91热爆

Have you ever wondered how to date sand? (Not in the going-out-with sense). No. Nor had I. But last night a very Heath-Robinson piece of kit appeared and a very black bin-bag and some sand samples. Then I had to go and hide in the kitchen so I didn't know what happened next. But this morning, before I agreed to cook kippers I demanded an explanation. I love good teachers, people who make complicated stuff understandable, even when you haven't completed the previous course. So this dating of sand isn't dating the time the individual grain became sand, or when the bit of shell was a marine thingummy, or even when the rock grain was a big rock. It measures how long ago a cup-full of sand last saw light. So what it dates is how old a beach is, for instance, and when a flint thingummy was put down and forgotten about. I've watched Time Team, so I know mostly they date stuff by dating other stuff. But this measuring 'how long the sand has been in the dark' is a new (5-10 years) science and has implications in dating rises in sea level and they have huge posh bits of kit in the labs. So what I don't understand is why the kit in the bar looked like it came out of the fifties and is like stuff my dad used to play with.

Apart from archeologists Coll is full of builders. The Dumfries boys have just left, the Tiree crew have just arrived and a new gang from Dornoch leave tomorrow. My Scottish geography is improving enormously. It is not so easy for deliveries now, it isn't possible to send stuff to 'the new house' any more.

It is going to be a long week end; an early boat on Saturday because of the sale on Tiree, the hour change on Sunday, and the forecast is wet. But at least the house is warm, pipes all fixed after two leaks and the radiators are mostly full of water not air. Even though he had to resort to filling them with a funnel as they just would not bleed!