A Thousand Words on a Brick
Once, as a schoolboy, I prematurely exited a class through a (ground floor) window. My reward was a requirement to produce a 1000 word essay on a brick. I failed. What is there to say? Scroll forward. I wish I could email stuff back in time to my fourteen-year-old self because now, when I look at the humble London Stock bricks of my Edwardian London terrace house, mottled yellow and ochre, dull streaked with shades of blue-grey, I see the materialisation of the city. In comparison red bricks used elsewhere are gloomy, modern brickwork is just boring and the Scottish and Cornish granite of the monuments and temples of finance is as grim as the people it honours. Start from the very, very beginning, in the primeval smoothie. Perhaps a few hundred thousand years later it began to cool and matter formed; initially the tiny and mysterious stuff understood only by physicists, but which later coagulated as atoms, the woo of stardust. These disappeared into the mincer and mixer that was proto