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| A slice of pudding(stone); inset, the hammer with the puddingstone head. |
When I was about knee-high to a tabby cat, my parents had the most wonderful atlas. It was huge! It was about 2 feet (60 cm) high with pages not far off a foot (30 cm) wide, and it was a good inch (2.5 cm) 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 it was given to me when I left home. It was falling to bits by then, and 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 and the end of the Warsaw Pact! 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 apart? No more
USSR, no more Yugoslavia, no more Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany
separate and walled off from each other…
After the atlas proper, though, there were other equally
interesting pages. I remember a page
about precious stones, with (of course!) pictures of a diamond, a ruby, an
emerald and a sapphire, and another page about semi-precious stones. There was probably a page about precious
metals as well, but I can’t bring it to mind.
I do remember another page with a few sentences about Hertfordshire
puddingstone and a good photo to illustrate it (If you are interested, by the
way, the 'plums' in the pudding are flint and the 'pudding' they are in is a
finer matrix of sand and silica cement known as a silcrete. It was formed some 56 million years ago, in a
time period geologists call the Eocene; the flints came from the chalk that
forms the downlands and the white cliffs of the south of England.). I’ve seen a couple of lovely pieces of it,
and I’ve seen a hammer (inset in the photo above) with a puddingstone head that a local geological group
use to call their meetings and talks to order to start them. It’s a thing of beauty.
To me it's also a trip down memory lane. I don't know why, but the name is one of
those things that stuck with me from my childhood. Perhaps it was a foretelling of my career?
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