When I first strted examining the local libraries and bookshops searching for information about how the planet works I was just trying to teach myself geology.
I had come to it the long way around having spent my forst 17 years learning nothng more than how to read and write. I never got past the final class in my primary school with maths and languages and gave up music lessons because it was music lesson or wooddwork.
Later it was a choice of woodwork or metalwork, not that it made any difference for as from the fourth form at grammar school, I was like the teacher we were supposed to have for maths, technical drawing woodwork and metalwork semi-permanently absent.
I saw more of my biology teacher than I did of him. But that was no loss to any of us as he was a foolish bully. Not violent bully but an unpleasant chap no less. All the more so when you think that his absence at class extended from the first year. Imagine 30+children running amok in a workshop with electrical machenery as well as sharp hand tools in it.
Considering my intake went on to burn down Britannia railway bridge and some other sods set fire to the engineering department of the university that was being built at the time. I think we got off lightly.
But I am not pointing the finger at anyone likely to be alive at this time.What I am saying is that I was among the worst wretch of my generation. And although I was forced to become religiously inclined by my parents I was never a true Christian. Had I been a nicer person I may have taken it seriously. Fortunately I was an innate arsehole (as I am to this day) and thus had to find out everything the hard way.
At the time I could not honestly comprehend how the phases worked. To this day I have to stop and thing to see which way the moon is falling back against the sun. I say this as a person who taught himself to tell the time by the moon. Not many people can even tell the time by the sun, certainly very few could do so in Britain if asked, I am sure.
I worked out (using felt pens on a south facing window) what positions the sun appeared in over the rooftops opposite at around noon and went on to work out approximate shadow lengths from there. I became once again as aware of my environment as I had been decades earlier when I used to dodge off school to go up in the hills locally.
I noticed the likelihood for rain from the BBC shipping bulletins when they used to announce such properly. After that I learned the likely behaviour of the daily weather from the same source announcing the directions of cycloninc forces headed towards Britain.
Any cyclones heading through SE Iceland tended to go to the Hebrides and then north towards Norway (not mentioned) but I knew the various sea areas that implied fiar weather and the ones that meant wet.
From there I worked out using a sea-fishing tide time-table that a time between phases ot one hour was likely to produce wet(?) weather. It has been decades since I was in the region and have forgotten which type of weather the time lapse tended to produce.
From there I went on to develop a simple code that didn't work all the time that applied to all the phases of the moon. I could never understand why it went out of phase but every few years it came back to spot on. I have since deduced that it is the same principle that is involved with the science of climatology. There is something known as a singularity in British weather that appers the world over at the same time(but with a different product depending on location.)
This comports to the oceanic cycles often called multi-decadal oscillations. And I rectified my Lunar Phase code to fit the North Atlantic Oscillation. That is: I learned to shut my mouth when I expected a volcanic eruption as opposed to the more common (at the time) large earthquake.
All this guesswork was accompanied byan astonishing rush of excitement. I was like a little child with their first Christmas present, and the news of more to come until the secret that there is no Santa puts and end to it.
I had been diligently scouring all the article on physics that applied to earth science that I could understand in, for example the Encyclopaedia Britannica and whatever else I could find in the local libraries and whatever I needed in addition from whatever secon-hand bookshops that there were locally.
Eventually I ended up toying with the idea that a computer would be able to sort through the problem for me. I had no idea that even were I capable of filling out a database to suit my particular needs, I would still be short of the magical conclusion that the energy source for earthquake and volcanoes was exactly the same as that for storms.
Who knew?
Astrologer knew.
And god!
