Sunday 25 October 2015

How Times Have Changed,

as a young teenager,


one of the highlights of the school week was science, chemistry in fact, there was, with a little help from one of us, always the chance of an experiment going over the rainbow, resulting in smoke, fumes, flames and in one memorable experiment an explosion, but I digress, if there was one element we all like to play with it was mercury, which by all accounts should not be handled, well that was it, every Saturday in those days jumble sales, yard sales I guess you would call them now were held, with hard earned pocket money the kids of the lower third would be out buying barometers taking them home and removing the mercury, Monday mornings for a few weeks it would be who collected the most mercury over the weekend had bragging rights, on to today, there was a spillage of mercury from an antique clock in Downham Road, Ely, in the UK, just before 10.30am on Thursday, fire crews from Ely, St Neots and Sawtry in Cambridgeshire were called in, 

 the town was in shut down, a 75-metre cordon was put in place, warnings were issued for people in the city to stay indoors with their windows locked and doors closed until further notice, schools in the city were also on lock down, with no children being allowed in or out, I am guessing the clock was a mercury compensator, a fairly common antique clock in clock collecting circles and I guess many a home has one as a family heirloom, but just think, it is a ticking time bomb if you drop it by accident if the city lock down above is anything to go by, if you want to buy one just look on eBay and type in 'mercury compensator antique clock' I wonder given all of the above that these toxic clocks should be banned, or was the above just a tad of a bit of a over reaction?


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