The topography of womens’ underwear is quite beyond me.

It’s so bloody cold here in England that I have been wearing a set of silk longjohns, with several layers of clothing on top. Last night, with an arctic blizzard raging outside, I kept my longjohns on to go to bed. When I woke up this morning the long john tights were around my ankles, and my underpants were wrapped round them in the most curious way. The crotches were intertwined and the underpants dangled, like one of those metal puzzle rings, unsolved. I stared and stared, and for the life of me could not figure out how my underpants ended up in that position—unless some devious mathemetician sneaked in in the night, took the whole lot off and deliberately rearranged them in a configuration guaranteed to boggle my feeble waking mind.

And this led me to thinking about women who are able to take off their brassière without removing their top. Who invented/discovered this awesome trick? Was it perhaps some feminists in the 60s who felt it added drama to the bra-burning ritual? And is there indeed a whole slew of other cunning manoeuvres women know about and don’t share with us? Are you all out there sniggering over my longjohn puzzle, thinking to yourselves “ah, Dolby’s stumbled onto Womens’ Underwear Manoeuvre #37″?

Pic: NASA/GSFC, MODUS Rapid Response

This is how Britain looks at the moment from space. And where’s the Nutmeg of Consolation? Roughly under the centre of that snow cloud vortex over Eastern England.

Last night temperatures reached as low as -21 degrees centigrade in parts of Britain. It’s still snowing. The wind is expected to pick up today and though that gives me plenty of power, it’s hard to stay warm in a wooden lifeboat in these conditions. Fortunately this month I’m able to work in the house, on a laptop at the kitchen table. I’m taking a break from my album as I prepare for the TED Conference next month. I’ll be doing the House Band again this year, along with Ethel, a progressive string quartet from New York. We’re doing a short instrumentals to introduce each of the 12 sessions. I really enjoy arranging for strings, and though my knowledge and experience is limited it works surprisingly well to just write the parts in Logic using samples and then display the score as musical notation. I’m hoping to debut a brand new song there, which we’ll later record for my new album.

It’s serenely beautiful here. There are sand banks out to sea that are completely covered in snow. It’s truly starting to look like the Arctic, and I half expect to see a pod of orcas swim by. Maybe my polar bear dream was a premonition?

By the way when I told my kids about that dream, they broke into a routine. ‘Hold me?’ ‘what?‘ ‘nothing.’ And cracked up laughing. You have to be a Mighty Boosh fan to understand.