THE GREAT DORSET CHILLI FESTIVAL We went down to Bournemouth to celebrate Alison's brother's 80 th  birthday and see the English Canal..er..Channel. So, of course, we took the opportunity to visit deepest, darkest Dorset and do the Chilli Festival. What, you may ask, has this to do with canals? Well nothing, but chillies are a hot topic, right? Celebrating chillies is a dangerous business as there is no way of telling which is the hottest just by looking at them. Only taste will tell, but never ever put an unknown chilli in your mouth! I am now able to reveal the way to avoid a mouth furnace and remember you heard it here first! Break the chilli in two, touch the broken surface carefully with your finger...and put this  against your tongue, gingerly. It was a typical summer country festival; birds and bees, a country mansion, a dare devil ride,  lots of hot food demonstrations, people giving good advice, mid visit exhaustion, exotic visitors, dodgy vegetable jokes, thousands of chilli plants for sale and a salutary warning about the dangers of overindulgence. The heat of chillies is measured on the Scoville Scale and I am proud, as a one time Dorset resident, that the world's hottest chilli in 2006 was the “Dorset Naga” measured at approximately 1 million units. As a comparison this is over 300 times hotter than Tabasco. It has since been overtaken as chilli technology progresses.