Error!

It seems that the piece of chalk I removed from the Water Board hole at reference 1 is not rock chalk at all.

I think now that when the water main was first put in, they dug down into the chalk, replacing most if not all of it when they made good. Over time the disturbed chalk consolidated, with the result that when it was disturbed again, near a hundred years later, some of it came out in lumps.

But out in the open, the rain soon broke them up again. Rock chalk, while vulnerable to attack by water, would last a lot longer than a few days.

For some rock chalk in a natural setting see reference 2. But it can also be used as a building stone, if one keeps the worst of the water off with wide eaves - snapped from Street View in West Street, Brading.

Where it looks as if a course of flint keeps the chalk out of puddles and such in the road. Maybe the flint also counts as a damp course.

PS 1: a bit later on, the chalk fell too pieces when I tried to move it to the compost bucket. Had to resort to dustpan and brush.

PS 2: I have learned from a correspondent of a new sort of conversation with an AI assistant, at least not a sort of conversation I have tried myself very often, although the musical conversation of reference 3 does come to  mind. In the present case, the correspondent was thinking about a scene in a film he had watched, but could not remember the name of the film, or place the scene in its proper context. So he asked his AI assistant, which I think is not Gemini, who straight away told him that the scene came from a certain place in a Netflix adaptation of 'All Quiet on the Western Front', an adaptation which Bing runs down to reference 4.

Which explains that the adaptation has taken considerable liberties with the original text, perhaps with the excuse that a young audience of today knows so little about the first world war, more or less nothing about how it came to an end, that it will be a bit lost without the film including some tutorial background. I wonder if, as an old audience, who has owned at least two copies of the book, I would find the tutorial material irritating? I don't suppose I will ever know, being in  a Prime rather than a Netflix household.

But it does explain why, despite thinking that I knew the story fairly well, I did not recognise the story from my correspondent's clue. And it also tells me that I had not remembered the story nearly as well as I had thought, although I can say that the Wikipedia entry has propelled some more of it back into consciousness.

All that apart, the AI assistant must have had something to bite on. Was the Wikipedia summary enough or did he have access to something much closer to the film script? I assume that he cannot yet watch the film, as it were, and work it our for himself.

PS 3: checking the bookcase, I put my hand on my copy of the book fast enough, but find it is the copy which I first read, probably more than sixty years ago. Not at all clear that there ever was a second copy. The brain must have assumed that it had been culled at some point, then subsequently replaced by a Penguin Classics paperback, perhaps in the context of the episode recorded at reference 5 - which, oddly, does not mention the present book.

Which was printed more or less immediately after the book appeared in German in 1929, looks to have been a very big hit here, with the translation being reprinted at least four times that year, and was once the property of the husband of my father's eldest sister, a chap who served in the First War, I think catching the TB which eventually killed him as a result. He became a dentist in civil life, an occupation into which my father followed him, access to teaching having been denied.

Pleased that I turn out to still own an 'original' copy, perhaps I will now read it again.

In the meantime, Gemini is able to tell me all kinds of stuff about this particular translation and this particular reprint. Including the fact that the text was censored a bit to conform with English standards in matters of bodily function and dis-function. Including the now rather faded green stain to the top edge of the pages.

Will I attempt to check any of it? He might be a bit repetitive and he has been trained to please, but I would be surprised if he has gone seriously astray.

References

Reference 1:https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/02/bifana-epsom-style.html. 

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/07/back-to-yaverland.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/french-affairs.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Quiet_on_the_Western_Front_(2022_film).

Reference 5: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/11/pour-le-merite.html.

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