I'm wondering if I can get away with trying to join the The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists with a 10 year old and-never-used-since BSc and a handful of hypothetical experiements on hamsters. If you know anyone likely to be interested in membership, please encourage them to apply.

NB I'd also heavily recommend The Annals of Improbable Research generally to anyone with a slightly sciency bent and a decent sense of humour. It contains classic ground breaking research such as:

There's also the book which was one of the more formative publications of my young life along with Tank Girl and "Seawater and the Dragon" which sadly, seems to have gone out of print. Enjoy!

Exerpt from a very wonderful book I’m reading

“What is your colour?”

“My colour?”

“Surely you know your colour?”

“People often remark on my red face”

“I do not mean that at all”

….

“No doubt you are aware that the winds have colours. A record of this belief will be found in the literature of all the ancient people. There are four winds and eight sub-winds, each with its own colour. The wind from the east is a deep purple, from the south a fine shining silver. The north wind is a hard black and the west is amber. People in the old days had the power of perceiving these colours and could spend a day quietly on the hillside watching the beauty of the winds, their rise and fall and changing hues.

“A persons colour is the colour of the wind prevailing at their birth [and you can] tell the length of your life from it. Yellow means a long life and the lighter the better.”

“Please explain”

“It is a question of making little gowns. When I was born, there was a certain policeman present who had the gift of windwatching. Just after I was born he went outside and examined the colour of the wind. He had a secret bag with him full of certain materials and bottles and he had tailor’s instruments also. He was outside for about ten minutes. When he came back in again, he had a gown in his hand and he made my mother put in on me.

“Every time my birthday came, I was presented with another of these gowns identical to the last except it was put on over the other one and not in place of it. You may appreciate the extreme delicacy and fineness of the material when I tell you that even at five years old with five of these gowns together on me, I still appeared to be naked. It was, however, an unusual yellowish sort of nakedness. Of course there was no objection to wearing other clothes over the gown. I usually wore an overcoat.

“With each year and each gown, the colour will get deeper and more pronounced. In my own case, I had attained a bright full blown yellow at fifteen although the colour was so light at birth as to be imperceptible. I am now nearly seventy and the colour is a light brown. As my gowns come to me, the colour will deepen to a dark brown, then a dull mahogany and from that ultimately to that very dark sort of browness that one associates with stout. The colour will gradually deepen gown by gown and year by year until it appears to be black. Finally a day will come when the addition of a new gown will actually achieve real and full blackness. On that day, I will die."

“So from the colour of your birth wind, you can tell roughly whether you will be long lived or short lived?”

“Yes. Some of them like purple or maroon are very bad and mean an early grave. Pink, however, is excellent and there is a lot to be said for certain shades of green or blue”

What is your birth wind colour do you think? I really hope mine is the lightest shade of cream....

(excerpts chopped loosely and paraphrased from Flan O’Brien’s “The Third Policeman”)