As one who considers that, due to overlapping space and personnel, one all-inclusive meeting would be a more efficient policy, which might also serve to promote some anti-patch squirreling openness, I’m bemused and disappointed that my suggestion has resulted in, err, an extra separate meeting. Sometimes you should just keep your mouth shut, eh? Aside from the fact that I’m an ‘unproven’ scientist, this is another reminder of why I won’t move among the upper echelons – I just don’t do politics.

Unlike some: hagfish writhing together in a bucket in a mating garter snake masquerade. The latest spin? A ‘Coalition Committee’ to ensure that differences are aired and smoothed in secret, in order to maintain the tiddly-boo facade, so all the minion citizens of the broken, under-sized society needn’t be troubled by reality.

These things perhaps shouldn’t bother. But they do. Thus, feeling lately uncommunicative, I’ve holed myself up in one of the ‘scope rooms, wherein I’ve rigged up the computer with a woofered speaker set, and have been catching up on some oft-displaced counting. So, there’s me, cathartically blasting out Robert Plant, and Black Sabbath (because I’m feeling angry), singing to a microscope, thumb-clicking to the thumping beat, seeking temporary oblivion. Hey, I can multitask after all! Looking at some numbers later… How come then, although that growth factor has no effect on counts and, predictably, neither does an inhibitor of its associated signalling pathway, that the two in combination increases them? (Hmm, actually a few look suspiciously high out of pattern – Bill Ockham’s fast drum fills, perhaps?)

Some louche predictions:

• The Lib Dems are finished as a party
• England will not win the World Cup
• I could be out of a job by the end of the year

Each arguable either way. I may well be wrong; however, I’d wager on at least one out of three. I hope the coalition works, really I do (- I think); but a relationship with a vacillator is almost inevitably doomed. And I hope England wins, although I’d be a little more confident were the agent-less Paul Scholes persuaded out of international retirement; rather than glory going to some overpaid pitch-kissing self-crosser entreating divine reward for diving. Apparently, people are happier when there’s a World Cup on, temporarily distracted into cohesive focus. As for me… I suppose I’d better make up my mind.