But I spoke of cross-currents, and one day, when I was in the zócalo, or the central square, of Oaxaca city, I got a bus back to the hotel and there were two people on the bus who were speaking... a dialect of German, a sort of Swiss Deutsch. And this immediately brought to mind how, in 1946, just after the war, my… well, of course, '45 would have been just after the war, but in '46… take that parenthesis out, I’m wrong... how in '46, just after the war, my parents went and took me and my brother Michael to Switzerland, and how we had been picked up at the railway station by an electric vehicle and how I heard people speaking this Swiss Deutsch. So, suddenly I remembered this forgotten incident of arriving at Lucerne when I was 13 in 1946. And this in itself insignificant thing then opened out into many of the personal aspects of childhood and boyhood and growing up, and this led to the other half, the personal half, of Uncle Tungsten. So Uncle Tungsten… I’ve spoken of the Island of the Colourblind as a double book. In another sense, Uncle Tungsten is a double book. But here the two parts are ‘Siamesed’ together. They... they are both me. And it’s me, and chemistry, and growing up, and London, and family, and being Jewish, and being neurotic, and being exiled to a school in the country, and going a little mad. It’s all there. It’s all in Uncle Tungsten.

And so this was a radical departure for me. This was a... an autobiography, a memoir, hinted at by the two pieces I had written in 1993, the Humphry Davy piece and the South Kensington Museums piece. It gave me great joy, although I shouldn’t conceal the fact there were also great difficulties, but there was great joy writing Uncle Tungsten, although just as the rare earth metals had to be cut down from 50,000 words to 500, so the manuscript was almost a 1,000,000 words and was cut down to 100,000.