Stephen Phelan

THERE is a portrait of Sir David Frost as a relatively young man hanging in the reception area outside his Kensington office. Frost would have been in his 30s when he sat for the artist John Bratby some time in the late 1960s or early 1970s. By then he was already a veteran of television, after a decade of hosting one popular show after another – That Was The Week That Was, The Frost Report, The Frost Programme – and his ubiquity probably appealed to Bratby, a so-called “kitchen sink” realist, best known for his pictures of everyday people and common household items (including kitchen sinks). In the painting, Frost seems more object than subject, his familiar face, suit, and cross-legged pose rendered mild, or even dull, by contrast to the bright surrounding colours. Which might say as much about the man and his life as the photographs on display elsewhere in the room, of Frost with Putin, Frost with Mandela, Frost walking and talking between Blair and Clinton on what looks like the White House lawn.

IT has been written that Mogwai make music to tear down the stars, rip holes in the sky, shred audiences like scarecrows in the teeth of a gale. And so on. But the band do not hyperbolise themselves, unless they are being satirical. This afternoon in a Japanese hotel bar, bass player Dominic Aitchison looks out of the window towards mighty Mount Fuji, and promises to make that volcano explode tonight.

LONG before Scotland was Scotland, when the population consisted only of green algae and the Highlands were as dry as Death Valley, a large natural object fell out of space and struck the Earth near where the village of Stoer now stands, in Wester Ross. This incident occured 1.2 billion years ago, but it has only been confirmed in the last few months. “If the same thing happened today,” says planetary geologist Scott Thackrey, “all the trees in Aberdeen would be felled. The trees in Inverness would actually ignite. Most man-made structures would collapse. Everything made of paper would burn. You wouldn’t be safe in Glasgow. But sitting here, we would be vapourised.”

THE short life of New York’s World Trade Center began with one spectacular crime and ended with another. Philippe Petit can only speak for the first. “My story is a fairytale, ” he says at the start of Man On Wire, a new documentary about Petit’s illegal tightrope walk between Twin Towers on August 7, 1974. This film goes on to confirm that the thinking behind the act was infinitely simpler than the staging, but its meaning has never been agreed upon.

ONE thing never questioned in a pub quiz is the pub quiz itself. Where did it come from? Who held the first one, and when? How has it become such a defining characteristic of British pub culture? Why do UK drinkers in particular seem to accept and enjoy challenges to their capacity for factual recall? What is the point?

AS THE winner of this year’s Celebrity Big Brother, Mark ‘Bez’ Berry is now £50,000 richer. So far he hasn’t seen or spent any of it. Today he’s wearing a flashy, swollen pair of experimental Adidas moon-boots, but apparently they were a gift from the label itself. “Got them yesterday, ” says Bez proudly, over lunch in London’s obnoxiously on-trend Sanderson hotel. “They’re pretty bling, eh? I am fortunate enough to be in a position where people give me stuff for free.” Fortunate indeed, given that Bez has openly admitted that he was recently made bankrupt, because of “all sorts of massive fuckin’ problems”.

THE oldest living thing on the planet is King’s Holly, a bush that has been growing in a Tasmanian river gully for more than 40,000 years. There are bivalve molluscs in Iceland that reach ages over 370. Bowhead whales have been discovered roaming the cold oceans with antique ivory spear points still stuck in their hides, which means these creatures have survived for at least two centuries longer than the pre-industrial sailors who tried to harpoon them.

CONSIDER the brain of Albert Einstein, which wasn’t noticeably bigger than anyone else’s. It was, if anything, slightly smaller than average, weighing in at a comparatively light 1.23 kilograms when removed from Einstein’s skull after his death in 1955. Fellow scientists have since been cutting into neural tissue samples from that brain, looking for the physical roots of genius and finding nothing conclusive. They cannot, as yet, explain why this particular complex of cells generated one of the greatest minds in human history. They haven’t precisely located the source of the “peculiar religious feeling” that Einstein spoke of when contemplating “the mystery of life, and the marvellous harmony manifest in the structure of reality”. But they’re working on it.

THERE WAS a time when people believed that only a virgin – and only females were considered true virgins – could coax a unicorn out of hiding. Like most other folk tales, that legend can now be easily re-read in Freudian terms. Seven centuries of secular thought and medical science have discounted, if not discredited, the idea that sexual inexperience is a source of spiritual power, along with any number of pseudo-biological theories as to how maidenhood manifests itself physically. But virginity has not yet been demythologised. A few still believe in unicorns. Almost everyone still believes in virginity, which is elusive in its own way.

A turbulent flight to Bristol, then a train to Totnes, via Exeter, along the bottom edge of England, on a track running so close to the coastline that the waves splash up against the carriage windows. After that, a bus ride to Buckfastleigh, down threadlike country roads, past a village called Hunter’s Moon and an inn that began serving in the year 1327. The driver will, like James Brown, “take you to the bridge”. From there, you can walk the last half-mile. Physically then, it’s a long way from the streets of central Scotland – where Buckfast Tonic Wine is drunk in public and private, by old-timers and underagers, habitually and anti-socially – to the Devonshire abbey where that wine is made in cellars by monks. And spiritually, it’s even further.