Jim Al-Khalili – Boadicea's Chariot

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”