Somerset's liquid gold

09.00.  Filming at Sheppy’s Cider near Taunton . A crisp frosty morning.  David Sheppy inspecting two huge oak vats of Cider.  The air filled with the sweet heady scent of crushed apples – Dabinett, Kingston Black and Yarlington Mill.  Streams of apples being fed into the hopper and scrunched through the press. Gallons of un-fermented juice slowly filling the vats.  The unforgettable sound of primary fermentation – a vigorous energetic bubbling. Somerset’s liquid gold waiting to be bottled.

Avocets - image courtesy of BBC

Monday 3pm. Grey and overcast. River Parrett estuary. Tripod legs sinking slowly in the mud. Struggling to keep the rain off the lens. Mattebox getting battered by the south westerly wind. Filming the naturalist Robin Prowse walking along the sea-wall of the banks of the Parrett to provide a sense of scale against the Steart sea defences.  And there on a sand-bar right in front of us, half a dozen Black Tailed Godwits and sixty Avocets busily feeding on the ebb tide. I’d have been overjoyed to see one.

Being interviewed by the great Joe McEntee of the Institute of Physics

Monday morning 08.30, Dirac House, Institute of Physics, Bristol.  Having recently finished Graham Fermalo’s biography of  Paul Dirac, I felt I was walking on hallowed ground as I entered the building. Worked alongside a great team from Mendip Media to deliver a half-day video training seminar to a group of very bright-eyed, bushy-tailed science journalists. My role, for once, was to step in front of the camera and be Professor Redpath – a cross between Professor Branestawm, David Bellamy and Dame Edna Everage. My challenge was to take an ordinary domestic appliance and provide an unexpected twist in the narrative so that the journalists had to think quickly on their feet in the interview session. Thanks to a little surreal dream time on the late train home from Paddington the night before, I became, for one magical hour, the inventor of the super-string pasta creator (a garlic press), an aural memory recovery kit (a pair of ordinary headphones) and a sonic parabolic reflector for seventy-five year old nightclubbers (a kitchen colander).  The journalists took it in their stride without batting an eyelid.  Expect to see them presenting their own science channels in cyberspace before long. Quite what my youngest brother Steve (a Professor in real life) thought remains to be seen.