Steps Through Geological Time

The great curse of being a geologist is never being able to go anywhere near a landscape without wondering (or being asked) about the geology beneath the surface. The great curse of being a teacher is never being able to go anywhere without thinking about whether it could be a learning opportunity.

So Paul rolled his eyes when I pulled off the main road in Derbyshire to head to the National Stone Centre. It was a popular place for my parents to take me on the way to or from Dovedale (which, as it happens, is where we were off to). Now, it's probably about 20 years since I last went there, so I have no idea whether this is a long-standing feature, but I was rather struck by the Geosteps:


From Precambrian at the bottom to Palaeogene at the top, the stones represent half a billion years of British rocks. And of course I'm going to show you (ages are quoted from the literature at the NSC)...

   
Antrim basalt (58-62Ma) and Portland limestone (146Ma)

   
Sherwood sandstone (230-240Ma) and Magnesian limestone (256Ma)

   
Rough Rock gritstone (316Ma) and Bee Low limestone (330Ma)

   
Much Wenlock limestone (425Ma) and Caradoc granodiorite (463Ma)

   
Borrowdale Volcanics green slates (453Ma) and Strinds sandstone (550-560Ma)
The ultimate destination, however, was a more intimate encounter with the rocks, as we headed to Dovedale to climb Thorpe Cloud.


It's a cracking ascent up a Carboniferous reef knoll for a hot summer afternoon. But it was a straightforward hike, and Paul even pretended to give a damn when I stopped to show him some crinoid fossils in a lump of scree.

Wordless Wednesday: Land Of My Fathers

The Stokenchurch Gap

I've just got back from a visit to my parents' house up north. One of the best bits about the journey up there is the drive up the M40. We go through the Chilterns, and a Site of Special Scientific Interest - the Stokenchurch Gap.


I was in the rare position of being in the passenger seat and having my smartphone to hand for photos. It was also not raining, snowing or foggy.

It's known as the Aston Rowant Cutting on Natural England's citation, and it is protected for the following reasons:

A stratigraphically important site providing the best Coniacian section in central England, part of the Upper Chalk succession. Above the Chalk rock exposed at the base of the cutting there is a late Turonian to basal Coniacian section of coarse grained nodular chalk, extremely rich in fossils and important in defining the boundary between Turonian and Coniacian age rocks.

It's late Cretaceous, containing a number of marine organisms.


It would be lovely to explore, but I imagine the combination of the SSSI and its location next to one of the busier motorways in the UK makes it fairly inaccessible.


However, with views like this, and such impressive chalk geology rising up on both sides, I'm content to drive through it every few months.

Pet Photoshoots

Full disclosure: In return for agreeing to review the experience on this blog, I received a free pet photo shoot. The reviews were run by FuelMyBlog.

There comes a time in every proud parent's life (and they don't have to be human babies) when it's time to record one's pride and joy for posterity. When the opportunity for a free pet photo shoot came up on FuelMyBlog I volunteered - it would be nice to have a photo of Jabba done professionally, and I was interested to see how he could be posed in case I wanted to try out a few tricks with my DSLR.

The company is Wish. They are part of a blossoming "experience" industry, and one of the things they offer is a pet photo shoot. At the time of writing its cost has been marked down to £15, usually £50. This includes a 7x5 photograph.

Upon receiving the voucher, I had to phone to activate it and make the booking. However, the main problem with this was that the phone number was only active between 9am and 5pm Monday to Friday. I usually work 8am to 7pm minimum, so it was always going to be nigh on impossible to phone them. In fact it was the Christmas holiday (having received the voucher in early November) before I was actually free to phone. And the most annoying thing was that there was no information they asked for that could not have been given online. I could have done this over the internet and been sent the details of the studio that way.

So it was the new year before the studio got in touch with me to arrange Jabba's close-up. The studio in question was The Click Studios in Richmond. Again, the same problem presented itself that I had to call during normal office hours on a Monday to Friday. But somehow they managed to get hold of me at ASE (!) and then after I had finished teaching one afternoon. Jabba's portrait was duly arranged for 4th February.

Despite me giving them my name on a number of occasions, they insisted on calling me Juliet. Eventually I stopped trying to correct them and answered to Juliet each time. When we arrived for the shoot, the studio was crowded - there were at least three full families in there, waiting either for viewing or for their own photo shoot, and so we stood. We at least didn't have to wait very long. Our photographer was absolutely wonderful. She was not a fan of reptiles, but despite her nervousness around him she was professional, talented, and talked to him in a soft soothing voice. The whole shoot took about 10 minutes, and then we were invited in for viewing.

I'm always a little nervous about viewings, having had a bad experience with an unrelated agency a few years ago. I expected to be given the hard sell and sent on a guilt trip. We had none of that - the man showing us the photos accepted that we were just looking for one good photo for the 7x5 image, and he helped us narrow it down to one good one.

Nearly two weeks later I missed a call from them to say the photo was in, we could collect it, but that we should phone them before we come in. I phoned back on the Saturday, but they didn't answer. They also didn't return my voicemail. So last Saturday I phoned in my Teacher Voice. They called back within half an hour and we collected Jabba's picture.

It's a gorgeous photo. The photographer did an excellent job and she is to be commended. However, the experience was less than stellar. Simply the inaccessibility of the companies outside normal office hours (even banks do a Saturday morning) has been enough to deter me from using their services again, coupled with messages from FuelMyBlog pushing me to update them. The cost, were it £50, was a little steep for the 10-minute photo shoot and the photo.

And they have yet to refund my £20 deposit! So I may be writing a complaint letter...

I may use the studio again if I was looking to book a family or couples portrait, but even so, some of the prices look steep. For example, though it was six years ago, I paid £850 for our wedding photographer, including 300 photos and an album. I understand that studios have premises to maintain and so on, but it seems like an awfully big mark-up.


Detail of Jabba's portrait, scanned in badly and used for evaluation purposes.
Picture's amazing though.

Nekkid Lady Backbone Sculpture

This week I've been earning back the car's new exhaust by tutoring on a course. I've walked through Cavendish Square each morning, and noticed an interesting sculpture.


It's a human spine. Cavendish Square is noted for the presence of the Royal College of Nursing, and it is next to Harley Street, the street for private medical practices (though I do occasionally offer a "quack quack" under my breath passing some of the clinics...). So I had a closer look.


There are 24 vertebrae there, corresponding to the seven cervical, twelve thoracic and five lumbar vertebrae. Three curvatures can be seen (perhaps a little kyphotic!), the dorsal surfaces are facing left and the ventral surfaces are facing right. But hang on a minute, those are funny looking vertebrae - I mean, my mum's had as many back operations as I've had margaritas, but even her spine is in better nick! Time to find out what's going on here.


Oh. OH. Right, it's art. Let's make a spine out of decapitated female torsos. Umm. Oh look, there's a plaque to go along with the sculpture.


I suggest that, while you read that, you grab your cheek with your thumb and forefinger and pull it in and out really quickly. That'll give you the appropriate auditory accompaniment. In that it will sound like a load of pretentious wank.

It's apparently been there since May. I'm not someone who goes crazy over art. I stood in the final hall of the Tate Britain Watercolour exhibition earlier this year shrieking indignantly at Paul: "It's a teaspoon. A fucking teaspoon. Covered in paint. For fuck's sake!" And at the Royal Academy summer exhibition I nearly took the Pink Pen of Doom to Tracey Emin's "Me Too - Glad To Hear I'm A Happy Girl" to correct "your" to "you're".

However, if pretentious arses want to produce a load of shite and get paid to do it, then more power to them. I just hope the funding for Westminster's City of Sculpture has not been diverted from other budgets. I really feel that the arts must continue to receive funding (and we happily pay for RA membership to contribute in a small way to this), but what makes me uneasy is that this festival is in aid of the 2012 Olympics, and an awful lot of money has already been siphoned from more needy budgets into this yawning black hole.

Happy Solstice

Jabba Claws is not renowned for his time-keeping, but he would nevertheless like to take the opportunity to wish you all a Happy Solstice, along with any other festivals that involve eating lots and leaving out waxworms for gecko visitors.


Remember, he watches you intently when you're sleeping, and he runs and hides in his cave when you're awake. And if you've been extra good this year, then he might leave you a festive Yule log in Poo Corner on Christmas morning.

A Word From Our Sponsor

The resident gecko on Stages Of Succession would like to wish you a very happy Samhain, and feels that an appropriate way to celebrate such an occasion is to give him lots of waxworms.


In fact, in the traditions of the festival, if you treat him with waxworms, he won't crap all over your hand.

A Gneiss Photograph

I was flicking through some photographs this evening, and found one of my favourite photos of Paul.


It looks like an old photo, perhaps from the 1960s or 1970s. In fact, it was taken on my SLR with what I later discovered was damaged film. It was our honeymoon in 2006, and when this was taken we had paused on the crest of the Bighorn Mountains on highway 16. He looks like a rock star, rather than a newlywed legal secretary.

Behind him is an outcrop of the Precambrian gneiss for which the Bighorn Mountains are renowned. The Roadside Geology of Wyoming says these are Archaean - once sandstones and shales, metamorphosed and folded.


I couldn't resist taking a proper geology photo, with lens cap for scale, of the folded gneiss. Paul let me off with this bit of geo-geekery, even on our honeymoon. After all, as they say, geologists make the bedrock...

Wordless Wednesday: My First DSLR Moon