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of the best Armagnac you can find, set out the mixture in blobs on a baking sheet and grill them quickly. These are Samper’s justly renowned Mice Krispies; and as a way of teasing the palates of visiting gourmets they are unsurpassed. They somehow manage to give off an aura of warm haylofts and hazelnuts nibbled amid stubble beneath great yellow harvest moons. For the present occasion, though, I incline towards the vol-au-vent solution which it now occurs to me could easily become vole-au-vent with a slight change of its rodent filling.
    So that’s settled. I put the tiny giblets and skeletons (how touchingly frail they are!) on to boil in a bare cup of water with a quarter of the smallest shallot I can find and a single juniper berry, and turn to the tender Cumbrian lamb I had the butcher mince up fine for me in Woodbridge yesterday. This, too, can go into puff pastry cases, enriched with tiny quantities of chocolate, à la rabbit in chocolate that the Mexicans do so well. Into the mixture go four drops of Fernet-Menta, the Branca Brothers’ bid to attract to their exquisite original product a wider public than hollow-eyed topers. A little finely chopped basil and fresh mint will add green top notes, and my betting is that Samper’s After Eight Mince will not soon be forgotten. Of course, both these little amuse-gueules are savoury. Ideally, I would like an additional dish of sweet beetles for my diners to crunch on – probably the candy-bug Scarabaeus gastromellifer that Guatemalan Indians give their boys as a reward for not crying during circumcision, an operationperformed by the village shaman using his or her teeth. These yellow-spotted delicacies have the additional advantage (for a dinner party, that is) of being mildly aphrodisiac. But in default of such exotica in Suffolk I think I shall accompany my ground-breaking hors d’oeuvres with my patented liver smoothie (served with a slice of lime, a sprig of basil and a sprinkling of hundreds-and-thousands as a final touch of festive playfulness). It really is just too banal to serve nothing but unrelieved savouries before a main course. Finally – and all those years in Tuscany have clearly left their wholesome mark – some bruschette spread with my inventive haddock marmalade , which isn’t sweet but is wonderfully confected with sour cream, a pinch of cinnamon and cooked lime peel, carefully de-pithed to avoid bitterness.
    Adrian, bless him, turns up for a conventional bread- and-cheese lunch. I am itching to consult him about my grand operatic plan but first he has to play dutiful uncle to Josh. He has brought his nephew a junior microscope which he sets up on the kitchen table. They look at several prepared slides of the sort of unsavoury little creatures one swallows without noticing while swimming. Then he and Josh go outside with a jam jar to sample ditchwater or a puddle and for the next half hour they peer at daphnia and paramecia and amoebae swimming about. Cries of delight from Josh, who is especially pleased to watch them slow down, dry out and die beneath their cover slips in the heat of the lamp. Then they examine one of Luna’s hairs. I am astonished to see Josh, whose attention span is normally that of a grasshopper, diverted for so long without the least sign of boredom. Is this perhaps the eureka moment when we realise we have another Richard Feynman in the making? It would obviously please his scientist uncle but it would probably please his musician father even more, Max having once confessed he wished he’d been a palaeobiologist instead of a conductor. Maybe at the age of six Richard Feynman, too, wore his underpants back to front out of sheer other-worldly brilliance.
    Later, while changing for dinner, I tell Adrian about my operatic plans. However, my sketching out a grand future is halted by having to decide what to wear in order to wow these Suffolk grandees. I can’t wear my Blaise Prévert suit in chocolate corduroy: it had its