Today is Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day which means that not only is the air full of pancakes but the papers are full of dubious puns on the words ‘batter’ and ‘toss’. Metro got the day off to a flying start with a story about chefs at the Hilton Grosvenor in Glasgow building a 75 cm high stack of pancakes. At 2cm higher than the previous record, this was enough to get the chefs in to the Guinness Book of Records. Or, as Metro put it, ‘Tossers make world record bid’.
On a slightly more educational note, The Daily Mail managed to unearth a maths expert who has come up with a mathematical formula for making the perfect pancake. It might be correct but surely nothing would erase the fun faster than doing a spot of algebra before whisking up the batter.
Even the perfect pancake pales in comparison with the Brazilian way of celebrating Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras. The Brazilians get several days of sun, samba and fiesta. We get a maths professor setting us hard sums before we get so much as a sniff at a pancake.