Oolong’s Long Oo

The salt bin opposite my flat provides me with a suprising amount of intrigue. Somewhere down the line, it filled up with water enough to become distended – or became distended enough to fill with water – so now it sits there and forever grins invitingly, like some kind of fat plastic crocodile.

It’s permanently full up with water now – intensely saline water, of course, which does some pretty interesting things when it’s stagnant… when someone dumped an old paperback in there, for example, it quickly became encrusted with those characteristically square salt crystals, like the ones you can buy at fancy delicatessens (‘fleur de sel‘)… although not so appetising.

Later, days of intense, steady sunshine led to some fascinatingly rich crystal formations around the borders of the salt bin, as an inch or two of the water evaporated.

Then, most recently, a combination of wear and tear with hot, hot sun and heavy rains have led the bin to start cracking at the sides, sweating its saline drips in waves to leave a story of the weather inscribed on its sides.

I suppose this would be a good place to write about the way crystals derive their shapes from the way their component molecules stack together, or about the echoes of geological forms in small-scale emergences like this.

…maybe some other time.

Welcome to Fergus Ray Murray’s new blog.

Why ‘Oolong‘?

• Well, what with this being Teh Internets and all, I thought I had better come up with some kind of a pseudonym. I took the name of my favourite tea because I liked the sound of it, I wrote a song about it once, and it was also the name of the hero of quite a cool computer game I remembered from my youth.
  I only discovered later that I shared the name with the Internet’s most famous bunny, and the Pigsy character out of Dragonball. Such is life.

Why ‘Oo‘?

• Oo is an interjection which can express glad surprise, or a moment of pleasure. I like that, and I thought I might enjoy keeping a log of things that make me go ‘oo’.

…Why ‘long’?

• Call me a preposterous optimist, or – if you prefer – a gloom-mongering Lethargian – but I think there’s a fair chance I’ve got another fifty years ahead of me on this planet. Life is far too long to live without routinely taking pleasure in day-to-day things of beauty and wonder.

Have a cup of tea?