I know we’re supposed to love Sainsbury’s for embracing traffic light labelling, but when those traffic lights show data for a single liquorice comfit in a bag of 44, it’s difficult to conclude that they’re really entering into the spirit of the exercise. Especially when the same packaging claims that a single serving is 11 comfits…!

This is the M6, looking North from Southwaite services. Southwaite’s Wikipedia entry has me convinced that it is the place to be: it’s most notable features are a railway station on the west coast mainline that closed 60 years ago and a phone box. What more could the modern tourist want?

Meet Woody, Annabel, Maxwell, Lady Hillary and Sir Nathaniel Westminster, the original family of five piggy banks given away by NatWest between 1983 and 1988. Each successive figure was earned by reaching a child’s saving account balance of £5, £25, £50, £75 and finally £100. I’m not entirely sure whose these belong to – possibly my sister, maybe my brother? Maybe some of them are mine? Might be best not to ask!

These days, a complete set sells for about £200 – the prices of the individual figures reflect the account balance required to collect the figure, as that’s obviously proportional to their rarity.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a Cousin Wesley, who’s worth a similar amount alone and was released in 1998 to reward those investing £1000 in a children’s savings bond. He’s now worth £200 alone! We also don’t have the grandparents, Lady Margaret and Lord Henry, who were released in 2011, or Master Richard (another cousin), released just this year. But then, there’s only so much room on the shelf!

This is what’s left of Penrith Castle, built between 1399 and 1470 by William Strickland, who later became the Bishop of Carlisle. Richard III lived there for a bit, but William III gave the castle to his good friend Hans Willem Bentinck, though the King’s subjects weren’t all that impressed with his decision to give a castle to a Dutchman.

The King wasn’t particularly bothered about what his subjects thought, and went on to give Bentinck 135,000 acres of land in Ireland, too. he wanted to give him a fair chunk of Wales as well, but got scared when the whole House of Commons was united in opposition.

If Elizabeth II has a spare castle or hundred thousand acres she wants to give away, I’ll happily take them off her hands…!

I’m featuring another health-related Wired feature this week: a fascinating article about the investigation surrounding a mysterious radiation-emitting shipping container which reached port in Genoa, Italy. It’s a really brilliant bit of writing.

I was moaning on Tuesday – not least on Twitter – about my inability to make good coffee at home, and as a result, I’ve been given a Nespresso machine. These are some of the pods that go in it.

It’s by far the poshest kitchen gadget I’ve ever owned. I rarely eat in restaurants with hardback menus, yet know I have one in my own home describing the 16 Nespresso “Grand Crus”…!

The coffee is very tasty – but at 30-odd pence per cup, it isn’t cheap!

I’ve been again to give blood today (you should too – see blood.co.uk). My local donor centre has just replaced its beds with these reclining chairs… I have to say that I found the process of being reclined a little unnerving!

Alan Turing is a fascinating subject for a biography: A leader in the fields of logical mathematics and computing, a war hero of a very different kind, and a social misfit. There’s so much to explore, and so much to learn. Yet, before turning to this definitive volume, I hadn’t read a proper biography of the man – although given the size of his standing in our cultural, intellectual and scientific past, I had a fairly good knowledge of many of the key moments in his story.

This comprehensive biography is certainly detailed. It is, perhaps, the most thorough biography I’ve read. This allows a great insight into the character and intelligence of Turing, but it did quickly become unnecessarily dense in parts, and felt like it was veering off at a tangent by placing Turing’s academic work in a wider context than was really necessary. I don’t think the book needed to explain some of the mathematical concepts in quite the detail it did, nor did it need to explain in fine detail the sequelae of those concepts as discovered by others.

I was also a little uncomfortable with the degree of subjectiveness in this description of his life. Clearly, it is impossible for any biography to be written from a totally objective stand-point, but it is clear that Hodges stands in awe of Turing, and constantly tries to explain and justify anything that could be seen as a fault in him. There were times when motives and opinions seemed to have been assigned to Turing’s actions without a clear explanation given as to how Hodges had derived these, which made me question their veracity. I’m also awed of Turing and think he’s a giant of our age, but even I found the warmth, bordering on sycophancy, of this book a little overbearing. I think the point would have actually been made more strongly had the reader been left to draw their own conclusions from a more objective description of the events.

I was disappointed with some of the omissions of this book. Turing was clearly a man with a strong sense of morality and ethics, and yet cryptography – perhaps his best-known skill – has inherent within it the ethical complexity of choosing when to act on intelligence, and when to ignore it and effectively sacrifice people in order to maintain the illusion that the code has not been broken. This, to me, is one of the most profoundly interesting parts of the work completed at Bletchley, and of cryptography, yet this is given relatively short shrift in this biography. I feel sure that Turing would have reflected on this point, and probably had interesting things to say about it, so it seems a shame that they aren’t discussed here. Perhaps this reflects a wider criticism of the book – it’s difficult at times to pick out Turing’s character amongst the reams of detailed mathematical and computational theory. That said, I think the story and an impression of the character of Turing does manage to shine through over the course of the book as a whole, even if it is hard-going in parts.

It’s really difficult to give this book a star-rating, because there are passages of five-star descriptive biographical brilliance, and passages of five-star mathematical or computational explanation, but the two cannot really happily co-exist in one volume. For a general reader like me, it leads to passages of tedium; the opposite passages would probably have the same effect for someone reading for the theory.

My head says, therefore, that this is a three-star read; but my heart, perhaps more because of the piquancy of the tale, says it’s a four-star read. So I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Alan Turing: The Enigma is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback, and also a special Centenary edition. There’s no Kindle edition available, which may well have frustrated Alan if he were alive today, and is really inexcusable when a new edition has only just been published.

This pair of signs features in the car park of one of my local hospitals. It’s hardly the end of the world that two nearby signs contradict one another, but I would’ve liked to think, even if only for the sake of neatness, that the person putting up the new sign on the left would have obscured or removed the old sign on the right.

I wonder, too, whether the new sign is more effective: how many people would bother to read the small print, and how many would miss the main message given the reduced font size?

This is another of John Dobson’s many contributions to Newcastle: the 1840 Market Keeper’s House. It’s notable for standing in the middle of the very modern International Centre for Life.

Originally, the downstairs housed the offices of toll collector and market keeper for the surrounding cattle market, which featured 10,000 or so animals each week. The upstairs held accommodation for their families.

Despite its historic appearance, these days it could barely house a more modern company: QuantuMDx, the current occupants, research and manufacture handheld genomic sequencers, along with similar cutting-edge near-patient diagnostic medical stuff. But I don’t think the employees’ families get to live upstairs any more…!