Oil Drum Lane

  Tom Coryat  In 1577, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a Rector in Somerset had a son named Tom. Connections got him an education at Oxford and, later, a position as a wit and joker at the court of the teenage Prince Henry, the son of Elizabeth’s successor, James 1st. Prince Henry   In 1608, he decided to leave this and become England's first backpacker, travelling around Western Europe, driven by curiosity and the possibility of enhancing his reputation by publishing a book about his journey.  Western Europe was well known, not least because the English had popped over the water for a recreational invasion.  Later, he added to that by embarking on a much longer trudge across Asia to India, a remote and mysterious land.    Tom's contribution was the descriptions of his trip, which introduced  the civilisations of the east to the English public.  By all accounts, he was a short, skinny and unprepossessing man, an affable but long-winded odd...

Other Creation Myths Are Available If you're not a Palaeogeography geek – and odds on you are not – then you probably struggle to make coherent sense of what you know of early Earth. I attacked it two ways. My recent post ' Avalonia' looks at the movement on the bit of the Earth's crust that you are probably standing on now. Here, I scan the bigger picture. You might wonder if I am up to the task and, at this point, I do too.  The story plays out over billions of years and, while geologists have helpfully sliced it into Aeons, Periods, Epochs and Ages, there is constant change within each. Can you place the birth of the moon, snowball Earth, and Jurassic Park within this? Do you want to? It's a bit like a jigsaw in which the pieces represent slabs of the Earth's crust, and can change their position, shape and colour.  There are YouTube videos of the movements, but while pretty, they are often contradictory, confusing or just wrong. Part of the problem is the lab...