Water, Stone...

Our kitchen has dark stone worksurfaces. I love them; they have a three-dimensional, liquid quality that is brought out particularly if a shaft of sunlight hits the stone from one of the roof windows. Looking at the patch of light is like peering at algae, moss and unidentifiable floating lumps in the dark, iron-rich water of a pool on an upland moor. Picking stone, and this stone in particular, was one of the decisions I most celebrate about our rennovation of this place. I've tried to take blippable pictures, but it defies capture - so far

We bought and fitted the stone as a separate deal from buying the kitchen. No fancy showrooms or slick sales-pitch; we drove into unexplored industrial heartlands in the demilitarised zone between Birmingham and the Black Country. Following sketchy directions, we found a hangar-sized warehouse, full of stone. Each type of stone that they had (and there must have been several hundred) had clearly been imported as a complete rock weighing a tonne or two. It had then been put through a machine that had treated it exactly like a loaf of bread that you might buy whole and request to be sliced in the shop. One face of each slice was polished, either by the same process or a subsequent one. The result was successive 'slices' of stone, stiil stacked in their original position, maintaining the outline of the original boulder

In the warehouse, these slices were stored on their edges in racks - like giant plate-racks, or displays of the type you get in art galleries that let you leaf through mounted, unframed prints. With considerable effort, we could pull a slice over its vertical balance-point, moving it from leaning on one side of its slot to lean on the other - the better to examine its surface. We spent hours looking at the jaw-dropping varieties of stone available, deepest black to marble-white, some streaked through with vibrant colours, some with sparkling flakes of embedded mica, some with swirling patterns in its grain. It was an Attenborough-standard glimpse into the variety and excitement of the natural world

I'm reminded of all this by Australia's decision to ban 'engineered stone'. This is stone-like material, reconstituted from stone dust. The ban presumably does not include the real thing, but it struck me that the process we had an insight into must also generate a lot of stone-dust (possibly sold on to the reconstitution businesses?) I wonder if they are also in the spotlight

This 'pond' appears in the orchard every wet winter. It's on a high bit of ground; there is a ditch a few metres to the right. The tree-line behind lines a deep brook. It must be highly impermeable soil to maintain this elevated flood. No risk of dust. A few gentle reflections enhanced a snap of last rays of the setting sun on the eastern side of the valley behind - at 3.30pm! Roll on the equinox