Perfection: Our souls are incomplete until we get the first stain

I CAN’T remember much from my formal education — just useful snippets: “Stony grey soil of Monaghan you burgled my bank of youth”; the stages of development of an oxbow lake; how long it takes for an oven to cool if the oven-door is left open; and the Hardness Index.

The hardness index is not who in your class could ‘take’ you in a fight. It’s a scale that rates minerals according to whether they can scratch each other — so effectively, which minerals could take each other in a fight. Talc is the softest, Diamond is the hardest. You can apply it informally in the home as well.

For example it turns out the hardness index of a coal scuttle is higher than that of the paint on a recently painted wall against which, the coal scuttle has been accidentally swung by a man warned by his wife to be careful with that coal scuttle; thus creating the first scratch on the wall.