The Expert

When I was a secondary schoolmaster I always considered myself a generalist rather than a subject 'expert', so I was particularly useful to the unfortunate colleague who had to construct the annual school timetable, when he/she found they needed someone to teach a class of, say, history, but didn't have a history specialist to take it. So, over my thirty years in the profession, I took classes of geography, geology, history, English, religious education, personal and social education, information technology, French, maths, general science, and, just the once, thank goodness, girls' netball. Of these I was qualified in only one: geology.

I enjoyed learning in new subject areas, and felt that it was not altogether a bad thing that I approached a subject from the same ignorant view as most of my pupils.

Despite this, I have always had a niggling desire to have been THE world expert on something. I might have become just that when, on leaving university in 1967, I was offered an MSc, the area of research being the Namurian goniatites of the Derbyshire/Staffordshire Peak District, goniatites being a slightly obscure, ancient and long-extinct relative of the ammonites.

Had I been able to take history at university - I wasn't, because I didn't even have an 'O'-level in the subject - my research would have been into the development and spread of the lateen sail, seen here on an ngalawa off the Tanzanian coast. I suppose the reason for this interest lay in the fact that I had seen lateen sails through my early life in Tanganyika and Kenya, and because....

....a lateen sail, seen here on an Omani dhow, has always seemed to me to be exceptionally beautiful.

I would also have loved to have been an expert on the semi-precious gemstone tourmaline. Its elongate, elegant natural crystals are so much more special than most other semi-precious stones because they come in such a variety of colours: colourless or in umpteen shades of pink, red, blue, green, yellow and black. My favourite variety is indicolite, which runs through rich blues and greens. More, and very unusually, the colour of tourmaline crystals can vary both along the length of the crystal and in zones from a central axis.

I suppose that, if I had organised myself for my retirement, I could have become the world expert on something but I allowed that opportunity to slip by. In any case, by the time I had spent years becoming that expert it would probably have been too late - I would have been forgetting all the precious facts so fast I would soon have ceased to be the world expert.

Photos of goniatite and tourmalines courtesy Wikipedia.