I have my own image of science. I like to think that scientists show a spiritual dignity above the frenetic, last-ditch-everything Bakhtinian roundabout of life. In that idiosyncratic little fool’s dream world that I live in I like to think of scientists doing everything better and not worrying like I do about hair and holes and hickeys, to sum it up in the most cryptic, but also, oddly, the most concrete way I can. Hm hm and Hm.

Viruses are apparently “strands of genetic code wrapped in protein,” and they can be “60 times smaller than a red blood cell.” How poetic and simultaneously comforting these phrases are! How they send one’s mind reeling into the smaller, more delicate vessels of the universe!

Here is a small success for the intercultural cooperation in which Anglofritz specialises. Heidelberg, Munich and Oxford Universities have cooperated in creating a 3D image of the HIV virus. It turns out it’s made of tiny but deadly Weetabixes in a blue breakfast bowl, doused in luminous yellow milk. But the BBC, as usual, describes the matter in more elegant terms than I – “the core of the virus - which is cone-shaped - spans the width of the viral membrane.” Oh do it to me right now, my darling! For those confused by my conceit – this is Weetabix.