Wednesday 23 December
“Why don’t scientists trust atoms?”
“Because they make up everything.”
It’s the time of year for cheesy jokes from Christmas crackers and this is one of the worst.
But out on our walk this afternoon there was the opportunity to marvel at the power of different elements coming together to make something special happen. It’s the same with colourful paints in tubes, on their own they are simply that – tubes of paint. But when they are combined with each other, in the right amounts and in the right places, magic happens.
So, it had rained for most of the day. When it wasn’t raining it was dense fog. At one point, I looked at the clock thinking the early morning was taking an age to get through, it was midday. It was so dark pretty much all day.
But then the clouds peeled apart form each other towards the end of the afternoon. So we took the dog out. Just around our local lanes.
I couldn’t resist seeing the droplets of water hanging on the ends of twigs or pooling in cupped, decaying leaves on the ground. Two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, squirted out of their tubes and mixed on the canvas, et voilà! Water. Loads of it. And where the sun shines on it, it either reflects and glistens like diamonds or it refracts and disperses to create rainbows. A simple combination of atoms, a multitude of magical results.
The Bald Birder 