For my most recent birthday, Brad purchased tickets to a Christmas Cheese Tasting at Neal’s Yard Dairy. We have been before — to their very popular Beer & Cheese tasting — and absolutely loved it. First we found out I was expecting (and that rules out a fair few cheeses) and then the Christmas Cheese tasting was unfortunately cancelled. Thankfully we were able to book into the Mountain Cheese tasting held on February 9th.

This is the little blurb from their website: The cheeses from the mountain regions of Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, France and Italy are amongst the oldest, most traditional and romantic in the World. Steeped in history, their origins can be traced back many hundreds of years and beyond. Those generations of experience can result in some of the most exciting and engrossing cheese to be found anywhere. Join us for a high altitude tour of european mountain cheeses that which will expand your taste buds and your imagination.

Brad got to taste all the cheeses on the list but so I didn’t miss out, the team at Neal’s Yard kindly prepared a special pregnancy safe cheese plate just for me. I made lots of notes, which you can see below… 

In November 2011, I attended a talk at the RIGB titled The Serendipity Engine with Aleks Krotoski and Kat Jungnickel. 

They describe the engine as the following (taken from the website): The Serendipity Engine is a physical manifestation of theoretical and technological interventions that can be used to enhance serendipity on the World Wide Web. It is a working machine that uses bike parts, flower pots, cake, pulleys, lightbulbs and other concrete objects to articulate the processes that could be translated into digital “solutions” that will re-engineer the potential dystopian social trajectories of current (social) software trends*. It is being theorised, devised, designed, developed and welded together by Dr Aleks Krotoski and Dr Katrina Jungnickel.

Brad and I weren’t too sure about this talk, mainly, if you are engineering serendipity, is it really serendipitous anymore? As a metaphor, I didn’t find the engine appropriate. Still, it was an interesting talk and neither of us went looking for answers. I’ve included my sketchnote below.