| The 2002 reunion was held at University
College London on a wet and windy November day.
Maybe it was the weather, but attendance was down on previous years. The
attendees leaned heavily towards the active retired, with a sprinkling
of young Rockwatch members spotted cutting out dinosaur models, beside a
floor area roped off for a trilobite model game.
The booksellers were busy with browsers, including the PBFA Natural
History Bookfair - check your bookshelves for old textbooks, going for
healthy prices nowadays. Stuart Baldwin of Fossil Hall has a huge
selection of geological offprints for sale (around £1each). He is moving
his business to his home address - with a quarter of a million still to
dispose of, no matter how obscure the gap in your library is, you might
find it here.
I hesitated over a wisp of hairy mammoth hair (£10) but in the end I
regretfully gave it a miss.
And for a good range of staple kit it would be hard to beat the
Geological Association shop - kit such as hand lenses, hammers, hard
hats, t-shirts and guides at bargain prices.
Peter Keene was on his Thematic Trails stall, selling guides from the
catalogue. They have over 100 titles for sale at
http://www.thematictrails.u-net.com/home.htm/. His company (a
registered educational charity) produces short, readable geological and
other guides for parts of Britain - you may already have a copy of his
"Bristol Heritage In Stone". There are similar guides to Exeter, Oxford,
Gloucester and Bath - all under £3. The guides mostly cover Southern
Britain, and they have produced a guideline to writing trails "Trails on
Trial A Student Guide". To produce a new guide, they need local funds to
produce the guides (from the area covered), an idea of local sales
outlets, and a writer who is a good popular communicator with extensive
local geological knowledge. (I checked, and no one has yet written a
trail for NE Scotland, the area we are visiting next year).
All in all there was a decidedly old fashioned and insular air to the
reunion, with little use of modern aids such as cd roms and access to
internet sources.
It was an absorbing day out, and it left me wondering what we can do to
attract younger members in to carry on after the older members are gone.
Click here for
link to the GA website
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