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.