This book is subtitled The Curious Lives of the Elements and you will probably think that it’s a strange choice of reading matter for someone like me who dropped science after two years of it at high school in favour of languages. But I was actually quite good at science, thank G I did drop it though as I would never have coped with the maths aspect of it.

Anyway, Jack was reading this book and he kept reading snippets out to me which is why I thought I would give it a go myself as it was obvious that you didn’t have to have a Ph.D. in chemistry to appreciate it.

I’m sure everybody is familiar with the Periodic Table which adorns every chemistry classroom, but the author of this book was so fascinated by it that he set out to collect specimens of all the elements that he could, starting off by looking around his own home to see what fitted the bill. He broke open dead light bulbs to get at the tungsten in them, copper was represented by an American nickel, his father had some gold leaf. It seems that it has been a lifetime’s obsession as he’s still trying to complete the collection, but it’s never going to be complete of course – for one thing they wouldn’t give him any plutonium!

This is such an eclectic book, he jumps from The Wizard of Oz, where he mentions that Dorothy’s shoes were originally silver. Then he’s writing about Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders as he’s shown the old way of making charcoal, just as Hardy described it.

Then we’re at platinum which is of course the most expensive of the metals. There’s actually no good reason for that because there is about ten times the amount of platinum on earth as there is gold, logically platinum should be a lot cheaper. It doesn’t even take a good shine like gold and silver do, but in the 1930s platinum was talked up, it was the trendy metal. It was Depression time but just as now there was still plenty of wealth about and those rich people wanted platinum. Hollywood played a part too, with Frank Capra’s 1931 film Platinum Blonde starring Jean Harlow, being the first use of that term to describe white blonde hair.

So far so accessible to the unscientific, but although the book does go into details of the discovery of the elements and the scientists involved, it’s always clearly written and understandable to the scientifically challenged such as myself. An enjoyable and unusual read for me.