Gold

Gold. An execrable 1983 single from Spandau Ballet, taken from their album True: or more generally, the precious transition metal with the chemical symbol Au and the Food Additives classification E175, Gold dissolves readily in Aqua Regia, an invention of the Alchemists: a fuming yellow noxiousness whose recipe comprises one part Nitric to three or four parts Hydrochloric acids, seasoned well with Chlorine and Nitrosyl Chloride. The metal also amalgamates with Mercury, used in one process for extracting the metal from soils and sediments, usually in small-scale mining operations, precipitating toxic pollution, illness and slow death by poisoning to those involved. The desire to accrue even a meagre living from the promise of this shiny substance drove hundreds of thousands of people over many centuries to this enterprise. Usually and typically in vain. As always, only those with deep pockets and an exploitable or very often coerced workforce and a rigged market in which to sell made any real gain.

Gold. It’s essential to so much of our science and technology, but also it is central to most cultures. Revered down the millenia as much for its symbolic value as anything else; I wear both my mother’s and my grandmother’s gold wedding rings out of respect and a sense of belonging and place in my own family’s history - it’s where I come from in the most direct sense - my own slice of the timeline.

Gold. At the end of it, though, gold equals wealth, one way or the other. As Etienne-François Geoffroy, an eighteenth-century physician and chemist put it succinctly: ‘Gold, of all the Metals is the most useless in Physick, except when considered as an Antidote to Poverty.’