Blue John

The Peak District began my life long interest in rocks.
As a family, we normally took summer holidays, the traditional fortnight by the sea in Cornwall or Devon, breaking the long monotony of London life. But one year, for some reason, we went North for a week and stayed on a horribly cold caravan site near Derby to explore the Peak district.
I could only have been 6 or 7. I remember only a couple of events. One was catching 'a chill' (strange how even ailments have fashions - no one ever catches a 'chill' these days) and being dosed by the owner of the caravan park with rum in hot milk. I remember liking it very much and embarrassed my mother by asking for rum every time I was unwell for the next couple of years. The second was a visit to the Blue John Caves at Castleton where a friendly guide gave me my very own chunk of Blue John.
I was entranced. I kept it as a great treasure in my bedside drawer, getting it out in secret to examine and polish it. I can still feel the chunky square crystals in my hand and see the mysterious dark purple lights inside it. Soon other treasures joined it. Some quartz chipped off the roof of a sea side cave looking for all the world like a piece of my dad's dentures with pink rock and white toothy crystals, a piece of green serpentine with flakes of embedded copper, a piece of cylindrical rock core from a boring. My father brought home what he said was a meteorite but what I think now was half a pyrites nodule. My brother gave me the observer's guide to geology and I added books about rocks to the books about space that I devoured on Saturday mornings in the reference library. I prowled our suburban garden with a hammer breaking open flint pebbles and old bricks looking for fossils and took my new camera to the Geological museum to photograph the minerals.
Day trips and holidays inevitably became searches for more interesting specimens. I remember some places just by the geology. Jersey will always mean for me great cliffs of red granite, lumpy and crystalline. In Wales we went to Blanau Ffestionog to ride a special train - but all I remember is the slate mine; Cornwall I remember for rockpools, and huge mountains of white china clay. Weymouth still recalls the Chesil Bank (8 miles of pebbles!) and finding 2 great treasures - a strange white rock with a lump out of it completely covered in tiny crystals like salt and a pebble that so nearly resembled a fried sausage that we put it on my brother's plate one April Fool's Day. And of course Derbyshire and the Blue John.
My rock collection migrated out of my drawer and into a succession of cardboard shirt boxes under my bed. It grew and grew over the years, driving my mother mad with the dust, until I got bored with it quite suddenly one day in my late teens and emptied it out on the garden rockery, amused by the thought of future amateur geologists puzzling over the strange miniature erratics in the London Clay.
Some few pieces I kept, the Blue John amongst them, but somewhere down the years it got lost. I often wonder where it went.
I have a piece of Blue John but its not my special piece. It's smaller than my Blue John, and it doesn't have the same dark purple glow in the lamplight. In fact I've seen any number of pieces of Blue John, the Natural History museum has a whole vase of it. But none of them quite has the colour and fire of my special piece from Castleton, so long ago.

Peaks adventure

Day out on Stannage Edge. We were fascinated by the eroded boulders,


These two look like they're talking to each other ...





and some looked more like Henry Moore sculptures than natural objects

dad's new baby

What is big, green, shiny and makes great rice pudding? Dad's new cooker!

Encore le lecon

French class as usual this week doing ‘social situations’ asking for food in the market, booking rooms etc. It all started seriously enough: our table was doing ‘saying sorry for being late’ and then the giggles started from the next table, getting progressively louder. We wondered what was going on till we all changed round and we got The Food Bag.

Our teacher, mindful no doubt of all the directives about multi style learning, hands on experience etc had brought along some plastic toy food to help with ‘aller au marche’ . All well and good except – well, we think it was made in China so perhaps they weren’t too sure about some of the items or perhaps the makers just had a perverted sense of humour – you wouldn’t have believed plastic food could look so rude. It really was extraordinary how they had managed to make all kinds of perfectly innocent vegetables look so suggestive. There was an outsized garlic that looked for all the world like a scrotum, a double fried egg like 2 shiny bare breasts, two ‘saucisses’ looking like dead penises and a couple of dreadful small oval pinkish ham slices which I leave you to imagine. The ‘pain au chocolat’ looked so much like a shiny dog turd none of the girls wanted to touch it at all. There was also this flattened brownish greenish mass…….we didn’t discover what that was supposed to be but none of us would touch that either!

The trouble was once you’d thought of ‘it’ it was impossible to not to think of ‘it’ if you know what I mean. It didn’t help that the guys in our class (all 40+ respectable managerial types) all seem to revert to 8 year old schoolboys once they get in the door. They talk while the teacher’s talking, make silly comments and rock on their chairs- I half expect them to start passing messages under the tables or flicking pellets soon. So you can imagine what this lot did for them.

Me and the other lady on the table did our best to ignore them. We discussed solemnly whether it was a tranche of concombre or une roulade? (‘ho ho je vous donne un grand concombre!’ ) and was it beaucoup d’ouefs or beaucoup des ouefs? ‘ha ha ha donnez moi des ouffs au topless toujours!’ all the while the guys are getting more and hysterical. They did rude things with the saucisses and the ham slices, stuck the ‘oueffs au plat’ on their jumpers and made suggestive comments about the aubergines and the asparagus. They made faces with all the various bits, stuck the jambon slices behind their ears saying ‘live long and prosper’ and poked the pain au dog turd at each other.
Of course it was impossible to explain to ‘le prof’ (a sweet and serious young lady and an excellent teacher) what the problem was, even if we’d known the French for most of it. I managed not to giggle till the lesson finished (I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction) got outside and laughed till I cried all the way home.
But what happens when I eventually get to France? Will I ever be able to look une celere in the face, or ask for a slice of jambon without giggling…? And whatever will she bring us when we do ‘aller au medicin’ ??