The following year, it was actually in '97 – I... I'd spoken to Roald a certain amount about my early days – and in 1997, at a time, interestingly, when I had a… I was contorted almost double by a backache. A... a parcel arrived for me, a very small, very heavy parcel. And when I opened it, out rolled a heavy grey bar, which I immediately recognised as a bar of tungsten, because I know what tungsten looks like, what it feels like, what it sounds like, what it smells like, and this instantly reminded me of my uncle who had manufactured lights with tungsten filaments, and who... whose factory produced bars of tungsten and who himself was surrounded by tungsten paperweights and bars and cubes and everything, and whose forearms were blackened with tungsten powder beyond the ability of any washing to remove. And as I opened this bar, I think it happened in seconds, a vision of my Uncle Tungsten came to me, of my chemical boyhood, and this was really a Proustian moment. That bar of tungsten was my madeleine. In the ecstasy of that moment, I completely forgot that I had a backache and I straightened up. I don’t think the backache was psychosomatic, but there was the most amazing therapeutic power in... in the joy which came to me.
And this bar of tungsten started me writing. Especially, and almost exclusively, with an emphasis on the chemistry of those days and my love of chemistry and the laboratory I'd had at home, and the experiments I had done, and how, at my uncle’s suggestion, I would always go to original accounts. He told me never to look at a textbook. He said… I’m afraid a word is escaping me. At that time, original accounts by Humphry Davy and Faraday and others were available, yes, Alembic, as Alembic [Club] reprints. These cost almost nothing, and so I became acquainted with all of the chemists through these Alembic reprints, and I wrote about this and much else in a... in a peculiar book. It wasn’t clear what it was going to turn into, and some of it was vastly out of scale. In particular, I’m very fond of elements called the rare earth elements. All of these originally came from Sweden and these were obscure elements, and... lighter flints are made of rare earth elements. And I, in fact, wrote something like 50,000 words on the rare earth elements, and Kate said, 'You can’t do that', you know, they’re not that interesting'. I said, 'They are that interesting!' But there was a sort of strange imbalance because, as yet, there was not very much about... on the personal side and all the other aspects of being a little boy growing up in England before and during the Second World War.
