General – Page 371 – Boadicea's Chariot

A game girl

Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.
Mae West

Goodnight everyone, sleep well.

Hello; sorry about this but I can’t seem to post comments this afternoon. I don’t think it’s a problem with this site Bearsy; it’s my computer since I had the same problem with MyT and hotmail yesterday.

But just to say; thanks Ferret and Jaime. There were loads of great entries which I really loved; I am genuinely and pleasantly surprised…

Ta very much for a setting such a good competition as well 🙂

So what happens now…?!

South Africa in the 50s!

Years ago, when I was at school in Kenya, my brother was at university in South Africa. He came home for Christmas one year with a 45rpm single, raving about a show called ‘ Wait a Minim’ which was as close as the anti-apartheid protesters dared to go without being deported. I saw the show back in England several years later, this is the offending song.

Lions posing

Miriam Makeba, with an old favourite

The Crucible

So, chemistry. Hardly remember any. Teacher was a short chap with specs and a hair-cut from the 1940’s who I don’t remember speaking to me once. I think he mostly bonded with boys. Co-valent bonding, no doubt. The chemistry swots were speccie geeky chaps who averted their eyes from us girls and already liked chemistry and physics.

Although I was mad keen on biology, I made no sense of the hieroglyphics that this teacher scrawled all over the blackboard. It might as well have been ancient Egyptian.

I felt it was a knowledge gap that I should attempt to address so I got a ticket to ‘Chemistry – a Volatile History’ – a talk at the Cheltenham Science Festival. I thought it might put chemistry in perspective at last; make sense of the carboys of noxious stuff that my bonkers uncle used to keep in the kitchen cupboards at my nan’s house and mix up on her kitchen table. Continue reading “The Crucible”