ERUPTION FREE - MAR 31 - 3.23PM

Volcanologist David Pyle, volcanoes

With someone who's job title is the stuff of late 19th Century Boy's Own adventures, I was I suppose expecting something... more. After all the brevity of the talk's title , "Volcanoes", suggested a brusqueness, a bluntness that only a true adventurer obsessed with bubbling lava and deadly volcanic craters would exhibit, but sadly no... Not on this occasion. Volcanologist David Pyle, a self-confessed volcano freak since the age of 7, is clearly still obsessed with these magnificent, natural phenomenon, but all I could think as I sat there was that if I was a seven-year-old I'd have long ago lost interest in this whole volcanic shebang - you know, Krakatoa, Vesuvius and Pompeii. More a journey through artistic interpretation than a thrill of a planet vomiting forth, it was a presentation that was learned and gentle and pleasantly arty-farty but hardly Conan Doyle's "The Lost World". Fortunately, aged 55 and not seven, I had the courtesy to keep my eyes open but boy did my mind wander elsewhere