Now we’re getting into the esoteric, right?” he says. “Some might say ‘twaddle’,” I volunteer helpfully. Undeterred, he references the experiments of the late Agnes Fyfe – who claimed to demonstrate the effect of the movement of the planets on plant sap – and a recent lecture he attended along the same lines. “Was it given by a biologist?” “No,” he replies, “and she wouldn’t have got her research published in Nature, and that’s the problem isn’t it? We’re obsessed with this scientific validation, but all science is built on hypotheses that comes out of observation and very often it takes years before a scientific hypothesis is proven to the point where it becomes an orthodoxy.”