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The Wobble

The Wobble

The clay looked harmless when Mr Adeyemi thumped it onto the middle of Talia's wheel. It was a grey lump the size of a grapefruit, and it sat there as if it had nowhere else to be.

'First you centre it,' he said. 'Until it's centred, nothing else works.'

Talia pressed her foot on the pedal and the wheel began to spin. She cupped her wet hands around the clay. At once it bucked against her palms like something alive, lurching left, then right, then left again. She squeezed harder. The lump wobbled more wildly, and a fat slice tore away and slapped onto her apron.

At the next wheel, a boy called Ezra had already pulled up a neat little wall of clay. He did not look over, which Talia decided was the kindest thing anyone had done all morning.

Mr Adeyemi crouched beside her. 'You're fighting it,' he said. 'Lock your elbows against your knees. Keep your hands still and let the wheel bring the clay to you.'

It sounded like nonsense. Still, she braced her elbows, held her hands steady and stopped squeezing. For a long minute nothing changed. Then, slowly, the bumps under her palms began to smooth out, until the clay spun so evenly that it seemed not to be moving at all. Only the wet shine sliding past her fingers gave it away.

'There,' said Mr Adeyemi quietly. 'Now you're potting.'

By the end of the class, Talia had made one bowl. It leant to one side, and its rim rose and dipped like a range of hills. When Mr Adeyemi asked whether she wanted to squash it and start again next week, she shook her head.

'I'm keeping it,' she said. 'It's the first thing I've made that I didn't have to wrestle.'

Two Living Things in One

Two Living Things in One

Look closely at an old stone wall, a fence post or the bark of a tree, and you may see crusty patches of grey, green, yellow or orange. They look like dried paint, or perhaps a kind of moss. In fact they are lichens, and each one is not a single living thing but two.

A lichen is a partnership between a fungus and a tiny green organism that can make its own food from sunlight, usually an alga. The fungus builds the body of the lichen. It grips the surface, soaks up rain and dew, and shields its partner from drying winds. The alga, tucked inside, uses sunlight to make sugars, and it shares them with the fungus. Neither partner could survive on bare rock alone, but together they can live in places where almost nothing else grows, from mountain tops to cold, windy cliffs.

This toughness comes at a price: lichens grow extremely slowly. Many kinds spread by only a millimetre or two each year, so a patch as wide as a dinner plate may be about a hundred years old.

Lichens have another unusual habit. Because they have no roots, they take in water, and everything dissolved in it, straight from the air and rain. When the air is dirty, they soak up that too, and many kinds sicken and disappear. Scientists therefore count lichens to check the quality of the air. A city park whose trees are covered in leafy, shrubby lichens is likely to have cleaner air than one where the bark is bare or carries only a thin grey crust.

So the next time you pass a speckled wall, look again. That "dried paint" may be one of the oldest and most watchful living things in your street.