Those Two Must be out of Their Tiny Minds

The kitchen here had a very familiar smell this morning which took me right back to the backroom behind our chemistry lab at school. This room was ostensibly for the storage of dangerous chemicals and also included a tempting box with the standard radioactivity warning symbol on it. However, it was actually a sort of satellite staff room for the science teachers and lab assistants where they would make tea in a large chemistry beaker and add milk using pipettes – maybe that should be called teatration. There was probably only enough room for three people sat on stools but this cosiness was what was so attractive about it.

The corresponding room at my middle school was less inviting being lined with pickled biological specimens some of very dubious age and quality which rendered it as out-of-bounds for many of the more squeamish among us. The science teachers there would drink their tea at the high desks at the front of class. If you wanted to speak to them you had to approach and peek over the desk, standing on tip-toes unless you were invited up onto the raised bit behind.

I could continue with these reminiscences for ages but they seem out of place, needing a proper document, not that it would be interesting to anyone but me and maybe my daughter. Though it does involve escaped chinchillas, greedy locusts and a jet of flame from the gas taps that nearly required us to call out Red Adair.

And that is how I come to have no eyebrows.