Trolley 948

Sunday proved a rather thin day for trolleys, with just the one on Station Approach, by the new flats by the station. M&S, medium small.

Then coming out of the front of M&S, a right untidy collection of trolleys. It was reasonably early, and I guess someone had collected up all the trolleys in and around the market place. Not an M&S person, as I don't think that they would have left them outside like this. Maybe a council man charged with keeping the market place neat and tidy? Surely not another amateur like myself?

The rebuild by the stream (left) is coming on, taking full advantage of the 'build on footprint' rule. And the garage to the left has yet to come. I wonder why they are leaving it for now?

Note the near vanishing roof to the left, with its blue insulating sheet very nearly matching the colour of the sky.

Home to take delivery of a copy of reference 3, all 3lbs 3oz of it.

Having had good use from the much lighter and more accessible reference 2 over recent months, probably lifted from RPPL, I had been prompted to take a look at reference 3 in the margins of Gemini explaining to me something of how formulae like that for Hornblende snapped above are put together. With all the complications which arise when you try to compress a complicated chemical fact into a short line of text. I might say that Gemini, once again, did very well as a study aid.

I was also impressed by the explanation he - or Wikipedia - pointed me to in reference 3. A text book for wannabee mineralogists, rather than the amateur like me who likes to pick up the odd pebble and rock. Including, I might say, a flat lump of pink basalt, perhaps 10kg of it, picked up from the shores of a loch somewhere in Scotland. Except that I can't, just for the moment, think where in the garden it presently lives. I am pretty sure I would not of taken such a thing to the tip. Worse still, Bing has no knowledge of pink basalt from Scotland and basalt only makes a fleeting appearance in the archive. And I had thought that large parts of Scotland were covered with the stuff. I shall have to try and find the lump in question, hopefully not at the bottom of one of the micro-ponds.

Back with the book, usually quite dear, as one would expect for 600 pages of textbook, but for some reason some people called JNC books offered me one on eBay at a quarter of the regular price, postage and packing free. It arrived yesterday that is to say the next day and I find the reason that it is cheap is that it has been stamped 'damaged', but I have yet to find the damage in question. There don't seem to be any pages missing. Given that I am unlikely to work my way from cover to cover, I might well never know.

I might add that some or all of the book is available online - but you have, quite reasonably, to pay for a download. I dare say one could work one's way around that, but that is working too hard at freeloading. Better just to pay eBay and have a real book.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/08/trolleys-945-946-and-947.html.

Reference 2: An introduction to the mineral kingdom – Richard Pearl, J. F. Kirkaldy – 1956, 1966.

Reference 3: Minerals: Their constitution and origin- Hans-Rudolf Wenk, Andrey Bulakh - 2016. 2nd edition, 3rd printing.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/12/granite.html. The one and only mention for basalt. Not helpful in the present context.

Reference 5: https://jncinc.co.uk/. The look to rather specialise in this sort of thing, that is to say cut-price version of fat paperback text books and there seems to be some link with the Cambridge University Press. I don't think I have ever done business with them before.

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