h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Need to check the spelling on this one. (well that's good, at least the spelling was right).

Honesty, Truth and Integrity (I think) will have to go and look it up.
Well how wrong can I be?

Quite a lot of weird things happened yesterday, and then when I did look up the meaning of this one, what Melody had said about it turned out to be true. More later.

1) All that nonsense about the Radio Licences
http://www.radiolicence.org.uk/1970s.html
Just as well there are some nice people on hoo too to help one get one's facts straight.

2) Saw W, very helpful Scorpio, who made me feel better about having been confused by messageboards

3) Some telesales operator tried to sell me an orange mobile phone with loads of catches no doubt. Can't afford to take on any extra money things at the moment.

Odd - *just* before you wrote your post, I'd had a mate point out some alleged sphalerite in the roof of a cave in South Wales.

He'd pointed it out becuase he didn't expect to see much down there, though it's apparently fairly common in the more mineralised limestones of North Wales, which are one of his (and my) more regular stamping grounds.
The word itself, I probably hadn't heard for many years, then twice in a couple of days.

Would that be coincidence or synchronicity? I was just wondering yesterday whether you ever came across any minerals whilst potholing. Do you ever study any of Melody's books? You only need to hear it once more. I saw someone who looked like he could have been the son of someone I once knew (yesterday). I don't know why I didn't say something then but something stopped me. See you soon.

North Wales (where I do my cave digging) has a lot of mineralisation - the limestone has had a fairly rough time, and subsequent igneous activity has resulted in many mineral veins, largely lead, but with various other things in smaller quantities.
In the Minera area, most of the caves are accessed through mines - there are many cave passages at 50-100m depth beneath one of the mountains, and the mountain surface is covered with glacial drift, so the are very few natural entrances. The corrolary is that many of the mines seem to hit cave passage at some point or another.

Regarding actual minerals, I don't have much of an eye for them (and many of the cave passages are pretty muddy, obscuring much small detail).
As far as the obvious minerals go, there's a fair amount of calcite filling in faults and veins that seems to have been part of the mineralisation, rather than subsequent action from surface water dissolving and depositing rock. There's also various galena debris in the mine passages, and occasional large pieces.

Down the shaft we recently capped, some guys found a very large lump of galena sitting in the floor of a level leading off, but it seems likely it will stay put since it was so big that two of them were unable to even roll it over, and it may not fit through the hatch in the shaft cap even if we were able to haul it up.

It seems likely the lump was found by miners late in the life of the mine, *after* the winding gear had been removed, so they just left it. However, it's possible it was found when it *could* have been removed, but left as an enticement to investors - apparently, some of the local miners were actually more interested in the act of mining than mineral extraction per se, so the mines were largely a means of moving money from distant investors to the pockets of the locals than a means of actually moving lead from below the surface to above.

Thank you for writing so much Potholer. It is so long that I have used hoo too I was surprised to see you still here.

I will have to continue replying to this post later on. Sorry.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/hub/Communities

I've just put this here because I didn't know where else to put it seeing as I've deleted most of my diary and you've got yourself a girlfriend

Err - I think you'll find I haven't, even in a virtual sense.

Oh! I thought you had.