A shutterbug of stone

Hertfordshire Puddingstone - pebbles of flint in a fine matrix. When I was knee-high to a tabby cat, my parents had the most wonderful atlas.  It was huge!  It was a good 50 cm high by 30 cm or more across and quite thick. That's not just me looking back at it through the eyes of a child, although I  remember having looked at it when I was about 7 or 8 years old.  I'd never seen anything like it!  I know it was that size because we lugged it around various RAF stations until (a) it was falling to bits and (b) it was given to me when I left home.  I eventually binned it when it had totally disintegrated.  I really do wish that I'd kept some of the pages but the actual atlas was fairly much obsolete by then, and that was before - for example - the break up of the USSR!  That's another thing - when we were growing up, countries felt eternal and absolute.  Who knew just how ephemeral they are and how quickly local and world events can split them ...

  "Why did you choose geology?" asked the tutor of each of us in turn. "Well, I suppose it was 'Once a rock chick, always a rock chick" I replied.   I actually had that as my tagline in my course's message board signature at the time, and one of the other students commented that she had seen me and the said tagline on there. It was true for more than one given value of the word 'rock'. I had listened to a fair bit of it during my teens and early twenties; Deep Purple's 'Black Night' still puts a smile on my face (Incidentally, I know that it's a rather heretic view, but I actually prefer Steve Morse to Richie Blackmore).  I can take or leave quite a lot of rock nowadays – but I get really excited by a good orchestra(!) I had become fascinated by geology and palaeontology in the very early parts of my degree (and I still am). I'd planned to study biology and ecology, but my foundation course was multi-disciplinary and I contracte...

Portoro marble - looking more like a dessert than a rock The day I took this photo was a feast for the eyes and the soul; whilst a rehearsal for the following week's Trooping of the Colour was underway nearby, my Other Half and I were visiting the [then] Queen's Gallery  at Buckingham Palace, London. It was the first time we saw any of the Royal Collection. We saw a Fabergé egg for the first time, and it was as beautiful and as finely wrought as we had imagined it would be.  We saw the golden Exeter Salt, we saw sculptures carved from the finest marble, we saw paintings by Old Masters and we saw, for the very first time for either of us, sketches by Leonardo da Vinci with notes in his mirror writing! One thing I also drank in, though, was this polished slice of Portoro marble. Stonemasons often refer to any stone that will take a polish as a marble, but Portoro is a true marble, i.e. a limestone that has been altered (metamorphosed) by heat and pressure; it comes from La Spezi...