The notable downside of our family's not owning a blender is that I am only now discovering the joys of homemade smoothies - ice cream, milk, yoghurt, frozen blueberries and half a mushy banana do combine to a deeply satisfying mix. The yoghurt, my friend explains knowingly, neutralizes the alkalinity of the banana, and you can hardly taste it in the end beneath the sweetness of the ice cream anyway. Deep. We ponder the biochemistry of bananas for a while before adjourning to our separate evening divertissements: Fitzgerald, old episodes of Charmed, and the painstaking restoration of the fossil of an extinct fish.