MUSICAL EXPERIMENTS FOR AFTER DINNER

In a rather beautiful metallic navy blue tin box decorated with silver embossed bottles, contained within are 21 sonic feats to amaze your guests. Enjoy Glacial Glockenspiel in which the host plays it cool. Fill a baking tray with about 4cm of water and leave it in the freezer overnight. In the morning, remove the slab of ice and let it rest for around five minutes. With a large, serrated knife, gently and slowly saw the ice width ways into five slabs of decreasing size, in rough proportion. Scrape off the edges until they are fairly smooth and then put them back in the freezer for another few hours. Cut a cucumber into two, long flat strips and place about 8cm apart in parallel and balance the ice bars between them like railway sleepers. Your instrument is now ready. Your mallets, in this instance, are a pair of teaspoons. Virtuosi could use carrots as mallets with your ice now resonant, compose a hymn to polar extremes while we still have them and tap out a tribute to the penguins. Let the room temperature dictate how long your piece lasts and listen as it melts for new and undiscovered tunings. Free Jazz Popcorn needs the equipment of cooking oil, four saucepans, popcorn, tin foil, baking paper and elastic bands or string for a fantastic two minute drum solo. When the Marrow Blows involves a courgette and a wooden spoon and the Ballad of the Greengrocer a cucumber, knife, wooden spoon, apple corer or potato peeler, a carrot and a pepper. Purse your lips and blow through them like a high-pitched raspberry and place your fingers over the holes to make different notes. Dinner parties will never be tame again as you liven up evenings with these hilarious after dinner sound and music experiments, a favourite of which here is recreating the fizz and crackle of a barbershop quartet on an old-time gramophone. You're in for a good time. 21 handsome double sided colourful cards of a large size, get out those wine glasses now and start to sing! Pity the poor dog!