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… says my granddaughter-in-law, “and do some Elle.” Elle MacPherson, that is, and her aerobics videos, but I’m not interested in a has-been-model ’s replacement for National Service. Dump your bloody doughnuts indeed. I had enough National Service in the godforsaken 50s, thank you very much.

Godforsaken because doughnuts weren’t as readily available in England then, and any that you could get hold of (on the sly) were a lot plainer. In the twenty-first century, by contrast, there are so many variations on a doughy theme it’s hard to know where to start: iced doughnuts, choccy doughnuts, apple doughnuts, doughnuts sprinkled with hundreds-andthousands, plastic tubs packed full of miniature doughnuts, hot doughnuts in paper bags from a van in Wolverhampton market, doughnuts linked together to form a daisy chain, savoury doughnuts with melted cheese on top, doughnuts dunked in coffee American-style, doughnuts of my dreams which orbit each other according to the strict harmonic rules of Johannes Kepler’s Music of the Spheres.

But not those offensive jam ones. Certainly not. Can’t stand them.
Can’t cope with them. Doughnuts must have a hole in the middle in order to be complete. Otherwise, they remind me of ... of ....

But let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk more about ring doughnuts. Or anything.

My granddaughter-in-law orders me to “Dump the bloody doughnuts” as though all doughnuts can be grouped together under the same pejorative; but, if she thought about the matter for a second, she’d realise that really the only “bloody” variety are jam doughnuts, which, as I say, are just the kind I don’t and won’t eat. I mean, they bleed jam, of course, but they and their ilk also actually caused bleeding in Medieval Europe: it’s a little known fact, I want to tell her (though in the end I can’t be bothered), that fried cakes like Dutch olie-koecken, French beignets, German fastnachtkuches, crullers, twists and maple bars — all forerunners of the modem doughnut — were carriers of the Bubonic Plague in the fourteenth
century, precisely because of their absent absence, precisely be58
cause it was difficult to cook them through to the centre. So it was a
great moment not only in pastry technology and culinary history but also in medical advance when, in 1847, Captain Gregory of Rockport, Maine in the United States decided to put a hole through his mother’s fried cakes once and for all. History decided against the holeless doughnut.

And so did I. They remind me so much of the blood ....

Think of something else.

My granddaughter-in-law is crying when she finds my old books of
Renaissance cosmology in the wheelie bin. When I think about it, why on earth she’s actually been in there in the first place is beyond me — she must have delved pretty deep to find my old friends Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler hiding underneath copies of The Doughnut Review and tins of stewed steak. She scrapes the onion gravy off and staggers in with them, plonking them on the coffee table in front of me. “For God’s sake, grandpa. For God’s sake, grandpa, dump the bloody doughnuts, not your astronomy. You’ve even thrown away your own book.” She doesn’t know that I’ve already moved my collection of doughnuts-to-eat onto the shelves in my study. They look so much prettier than the dour tomes they replaced. “Grandpa. You can’t go on like this. You never go out. You can’t go out. You can’t do anything. But eat. And you’ll die. Grandpa. What are we going to do. What would grandma have said.”

She’d have said, why don’t you like jam doughnuts? She did.

But they remind me so much of the blood inside ....

I want to console my granddaughter-in-law with a hand on her (poised, exposed, nylon) knee — after all, I’ve always found it a pleasure being given advice by her, even if I don’t do anything with it — but I can’t get out of my special chair at the moment, and certainly wouldn’t fit next to her on the sofa. If I were younger .... If I were slimmer .... Well, sufficed to say, her wine-bar-golfing-balding-office-toy-playing-paper-clip-counting husband (my grandson) would have to watch his back.

She’s always asking me this: why don’t you go back to your old books, why don’t you get down the telescope from the attic, why don’t you go and visit that Space Centre down the M1? She never quite grasps what it was I used to do (but then nor do I really). It was just a job, I tell her, nothing more or less — a couple of university posts, some aimless research, and then a consultancy with NASA; the latter was so part-time as to be almost no-time, except for a few trans-Atlantic ’phone calls about pensions and one query about how to spell Galileo’s first name for their website. Quite why NASA needed a Renaissance cosmology scholar on their payroll still escapes me. Perhaps they just wanted ‘all bases covered,’ to use their own terminology ... or perhaps they wanted to colonise the past as well as the Moon ... or perhaps it was something to do with the
CIA — you never know. But, whatever, I have no desire to return to it all, no interest in those mouldering volumes any more. Historical cosmology was just a job, I tell her. And the further I get away from it, the less the gravitational pull back. Gravity = the product of the attracting masses divided by the square of the distance between them, I tell her.

No, I hardly feel the pull back any longer. I don’t have to orbit anything nowadays — instead, the doughnuts of my dreams orbit me. That’s the advantage of being so big.

But I won’t have jam ones circling me. Oh no. I can’t have them near me. They remind me so much of the blood inside my ....

My granddaughter-in-law hugs a stained copy of William Gilbert’s De Magnete, Magnestique Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure to her (admittedly alluring) chest, crying over it as if she has the faintest idea what it’s about. Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi, Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius and Dialogue, Tycho Brahe’s De Stella Nove, Newton’s Principia, Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coeslestium — even my own great contribution to world knowledge, Stars of the Renaissance — all them are scattered around her on the sofa and the coffee table, beneath those gorgeous lashes, beneath those gorgeous tears ... and I feel a throbbingness I haven’t felt for years, and I press down on the arms of my special chair with the flats of my hands, and I try and try and try to get up, and I try and try and try to reach those celestial orbs, but I know they’ll be forever beyond my touch, and. . .

And I sink back down into the chair, knowing I won’t dump the
doughnuts for Elle MacPherson or Copernicus, because when I look over a doughnut and through it, when I slowly convey it to my salivating mouth, when I bite through its brittle sugarcoating, it seems, in that moment of consummation, enough of a universe for me now — a microcosmic universe I can hold and touch and control and even digest, like that Chinese dragon which consumes the sun or moon during an eclipse. After all, quite a few physicists these days think that the universe might be doughnutshaped, or even made up of three interlocking doughnuts in a complex kind of delicious geometry. A guy from the University of Pennsylvania reckoned he’d almost proved it the other day — it said so in the paper. Even the great Hawking talks about it somewhere. Copernicus et al are out of date: doughnuts are the new cosmology.

But not jam doughnuts. No one’s ever claimed the universe is made up of jam doughnuts. And I, well, I see no cosmic vision when confronted by them — I feel just earthly nausea. The very sight of them is enough to turn me back from Chinese dragon into pensioner and widower. You see, you can’t control them in the same way that you can ring doughnuts. They’re so unpredictable: always when you least expect it, whether you’ve squeezed them accidentally or not, the processed jam leaks out onto your hands, onto your clothes, onto the sofa, and makes you sticky and stained and sick, and reminds you so much of the blood inside your ....

And reminds you so much of the blood inside your ....

And reminds you so much of the blood inside your wife, which also
leaked out when you least expected it, onto your legs, onto your pyjamas, onto the bedsheets you were sharing,

during your sleep,

during your tears,

during those cruel nights when the constellation of Cancer was at its
brightest, and you were circling someone else’s cold, cold, cold doughnut-universe.