Well, here I am attending the Science Foo Camp at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, a gathering of some of the coolest and most influential scientists, technologists, engineers and thinkers on the planet (and me). It’s quite something to sit in an audience and find yourself wedged between Freeman Dyson, James Randi, Carl Djerassi, Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson… and listen to Charles Simonyi giving an account of his recent journey into space … with Martha Stewart adding celestial cookery tips. Sometimes you feel that were just one more neuron to be added to this group, the world would implode into some kind of intellectual singularity.

There are other Nature Network bloggers here – Corie Lok, Euan Adie, and Anna Kushnir – so they can do the hard work, which leaves me to tell you all about Poppy, the Plastic Pig.

After we got our chickens, and Mrs Gee in particular was showing Earth-motherly signs of a smallholding nature, I would creep up on her and say, sotto voce, that I was going to get her a pig for her birthday. This was especially cruel of me, as I know my wife should love to keep a pig, but as we live in a regular suburban garden, not a smallholding, this would be quite impossible. My offer was dismissed with the retort that I was winding her up, and should stop it.

As Penny’s birthday approached, I repaired secretly to a local roadside mart near Cromer that sells garden ornaments – old telephone boxes, trelliswork, old railway station signs and such – but which also has a line in full-sized, plastic pigs. Even identifiable to breed. So I bought a faux Gloucester Old Spot and secreted it the garden, next to the chicken run, before dawn, on the day of her birthday… then I went to work. Penny told me later that she’d never laughed so much on looking out of the window. Even our neighbours did a double-take (one looking long enough to assure himself that the pig wasn’t actually moving…)