

We waited and waited, through the long cold wet month of April, for an ant to appear to populate the ant farm. Felix went out faithfully, every day, to the back garden to check pavement mortar, under benches, beneath stones.

But the ants were not for coming out. Not in this chilly wet ant Armageddon.

And then the sun came. And lo, Felix found an ant: a lone ant, perhaps an envoy of some kind, sent out to see if the waters had subsided, because you see ants don’t have doves, and any attempt to send a dove out to find land might end in many ants being tragically squashed.

So the envoy ant was carefully wooed with a finger, and lovingly borne to the prepared ant farm, the precursor of a great Shrewsday colony, a brave new ant world.

Felix dropped it into the farm and then there was an almighty stampede by all adjacent humans to find something with which to block the door. My masterly solution was kitchen paper. We moulded it to fit the doorway: yet, with that ability to beam up, shared with the Star Trek crew, the ant teleported out of there. It was last spotted energising on the other side of the paper and heading for the back door to tell all the other ants what it had seen.

Doors do not hold much challenge for an ant.

As the envoy proved, when it relayed the untold riches which paved the kitchen floor in the people house at the end of their garden. Dog biscuits, bread crumbs, the odd squashed grape: no ant need go hungry, the envoy gushed  evangelically to his superiors.

Next thing we know, we have many ant farms, all run democratically by the ants. They have no doors but ant doors, hidden from the human gaze; run by the ants for the ants, with generous donations from the Shrewsday humans. The tiny free spirits are raiding the cupboards, the floorboards; they form orderly queues to claim the plunder just waiting for collection.

But they’re free spirits. We tried to borrow an ant’s time and it found our hospitality wanting. When he’d checked out the living conditions he moved swiftly on. It was the right time.

Sometimes you can’t make them stay.

It’s like friends, isn’t it? We work with them for ages and then it’s time for them to move, and it feels as though all the comfortable little rituals we share are about to disintegrate, and nothing will ever be the same again. Because they were part of the companionable fabric of our lives, we took them for granted: and now it is time for them to walk out of the open door.

Change is in the air: and sometimes change is painful.

Tonight I hitched a dog, slightly crazed with heat, to a lead and headed to the flat-top of the iron age fort a stone’s throw from our house, on the edge of a forest which has suddenly, with the sun, become impossibly beautiful.

And thunder clouds were sitting there in the sky, for observation purposes only, I think. The air was warm and thick, and suddenly I saw one of the most breathlessly wild sights you can see in a comfortable South Eastern forest.

Have you ever seen it? Two swifts, hunting.

Only with us for our warm months, these birds never land if they can help it. They spent most of their lives on the wing, far above us, spots in the sky.

But on rare warm evenings, when low-flying fat bugs hang in the air around our heads, they come down low to get them. And you see them up close.

You can’t press pause. You can’t stop them, air-scimitars that they are, slicing the warm currents with exuberant accuracy, more at home there than anywhere else. They are in their element, these small aerodynamic miracles, and totally focused on their work.

Standing watching them I knew this was time borrowed, a transient moment lent me from the wild: a creature so absorbed in living that we could only spectate and marvel.

But you can’t make them stay.

We all work on a system which involves borrowing other creature’s time. Sometimes it’s people, sometimes it is an envoy ant.

And sometimes it is a hunting air-scimitar, carving the air like a master sculptor.

Borrowed time is what makes our world go round.

A tale from way back when, which replays itself every Saturday: the dog’s ongoing antagonism towards huge huskies who run their sleighs in the forest.

The dog was breathtakingly audacious today, and I wasn’t there to see it.

Phil runs the dog at weekends. Saturday morning is rush hour in the woodlands which surround us. And the huskies are out to play.

They are strange beings, these beautiful dogs with so much of the wild pack about them.

Every Saturday they are ferried by van to the gateway to the forest, and harnessed up to sleighs which substitute wheels for rails.

If the huskies are great silver, pent-up warriors, then Macaulay is a shifty private, stubbing out a cigarette and scanning the horizon for any criminal opportunities before he shuffles on his way.

He does not like to walk past them.

When Phil reaches the forest path, flanked on both sides by those with lofty pedigrees, the dog hangs back and will not follow.

Because he, we and those huskies know that there is a pecking order, and that Mac is somewhere near the bottom with things that have only recently crawled up out of the sea.

And so, picture my little dog, as Phil puts him on the lead and leads him, glancing uneasily from side to side, one dishevelled paw after another, reluctant, along the parade.

Not so this morning. Because the huskies were still inside their white vans, awaiting the freedom for which their souls long, like a deer for running water.

Mac has never grasped the concept of sowing carefully, that one may reap. His idea of politics is lamentably warped.

Never mind the fact that next Saturday, the Samurais will be back, as intimidating as ever. Today, Caulay was going to make a typical terrier gesture.

So he selected the biggest, most showy sleigh. One which would need, ooooh, ten dogs to pull it.

And, as enraged eyes watched from behind glass van windows, he cocked his leg against it.

This is my territory now, he gestured, as he glanced at them over his shoulder.

Even as I tell the story, pictures of shredded dogs limbs fly terrifyingly through my mind. This was audacious, reckless daring, verging on the suicidal. Better be very, very careful next week.

Audacity, of course, is not limited to the canine race. A couple of weeks ago Phil and I stumbled upon a wonderful example of this trait : The First Men In The Moon.

The writer of the story, HG Wells, struck out audaciously into the most daring of science fiction. He chose to write, in 1901, about what might happen if someone ever invented a way to get to the moon.

He created an inventor, Dr Cavor, who allows his brilliant mind to wander untethered, almost without realising where he is treading.

He invents a substance he delightedly calls Cavorite. If you paint Cavorite on anything it renders the air directly above it weightless, the tale goes.

So of course that thing shoots upwards at breakneck speed.

And finally there is a businessman, a Mr Bedford, who has fled creditors in London and immediately, with native cunning, grasps the implication of Cavor’s invention as Cavor could never do. What plans someone daring could make for this Cavorite…

Risk is an integral part of audacity, and this short story of Wells’s has his characters risk everything to discover a brave new world.

The setting is a wonderful combination of fustian, Edwardian styling, total underestimation of what a trip to the moon would require, delight at discovery, and the realisation that in every risk lies deadly danger.

Wells was not the only one with his eyes on interplanetary travel.

One day CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein were sitting in the pub, as they did, and they were talking about the sorry state of story writing in their time.

CS Lewis had been struck by Wells’s story. There are apocryphal accounts which claim he had written to a close friend that it was the best of its kind he had seen.

Together, says CS Lewis’s biographer, AN Wilson, the two writers hatched an audacious plan. CS Lewis would write a space travel story, and JRR Tolkein would write a time-travel one.

Tolkein started and did not finish: it can be found in a collection of his writing published by his son- The Lost Road And Other Writings.

Lewis completed his, and called it Out Of The Silent Planet. It is the first book of a trilogy, and comes complete with a predatory professor who wished to colonise other worlds, and a language gap so cavernous the whole thing could only end in tears.

Audacity, for a dog, is a physical gesture to stake a claim. But for someone who writes audacity is a challenge, an adventure of the mind.

So many audacious adventures out there await, still to be written.

If we only dare.

When our Home Secretary was not a home secretary at all; before police reorganisations and passport staff cuts and abortive announcements about extraditing terrorists in the House Of Commons; once, she got very hot under the collar on behalf of the victimised people of Maidenhead.

It seems that parliamentary briefing documents on her constituency added a little colour to the statistics. They need not necessarily have bothered:  this area has colour all its own. With a privileged population of around 5,500, one area – Cookham – was featured as Britain’s second richest village in 2010 by Daily Telegraph readers.

Still, never one to miss a bit of exposition. May launched a scathing attack on the hapless researchers of the aforementioned documents for branding her constituency “somewhat spoiled by the gin and jag brigade.”

In a huffy letter to the Secretary of State she wrote: ”Not only do I feel this is offensive to members of my constituency and a wholly inappropriate way for a government department to regard an area, but it also concerns me as to the assumptions made by your department in dealing with my constituents.”

Allow me to give you a little insider knowledge.

For my sister-in-law was landlady of a great big Cookham pub, The Crown, from 1977-1989.

And my husband served faithfully as barman for intervals during her tenure.

And let me tell you: they had jags bursting out of every car park, and gin overflowing the glasses on the manicured village lawns. My sister-in-law had a jag: her clientele had jags. My husband, at the tender age of 17 having just passed his test, was handed the keys to a jag and allowed to cruise the lanes. He tells me that the hump back bridge at nearby Boulter’s Lock was a perennial problem for every Jaguar XJS driver, because you couldn’t see over the vast bonnet to the road ahead.

The poor victimised jag drivers were forced to drive it blind.

And so, Mrs May, though it pains me to gainsay your passionate campaigning, this place has been home to people with jags who drink gin for a very long time.

Cookham is an incredibly affluent area, home to various very important people.

And the evidence is that is has been, for centuries. Look in the gorgeous yard of the stunning little church and you will find that people lived a good long time there. There are vaults and tombstones with people living into their seventies way back in the seventeenth century. They lived well here long before jags were ever invented.

But it is also the most charming area imaginable.

This is where Ratty and Mole and Toad were born in the mind of Kenneth Graham. He lived in Cookham Dean as a child, and came back to write “Wind In The Willows”.

And it is the destination we chose for a picnic today, in lieu of Sunday Lunch. For England is cold and grey and rainy for an overwhelming percentage of the year; but when it is warm and sunny it is little short of paradise.

We threw a picnic in the National Trust picnic rucksack,made a flask of tea, and headed for the Thames.

After nudging the nice cars in the car park out of the way with our aged Merc, we began the most glorious amble across the common, towards the river. You know that sight when the boats appear to be sailing along the ground in a solemn traffic jam? There they were, nose to tail.

We passed houses beyond the dreams of avarice: a moneyed English Shangri-La, each mansion swathed in green trees. And as we got nearer to the river the dogs became visible: big ones, small ones, happy little corpulent ones, rangy racer-types. All on leads, all enjoying the sun and the social scene.

And so to our favourite bench by the river, shaded from the glare, opposite opulent boat houses, where we ate and watched the craft going by: canoes, rowboats, gin palaces, barges, all river-borne life was there, grinning and sun-kissed, cooled by the breezes of the Thames.

How can I describe the scene: the straw hats, the aquatint, benches for all, the affable conglomerations of picnickers with their salmon and champagne, the dappled willow-shade: a stroll to the churchyard and the stream-cool air of the 12th century church. This is England, my England; the most beneficial of clichés, a living oil painting through which one can stroll.

And so: if you find yourself in the South of England on a sunny Summer day, perhaps you might add, to your list of destinations, a trip to brave the gin and jag brigade, to picnic on the willowy river adored by Rat and Mole, at Cookham.

Euphonious words make the world go round.

The relationship of this word to a euphonium is not accidental: euphonious means pleasing to the ear; a certain musicality. An ease of pronunciation, if you will.

Like mytacism, which applies to you if you have an excessive fondness for the letter ‘M’. Or quidnunc: the quintessential busybody. The derogatory name for a doctor is quack, because once upon a time, the old Dutch ointment sellers were called Quacksalvers. Some words  fly off the tongue: others leave you stuck in phonological mire.

It is in the world of science that things euphonious really seem to go a little awry.

There, the razor-sharp systems men of the science world might use their names to name something; or a string of referenced syllables becomes a name simply because no-one can think of anything better. Like the chemical sallicyl ally aldehyde. Or the word for an alignment of the planets, syzygy.  

These words are less than euphonious. They leave a little something to be desired. They take work. They are a marketing men’s nightmare.

The issue of euphonics raised its head during a fairly heated family dispute yesterday, as Phil and I contemplated the woodpile in busy silence.

It is not a pretty woodpile. It is one of two not very pretty woodpiles on which I am waging war.

“It needs to go, Phil,” I said bluntly. “It’s mainly bits of old drawer. I could take it to the tip today if you liked.”

Phil wilted a little. His woodpile is so much more to him than a pile of old chipboard pilfered from the carcasses of disastrously dilapidated furniture. His eye lights up when he looks at it, for this is free energy.

Just as Scrooge liked the dark because it was cheap, Phil loves tacky old formica because it is free heat. It is a metaphorical broadsword directed at those greedy fuel companies; a blow for Everyman’s inner caveman.

Man did this once in front of a cave after a day out hunting. These days, it’s more chimenea and chipboard. But the principle’s the same.

And Phil is right: there’s energy in that chipboard all right. A lot of things will burn, given the right conditions.

There was a time, we observed, when scientists would have assured us that it was chock-full of phlogiston.

It doesn’t roll off the tongue, does it? Not in any way a marketing man’s dream. Phlogiston-modelled on the Greek word meaning ‘burning up’ – is a laborious wade-theough-the-mire of a word. When I say it part of me doubts I will get through it to the other side. I am like Pilgrim in the Slough of euphonious Despond.

It is the word scientists used to explain the change in form when something burned. Thus, when Phil burns a piece of unsightly chipboard it disintegrates, and all is left is a pile if ash. When something was heated, the theory went, it consisted of phlogiston and ash, and the burning set the phlogiston free.

Poppycock, said the euphonically-named Antoine Lavoisier, who showed that in fact a gas was used in the burning: and he named it with equal musicality: oxygen.

Phlogiston is a legacy of the fact that scientists choose these names themselves. German chemist and physician Georges Stahl took the Greek name for “burned” and ‘flame, and combined them in this monstrosity. No writer was consulted before the word was put out there: the scientist considered he had made a great discovery and thus of course he should have the prerogative to name it, with a spot of classical flourish.

Just maybe, Stahl should have considered the effect their name might have on posterity.

But the name of the basic building brick of matter: oh, they got that one right. Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig came up with an ordering system for sub-atomic particles in 1964. Protons, neutrons, pions: they are none of them elementary, because they are made of a smaller thing.

And to name the smaller thing, they used the work of James Joyce.

Finnegan’s Wake, a baffling masterpiece of comedy, casts far and wide for its material. Joyce uses present day postmen and pubs and weaves them with ancient lore and the old Irish Kings.

Amongst all this – on page 373 of my copy – is a thirteen-line poem poking fun at King Mark, the King who is betrayed by his wife in the Tristram legend.

“Three quarks for Muster Mark,

Sure, he hasn’t got much of a bark

And sure, any he has, it’s all beside the mark.”

The scientists cast around and lit upon this perfect word: the quark. Euphonic, musical, succinct. And they used it to name those tiny things which make up sub atomic particles.

If only James Joyce had been around when phlogiston’s unfortunate name was coined.

This is a roundabout response to Sidey’s weekend theme: contrasts. 

I ran out of dog food yesterday.

It happens often, and I am full of ingenious ways to solve the problem. But there was little to help as I gazed desperately round the kitchen, seeking some dog-food substitute as two limpid brown eyes flanked by triangularly expectant ears looked unwaveringly up at me.

The gaze is something akin to mind control, and no-one can stand it for long. Thus, under its insistent influence, my powers of decision-making are impaired.

Which is why my eyes came to rest on the gently casseroling best steak, the very expensive beef which simmered gently in a  mustard gravy in the slow cooker.

Today I was making a pie: a glorious pie for my mother and father to enjoy as my mother convalesces at home.

I eyed the beef. The dog eyed me. There was a moment of excruciating indecision.

And then I grabbed his bowl and the ladle and scooped in a generous portion. Robbing the sick to feed the insistent, so to speak.

Here in Britain, if you speak to a certain generation – the one born during or just after World War II –  I dare you to get them talking about wasting food. They will get on their soapbox, whoever they are, and sermonise better than Wesley himself. They can’t bear waste, they tell you accusingly, as if you get your kicks by buying food from the supermarket and throwing them directly onto a food mountain in the back garden so it can decompose gently.

I have a private theory that Churchill’s propaganda hit its mark most of all with the young children of the time, and they are all irrevocably brainwashed.

Howsomever, if any member of that generation knew that Macaulay the dog had had a large bowl of best steak casserole, the sermon would last a week.

I watched guiltily as the dog eyed the steak with undisguised admiration. This is more like it, he emanated. It was a tad hot: he danced a little ballet round his bowl, testing one piece, nibbling another in an ecstasy of anticipation. And much, much later, when he had finished, I have never seen a cleaner bowl.

However, on reflection, I have come to look upon the decision to give the dog best steak as a dud one.

One clear reason to avoid giving steak to dogs.

Miasma.

We have come a long way since Victorian reformist and sewer king, Sir Edwin Chadwick, pronounced that “all smell is a disease.” The theory that ‘bad air’ could spread pestilence existed at least since the ancient Chinese believed their southern mountains harboured air packed with pestilence.

Officials which had offended the state, and members of the criminal fraternity were banished to the miasma of the south in much the same way that Russia exiled people to Siberia.

The poet, Han-Yu, writes of his exile:

“The clouds gather on Ch’in Mountains, I cannot see my home;
….But I know that you will come from afar, to fulfil your set purpose,
And lovingly gather my bones, on the banks of that plague-stricken river.”

Man was utterly convinced that illnesses like cholera travelled by miasma -through bad smells – until a rather clever GP used his bonce.

Dr John Snow served the district in and around Soho when a horrifying outbreak of cholera claimed some 616 people in 1854.  It shocked London to the core; yet in the midst of all the panic, Snow was talking to patients. And what he learned led him to believe the sufferers all had one thing in common.

The Broadwick Street pump. Everyone got their water from the pump: it was popular because the water tasted better, locals said. Some even ignored nearer pumps and went that extra mile for the flavour.

But the sewer systems had not yet reached Soho and things were rather grim. The public well had been dug just three feet away from a leaky old cesspit: into which the nappies of a baby who had died from cholera had been washed.

Dr Snow vanquished the Bad Air Theory. Cholera, the Black Death, both had another source, he concluded. And while airborne droplets can travel from one human to another through coughing or even laughing, a bad smell holds little fear.

But I’m not convinced.

Because just hours after the dog had feasted on mustard steak, it was bedtime. And the wages of feeding the dog steak were the worst of air. How any small dog can produce so much miasma is beyond scientific reasoning. He was a veritable miasma factory.

And so, like those unfortunate Chinese exiles, I, too, got my come uppance. I have spent the night with the worst of air, and have experienced feeling really quite unwell.

Miasma is alive and well, and residing in the small barrel-tummied miasmatron on the cushion at my feet.

One of the greatest gardens in the world was built for a concubine.

A Babylonian priest, a couple of Greek historians, Greek Geographer Strabo and Greek engineer Philo of Byzantium all wrote witness accounts of the place.

The gardens were ordered constructed by Nebuchadnezzar II, to please his wife who was awfully homesick. She longed for the lush green mountains of home.

“…Being a Persian by race and longing for the meadows of her mountains,” writes Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, using the old accounts of a far earlier recount; “ [she] asked the king to imitate, through the artifice of a planted garden, the distinctive landscape of Persia”.

These gardens were made for love, poetry in garden form.

They were raised up on great high stone pillars, and ascended in tiers, each planted with great trees and plants so that it hung down to enchant those strolling along the raised paths.

When all was said and done, this was a garden an insanely rich lovesick husband might design. Siculus says it is a lush garden but also has a fair dose of theatre about it. None of the accounts tell us what they planted. We are left to marvel at Nebuchadnezzar’s amorous derringdo, with no hint of what actually hung there.

To a gardener – even a dormant one such as myself – the plants are the thing, with which to catch the concubine of a King.

Archaeologists have found no evidence the gardens ever existed. Which is strange. And Herodotus, the most contemporary writer to their time, makes no mention of it in his histories.

So some speculate this was just a grand story, an invention. A poetic device, fifty cubits high in a King’s imagination.

I wonder.

The grand gardening gesture is part and parcel of gardening: great Italian rococo affairs with outrageous fountains, or Capability Brown moving whole hills to alter the landscape. I’ve visited privileged garden after privileged garden. It’s all power play.

But the big stuff comes a poor second to one beautiful flower, a surprise on a Summer’s morning.

I love Cornish walls, for in that wet warm climate every crevice is filled with something beautiful. I have tried to bring the wild flowers north with no success. They are happy there, on their perch on damp stone, nodding at the fishing boats in the bay.

Like mermaids, they fade and wither, away from their native land. At school we have been putting seeds in a jam jar with a wet tissue. They sat unmoving for a day or two: and then sent up tiny shoots which delighted my streetwise, edgy charges. The hardest shell is pierced by such small signs.

And ask any gardener what are the most precious moments of the pastime and they will tell you about walking, in the early morning, around a beloved patch of earth, being greeted by new shoots, or buds, or flowers, or fruit.

The new stuff; the surprise plants in unexpected places: it all comes together this Summer,  in the most glorious movement around our capital city. It’s called “Pimp Your Pavement.”

This is what you do: find somewhere ugly, and plant things which will grow there.

It’s not the grand gesture of the ornamental garden: rather, it is the Cornish wall act of finding a crevice, or a patch of concrete, and sowing something beautiful, just for the sheer joy of it.

It is one of the mainstays of the very first Chelsea Flower Show Fringe Festival. All round London PYP plantings are happening. They are not targeting whole gardens but barren patches of pavement, the lost crevices of urban life everyone looks past.

It’s edgy. It’s beautiful. It’s almost irresistible.  Take a look.

Its values are bursting out all over, and BBC’s Farming Today programme of May 23rd featured Writtal College’s stand, which bucks the posh Chelsea trend by making veg containers out of old doors.

Compost, says PYP, compost and seeds: they rock our world. Writtle Lecturer Simon Watkins told FT’s reporter: “Anyone who wants to transform their community can get involved. In community gardening you’re getting people who literally are guerilla gardening and pimping bus stops, turning up in the middle of the night with a bag of compost and some plants, and doing things like filling the ash trays up and putting plants in them instead, encouraging people to be much more healthy.”

The planstmen and women are taking over the urban landscape. We know what will survive where: we’re gathering the right flowers and veg: and then, beware. No bus stop, no concrete crevice is safe.

It’s time for urbanites to green up.

Summer has popped her head around the door here in the UK, and my children are suddenly insistent upon al fresco dining.

Since we have not had a British summer for some years now, the children are in love with the idea of picnicking. But they have not altogether considered the implications.

Tonight a fly arrived to dine with us. Eight year old Felix was horrified. He sat looking outraged and glowering at me.

I’m not sure what he meant me to do. Should I don a tiny red cape and swing it to and fro between thumb and forefinger, yelling ‘Ole?’

“It’s a fly, Felix,” I said. “Flies happen. This is outside. You just have to get used to them.”

He clutched his home-made burger tighter to him and winced whenever our gatecrasher came close.

There have been other small visitors to the garden, however, which charmed him: top of his A list was the inchworm who appeared on my shoulder, and which he adopted  with all speed.

It is the creature’s movements which charm. It seems to be painstakingly measuring out whatever it encounters, like some small conscientious council clerk. Look closer, and you’ll see the Godzilla appeal for a small boy. This is a miniature monster, an adventure in a jam jar: and one with a placid temperament.

We watched it inch along his arm and then hoist itself on its little forelegs to have a reconnoitre, to nose around before gathering itself up to mark out another measure in this universe of infinite inches.

Consider the muscle power required to move in this way. A caterpillar like this has no bones to which to attach tendons and direct muscles to do its bidding.

Instead, says a 2007 article for the Journal of the Royal Society, it has the most extraordinary muscle quality: soft tissues which actually have similar properties to rubber; elastic proteins which choreograph electrical impulses, contractions and stretching to the most limber and sophisticated degree. These small aeronauts in waiting have a different freedom of movement from their adult counterparts: unlimited by internal skeleton, they are flexible beyond our wildest dreams, with 4,000 muscles compared to our 600 or so.

A very small inspiration, and one which is being mirrored in the world of the robot.

Scientists believe they have created a mechanical precursor to a muscle. A team of researchers from Nankai University in China have combined two materials which can obey the commands of an electrical impulse with a primitive form of flexible movement. Polydiacetylene, a crystal, deforms in response to an electrical current. But it’s fragile: so they’ve coated it with the new super-substance – strong and flexible – known as graphene.

With a little electrical current the artificial creation can exert as much push as natural muscle.

And what better way to test it, than to create a tiny inchworm robot? The scientists made a little worm which arches and relaxes in response to a current. It’s sedate: just 5mm in 20 seconds. But they’re working on it.

Yet as fast as they develop artificial means of movement, we develop new ways to command our world by moving the minimum of muscles.

And a few days ago we saw the end of the beginning in the sofa domination revolution: the death of the man who invented the remote control.

Eugene Polley: born in another era, in Chicago in 1915, he joined Zenith Electronics at 20 as a stock boy. But life changed irrevocably at 40, in 1955, when he worked out that you could point a beam of light at a television fitted with photoelectric cells and turn it on and off.

Instantly the need to walk to the television was a thing of the past and the couch potato was born.

The fruits of the need to move less: with remote control, with cars which respond to a little foot pressure and a turn of the wheel; they are already evident. And when I watch the Disney film Wall-E, I watch their picture of a future where corpulence is king and muscles atrophy with trepidation.

Yet might nature play another of her tricks on us? Might she begin to dispense with our internal skeletons all together, and develop our muscle power to unsettlingly flexible ends?

Perhaps the future is out there: and it is inchworm-shaped.

A repost, judiciously cut, about those small green vegetables with which children seem to have a love-hate relationship.

How about some pure, escapist stories? The world has shut a door for me today, and I feel the need for other worlds.

Perhaps I’l just pick a vegetable, any vegetable, and string a few stories along it, both familiar and unfamiliar.

Like the story of the impish monkey, who looked longingly down on a great Indian King and his closest, most trusted advisor, thousands of years ago.

The King was the ruler of a great city, Benares, a mighty civilisation which towered over the banks of the Ganges. Its streets were full of hustle, and the river was never without a wallowing water buffalo or a holy Brahmin at prayer.

Even Kings must get away from it all some time.

And the monkey happened upon the great man, as he and his friend stopped to feed their horses during a hunting expedition.

The monkey was peckish. He ate well, out here in the wilderness, with everything that nature had to offer him. But those peas the horses were eating – those peas looked good.

For these little primates there is only one way to get what you want: ambush. He waited for his moment. And then he hopped adroitly down to the horses’ trough.

The two men, watched, fascinated and amused, as those tiny hands scooped up more peas that either would have thought possible. And as they moved in to shoo him away he fled with the tiny gems in his hand, screeching his disapproval of their change in policy.

And then it happened: just one small pea dropped from his tiny grasp.

To monkeys, possession is an art. And in this elite corner of the world, its practitioners are perfectionists. Consequences are unimportant in the face of possessing something new.

So when that pea slipped from the monkey’s grasp, with the little creature’s mindset, there was nothing for it.

He spread his palms to catch the errant pea, and all the rest cascaded down out of reach.

That wise counsellor who rode with the king laughed so much he could barely breathe. And the he turned to his King, and he said: Don’t make the same mistake, Sire. When you are greedy, remember that monkey.

Peas and beans play a part in the folklore of Western countries too.There’s the English boy who chooses to do a deal for beans because some old codger said they were magic.

Poor Jack was branded a fool for making a gullible exchange during a chance meeting along the road.

But the story’s ending belies its beginning. Jack choose to take a risk, and courted the displeasure of his mother in doing so.

He lied, stole and cheated his way to treasures untold, telling himself that big ugly giant was fair game. Finally he murdered the giant. And he and his mother lived happily ever after.

Greed, according to this tale, is good.

Pulses: a monkey’s jewel; a yokel’s passport to plunder. And also: a way to check a princess’s pedigree.Surely every proper princess will have scrolls and parchments and royal seals a plenty to vouch for her royal forebears.

Wrong.

When one Danish Prince Charming came to his time for marriage, he was adamant. He must have a real princess.

His mother had ways to make sure this happened. These mothers always do. So when a beautiful princess arrived helpless, soaking wet and alone at the door, claiming to be a real princess, she did not reason why, but put her plan into action.

Servants cursed and stewards swore under their breath as the order went out: every mattress in the palace must be brought to the main guest room. A princess was coming to stay.

Every door in the palace was jammed by some maidservant or other trying to manhandle a duckdown monolith through the door.

And gradually all the mattresses converged on the cavernous four poster bed in the huge guest chamber.

But before the first mattress could be laid, the Queen Mother commanded sharply:”Wait!”

One hard, round, dry pea was set on the bed. Then they streamed back in and the mattresses were piled high on top.

Of course, the princess could not sleep because she was a delicate princess, and the pea beneath the down rendered her black and blue.

The true princess may have had the personality of bilgewater, but the pea rendered her marriageable.

And so these unassuming vegetables have become story fodder throughout the world, and I have no doubt there are more pea consommes where these came from.

But each people deals with the little green spheres in a different way. The humble pea has sparked thoughts of wisdom, greed and plain vanity.

Another reason to eat all your peas.

Picture source here