Mud, mud, pristine white mud...

Pristine, beautiful, white mud

There’s mud, there’s Mud, and then there’s Mud.  There’s your normal mud, like you find in fields; I remember trying to walk my way across a wickedly muddy field with a group of my friends one December day.  The sky was a glorious pale blue, the shadows were seasonally long, but the ground...  Oh dear, the ground.  We were sure there was a path there somewhere - or so the map was telling us!  It wasn't dignified.  The mud didn’t ruin the walk, but the memory of it does elicit a wry smile.  It was just mud.  The greater memories of that day are the amazing National Trust Property we were going to see, the red kites soaring overhead where we were parked, and the superb lunch in a country pub afterwards.  This was the day I developed a taste for peppercorn sauce.

Then there's Mud:  Like the last day of an Open University summer school (SXR260, anyone?) that had otherwise enjoyed dry weather.  During the week, we had looked at geology everywhere from Staithes on England’s east coast to Shap Quarry in Cumbria.  The last morning was a practical assessment in a quarry in County Durham - and even Noah would have been impressed by the rain that fell that day!  I was lucky enough to have borrowed a weatherwriter to keep my notebook dry, and I saw a lot of clear plastic bags being put to good use protecting other notebooks and hands.  Our boots got absolutely covered in beige mud created by pulverised magnesian limestone – it looked as though someone had melted a Farley’s rusk factory.  When we got back to Durham there was much changing of footwear before the afternoon’s further assessment and homeward travel!

Then, thirdly, there’s Mud.  I was in a chalk quarry some distance south of where we live.  You don’t need me to tell you that (most) chalk is white – think in terms of the White Cliffs of Dover or the Seven Sisters cliffs on the East Sussex coast.  Chalk is soft, it pulverises very easily, and quarry machinery is heavy.  It had been raining earlier so the mud was shiny and you just know what the quarry floor is going to be like, even before you get there. 'Claggy' would be an understatement.  'Glutinous'?  'Porridge-like'?  Any and all of these, quite possibly combined.

When chalk quarries are not your usual habitat (our local quarries, which I am much more used to, are honey-coloured Jurassic limestones or grey clay) the quarry floor is startlingly snowy-white and strangely beautiful, holding sharp impressions of quarry activity or shoes.  Walking across it, it feels like you’re in the Antarctic, especially on a January day when the wind feels like it has come straight off the South Pole like it did this day. It did not help that there was one thing I didn't know at the outset:  I was coming down with an awful cold at the time.  No wonder it felt even colder than it actually was!  In spite of that, it's the colour I'll never forget from that day.

The chalk there is food quality, by the way, and yes, you did read that correctly.  Have you ever had bread or cereal with added calcium?  This is where the calcium comes from.  They grind the chalk to a fine powder, roast it, and sell it to the bakers/manufacturers.  Genuinely.  Have you taken any white pills today? The active ingredients are mixed with chalk. Salt is not the only mineral to come from the ground!

I also know a fellow geologist who tells me that he keeps a lump of chalk on his bedside locker for when he gets indigestion.  I know him well enough to believe him.