Alison: We thought this week we would honour this very noble smokey quartz crystal because I’ve only just discovered it when Mil and I were clearing out the snuggery room, and it comes from a collection that I acquired in the late 90s when a wonderful old mineral shop was closing down forever, and I know that this and others like it had been purchased by John Ruskin, so I feel very honoured to say that I now own a John Ruskin mineral, and he was a very discerning man and he loved these things.
This is a very very noble smokey quartz, and I discovered when I was handling it that it has embedded in it some little cairngorms, and it has been robbed of other cairngorms I see when I look at it closely. They and the things that go in Scottish Skean Dhus. That hexagon there, and there’s another half buried one there. I thought we’d have a chat about it because it is a beautiful example of a piece of crystal structure embedded with many many forms. The forms of the uprights are all rectangular or square, and if you were to draw out the shapes on them it would make a very interesting picture. And some of them are to me extremely like the old gnomes and trolls in stories in mountains. I think this is a five faced crystal, and the slopey tops are all like mountain ranges. So it’s really great fun to take the object in your hand and let the light play on it and see how clever the geometry is.
It’s been inside me ever since I can think of really [Alison’s love affair with collecting minerals and quartzes]. It was helped by my father taking me to this wonderful shop in Chelsea when I was a little girl – Gregory, Bottley and Lloyd – and this was a very old Victorian mineralogy shop which supplied universities and museums across Europe, and people like me went in on a Saturday with her dad, and I made friends, I made great friends, with the two men who worked there.
One of them was the fossil man, and one of them was the mineral man, and they were both my pals. And as a little girl I just was in heaven, because that shop had these deep deep specimen drawers which never often got opened, and I had the chance to open them and found these treasures lurking in the back. This was the close down [in the 90s] , when I went down specially from Glasgow and selected some, and it came up in a most enormously heavy box. I’d been a life customer. It was a very dreary sidestreet, and it was down in a dusty basement. It was a real pig in a poke shop, but to me it was heaven.
That house [Bryngwenalt – Alison’s grandparents house] was set on the side of an old quarry and so there was a tunnel we used to go through from the front door, into the quarry up a hill, and there was lots of shiny lovely bits of lead, anyway I was always poking around with stones. I’m not particularly interested in precious stones at all. I’m interested in the form and the fascinating structure – the modest beauty of them. I’m very sorry I can’t explain why I love these rocks. I mean somebody kind could give me a beautiful diamond bracelet and it would mean nothing to me. I do believe that they pulsate. I think we haven’t begun to tap what’s inside something like that. And it could be in the old days people did have a very good understanding of crystal healing. Have a go [to Mil] you’ve really got to work to get the architecture of it, and you will see it is incredibly logical. They’re just fascinating pieces of art, or design – they are a mystery to me.
The Royal Collection 