SOUP AND A 9/8 SLIP JIG

The Bishop's Waltham Twinners make a right-hand star

Sunday night. My Dad's making soup (it's his latest thing) and my Mum's watching Poldark, a sort of swash-buckling period drama. The kitchen smells of raw onions and stewing vegetables, which seems strangely fitting.

I don't know where the soup thing started. I think he grew too many leeks on the allotment and wondered what to do with them. Plus, his background is in chemistry, and that always leads to dangerous experimentation in the kitchen, sooner or later.

Not like us physicists. We end up as keyboard players in folk bands who play at barn dances for small town twinning associations, don't we? No? Just me then?

Last night's gig was in a place called Bishop's Waltham. Even my sat nav wasn't quite sure I was in the right place. The venue seemed to be a sort of town-hall/gymnasium with a stage, much like a school assembly hall... in the middle of nowhere. I imagined it to be the kind of place where they count the votes on election night.

It went alright, I suppose. People enjoyed it and nobody fell over trying to 'thread the needle' or 'strip the willow'. I had an odd conversation with a man about trains and I almost messed up the timing of the 9/8 slip-jig, but to be fair, dancing to a 9/8 slip-jig is always going to be a little... irregular.

As an added bonus, I didn't have to drive home through central London. This time, the sat nav dragged me through the wilds of Hampshire, my headlamps illuminating hedges and trees in the darkness. If you want to get lost in the middle of nowhere, take a sat nav, that's my advice. As the orange petrol light flashed up from the dashboard, I started to wonder whether I'd also be spending the night wrapped up in an anorak on the back seat of my car. Thankfully not.

The soup is pervading the house now, in a way that would be charming and appetising to anyone who hadn't eaten for a few days. I don't know what he's hoping to do with it, he's made enough to feed the village. Meanwhile, Poldark is swishing around Cornwall on his horse while the women of the nation swoon at their televisions. If I close my eyes, I could almost be in an eighteenth century farmhouse.

I won't though. Work tomorrow - with actual computers and emails and people who get stressed about them. And anyway, he's just a fictional character, right, old Ross Poldark?

Plus, I bet he couldn't play a 9/8 slip-jig.