'What's a dendrite?' I whisper to Wilson. 'Or a glia for that matter?'
'Ssssh,' Wilson puts his finger to his lips. 'I'll explain later.'
'My brain's fried,' I say shifting in the rigid plastic bucket chair. 'And my bum's sore.'
'It's for your own good,' says Wilson. 'You'll thank me for it one day.'
Wilson and I are sitting in the second row of the Dana Science Centre in South Kensington, listening to a lecture about the brain. It was Wilson's idea - to give me a head start in the 'Mind Matters' series I'm working on for the website. Granted, I've learnt some tasty facts; the brain produces enough energy to fire a 25-watt light bulb, it can't feel pain; it's 75% water and one single human brain generates more electrical impulses in one day than all the telephones in the world - but now Dr Schwartzer has moved onto trickier turf.
'Recent studies show that the brain, once thought to be a rigid structure after the age of three, has an innate capacity for change. It is constantly laying down new neural pathways in response to fresh experiences and naturally, this affects the way we think ...' My mind starts to drift and I notice that Dr Schwartzer has huge feet, encased in brown slip-on shoes.
'Brain plasticity... apoptosis... synaptic pruning...' Dr Schwartzer has totally lost me now and I find myself focusing on his footwear instead. How big are those slip-ons? Size 16, at least.
My uncle Dave took a size 16 and when I was a child, he used to lift me up so that my little red patent t-bars rested on the toes of his ludicrously large lace-ups, then we would shuffle round the room together to Randy Newman's 'Short People.'
My fascination with the larger foot has followed me around since then. I once went into High and Mighty, the outsize clothing shop on Edgware Road, to ask if the enormous pair of shiny black dress shoes in the window were real or a plant. The assistant, Steven, said they were real, size 20 in fact.
We had quite a chat and he told me that the largest feet in the world belong to Morocco's Brahim Takioullah - who takes a size 23 (or about the height of an average sized poodle). Before I left, Steven let me try on the display dress shoes to get the full effect.
'That lecture's totally fried my brain,' I say, as I sit down opposite Wilson in the cosy French restaurant on Old Brompton Road.
'Favourite part?' asks Wilson.
'The bit about the heart having cells similar to those in the brain.'
'Which is why some scientists now call it the second brain,' says Wilson. 'Makes you think, eh?'
'Did you clock Dr Schwartzer's shoes?' I hold out my hands to roughly the length of a large salmon, before going on to tell Wilson about dancing on top of my uncle Dave's size 16s. In return, Wilson tells me that his aunt Jean would make him dress up in the little suit he'd worn for her wedding, and sing David Essex's 'Gonna make you a Star' to her, whenever she came to stay.
We pick up our shared menu and skim down the starters.
'Guess what I'm having,' says Wilson.
'Pan fried sweetbreads, perhaps?'
Wilson grins. 'No brainer, really.'
To be continued next Friday...