Like many kids who have been allowed the space to be interested in things, I had fleeting fixations. Having initially been WW2 obsessed, collecting and subsequently breaking Airfix models, I went on to be obsessed with snakes, fossils, and trees.
When I started secondary school in 1995 I came to the conclusion that the only way I could prevent being a daily target for bullies was to ‘fit in’.
‘Fitting in’, as I surmised, meant not really being ‘into’ anything…at all.
Even football, adidas or Eclipse clothing and boyband haircuts were bad if you were into it a little ‘too much’.
Somebody at secondary school found out that I could’t do my alphabet from A to Z in order, and for a month or so I was routinely bullied.
One memory I have is of naively trying to prove my knowledge in other fields, by naming the geological eras from PreCambrian right up to the Cretaceous (the ridicule that this provoked used to haunt me for years later).
However, After that, I would make sure that nobody would humiliate me ever again.
Yet, although this interest was crushed into the ground, it couldn’t be killed.
The image above show two sets of stones. On the left are stones collected on the Dark Peak, whilst on the right are stones from the Westmoreland North Pennines. All are from the Carboniferous era, with the exception of a few older rocks to be found from Igneous outcrops in the latter.
Of course, the area I am from wouldn’t exist, at least not as we know it, if it wasn’t for a certain carboniferous rock. Coal, formed from crushed vegetation, was crushed by the sandstone and grit rock that was originally silt and sand packed down, hundreds of feet deep, by an ancient giant river delta.
As a teenager I would hide map books of the local area under my bed when my school mates came around. These maps would often be full of imaginary roads, urban ‘add ons’ I’d attributed to my home town in order to ‘fix’ its disjointed former mining communities together and into a more recognisable urban whole.
I wish i’d had kept these map books. They were, in a sense, indicators of a future life as an artist.
The story of rocks to my life is yet to be realised, and maybe it should never.
All I know is that when I feel stressed in a town centre, if I stare at a wall, I see 300 million years of deep time that is so indifferent to the myriad of contemporary social pressures that it gives me glimmers of peace.
John B Ledger 