Sam Leith

The odds are that the name Alexandre Grothendieck will mean little or nothing to most Spectator readers. It’s a name I heard for the first time in high summer two years or so ago, not long, as I remember it, after the film A Beautiful Mind had come out. I was in the garden of my friend Umar’s house in Cambridge, and we were waiting for his ancient cast-iron barbecue, Camp Freddie, to cook some sausages. Umar is a mathematician of considerable braininess, and when we are together we often end up talking maths. That is, I tend to ask him to explain what he does, and he tends to try, and I tend not to understand. But sometimes we strike gold. An entire afternoon was once passed happily playing logic games involving prisoners with different-coloured hats.

The sound in the Grand Hall is like the chattering of sparrows. Milling at the door, most wearing bright yellow T-shirts with plasticky decals so big they practically double the weight of the cotton, are the domino sharks, kibitzing and waiting their turn for the tables. Inside, at the far end, a dais is decorated with an ascending series of enormous silver trophies. And filling the centre of the room, fenced off by the rows of trestle tables behind which spectators sit and holler encouragement, are dozens and dozens of tables of people playing dominoes. That chattering noise is the sound of little plastic tablets being shuffled. We’re in the depths of the Jamaica Grande, a resort hotel in Ocho Rios on the north coast of Jamaica.

The 13th Earl of Haddington (cr. 1619) was minded to revise his theory about crop circles to incorporate pixies, he told me the other day while we were enjoying a pre-dinner cigarette at the chimney piece of a grand dining-room in Chillingham Castle, Northumberland. Lord H. - a whiskery, engaging gent in tartan trousers - has done a good deal of research into the subject, and has come to some interesting conclusions. He has now established to his satisfaction that crop circles are not made by aliens but - if I understand him rightly - by dead people. His working theory is that the patterns are an effort to communicate using alchemical formulae associated with the god Hermes. Hermes being a prankish character, these can be a little opaque.