A to Z 2025 – Gadgets, Gardening, Geography and Geology…

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace, it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

I love gadgets – what can I say! The steel gadget was in my pocket for many years of sign-writing and whilst it has many capabilities, it’s most frequent use was for levering open cans of paint! The Swiss Army card is not cheap, £35 for a proper one (don’t even bother with cheap imitations) I use it every day, principally the knife (peeling oranges especially), and the scissors, it also means I am never without a “James Bond” pen! The Swiss Army style penknife lives in my briefcase and is also regularly used… I was never in the Boy Scouts and I think that in part is why I have come, self-taught, to always “be prepared”…

Gardening

The first garden I really took notice of was my Grandad’s. He had been a game-keeper ever since surviving the First World War and it was not well paid so he had to grow produce to feed his family. So the garden I remember was a rabbit-proof enclosure carved out of the field in front of the cottage where he and my Granny lived in Nuneham Courtenay. Incidentally, the estate to which the cottage belonged, had moved the entire hamlet of original inhabitants to a new site along the main road bordering the estate – such was the power of the upper classes then. The estate now belongs to the band Radiohead and I imagine they have their recording studios there. My Grandad’s garden contained raspberries, gooseberries and blackcurrant canes and this is what I chiefly remember – the smell of blackcurrant must and the taste of a ripe berry can conjure that garden to this very day…

My mother naturally carried on the tradition of growing food with part of the garden and later an allotment devoted to growing vegetables and my sisters and I were given a portion to grow our own choice of vegetables. Two uncles on my mother’s side remained, after the Second World War, as professional gardeners – one in market gardening and one as a gardener for a school. And so it was that the gardening “gene” or is it “meme” was passed on to my sisters and I.

When Barbara and I lived in Ireland, we had a cottage with three acres of land – two we leased back to Tony, the farmer we bought the cottage from but still had more than enough space to make a garden – mostly for vegetables. Returning to England in 2005, we eventually had time to start an allotment since our house has no garden, only a yard – although that is full of flowers and shrubs in containers.
Oh, and with my love of miniature worlds (and gadgets), I have since my teenage years, grown bottle gardens and latterly, windowsill gardens which I keep at work to brighten the office…

Geography and Geology

Another inheritance from my mother was my first introduction to Geology. Not only did she delight in finding fossils at Charmouth, and fossils are after all located in rocks of a particular geological age, but she also bought a tumble-polisher and when we visited Australia in 1968, it was at her instigation that we visited Lightning Ridge where the Black Opal comes from. So I collected not only fossils but also rocks and minerals and when I went to the University of Birmingham, it was to study Geography and Geology. But many things that I learned at school and university, it was not until later in life that I encountered the reality of the knowledge “in the field”. When we lived in Ireland near to the Ox Mountains, you could see scratches in the bare granite where the glacial ice sheet had dragged fragments of rock across it, just half a mile from where I live, you can see hillsides littered with boulders plucked from them and dropped where they fell as the ice melted. But the most exciting geological moment in my life came when visiting Iceland on an exchange with an Icelandic Choir. They took us on the “Golden Circle” bus tour to see the eponymous “Geyser”, to see the wall of ice in the distance which is the “Long Glacier, the stupendous waterfall “Gullfoss” which features in the film Prometheus (https://youtu.be/Z2Ht9I8ik_4) but most exciting of all, we walked down the rift valley at Thingvellir. Iceland is where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge rises above the surface of the Atlantic Ocean and allows us to see Continental Drift in action – Iceland is literally splitting apart and new land is being created and Thingvellir is on the line of that split – on one side of the small valley you are on the European plate and on the other, the American plate. This particular location is stable at the moment but as regular scenes on the news tell us, nothing is ever fixed and safe in Iceland and new volcanic events can and do happen all the time…

The reason this place had particular resonance for me, was that when we studied Continental Drift at school, it was a new idea and the key piece of evidence for it was and is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where a series of parallel and symmetrical mountain ridges lie either side of the centreline which emerges above water, there in Iceland. Not only is there a symmetry to the form, but each range of mountains records the orientation of Earth’s magnetic field at the time when it was created, frozen into the rock. I came home so excited with this idea that I shared it with my father as we washed up together that evening. I never knew whether the scepticism he evinced at the idea of continents moving, subduction zones and mid-ocean volcanic land forming, was real or just designed to get me to lay out the theory and its evidence for him. Whichever, I finally stood at the spot where the evidence is right there to be seen with one’s own eyes…

One final story about geology and myself – I was coming home from work on the train some years ago when amongst the group of staff from the University of Bradford, was a new face and he was lamenting that if he could not find someone to take a stack of redundant maps off his hands, then he was going to have to send them to landfill. I could not bear the idea of this and volunteered to take them and so under my bed is a stack of Geological maps covering almost the entire United Kingdom including the one below. I love these maps but I need to decide what to do with them before I pop my clogs – any ideas?