It’s Beetroot Jim, But Not As We Know It.

It happens sometimes; Mrs TD buys some delicacy, and then forgets it. Being fair, I am probably as guilty as she is but hers are more photogenic. It was probably mouldering in the fridge for a month before I noticed it; then I took it out and carefully nurtured it until the aroma demanded that it was dealt with appropriately.
 
A few years ago, Jnr was taking an Open University biology course; it was the fore-runner of the zoology degree for which he is currently studying. There was an experiment that I vividly remember that involved a tin of soup, a plastic food container and a week. It was remarkably simple, he had to pour the soup into the container and put the lid on it. He then had a week to calculate the volume of the container and subtract the volume of soup to find the volume of enclosed air.
 
At the end of the week, he took the lid off and counted the number of colonies of fungus growing. On the assumption that each colony was the product of a single fungal spore, he was able to calculate the density of fungal spores circulating in the air in our kitchen. I seem to remember that it worked out at about a dozen spores per litre; the elegance of the exercise rather intrigued me at the time, however, the beetroot experiment was not sufficiently well designed to ascertain anything other than that Herself’s memory isn’t what it was.
 
We were also involved in some research that had the three of us groveling about on our hands and knees in the glen - hunting a variety of small stripy snails; though the purpose of that escapes me now; at the end of the research, the creatures were humanely released in next door’s garden. Being away from their normal habitat, I assume that they merely supplemented the diet of the local blackbirds.