With a belated fug in my ears, I was rolling through Paddington a good thirty minutes late, when a drip, a mean solitary drip, crawled through the girders and deposited itself on my head. I say deposited because looking down I saw an incipient stalagmite leering up at me. On my coat was the faintest, smear of limestone (where it comes from I don’t know. Leeched from the stone, washed down from the seagull’s guano on Brunel’s arched iron roof, whatever.)

Each drip leaves only the most minute meniscus on me. How long would it take for a stalgmite to grow on me? It appears most stalagmites have less than 1mm growth every year, as this website indicates, and they’re solid. I estimate I only catch 1 second of drip a day, so I’m going to calcify at the rate of (1mm/(60x60x24x365)) which is about 3.17 x 10 to the minus 8 (assuming immortality of course.) I’ve illustrated the level of calcification I’ll suffer over the years of working in this job in the graph below.

Update: I got dripped on again today, at a different stalagmite location in the walkway. Doubling my estimations, this results in the graph below.

I’d like at this juncture to indicate that I am in no way bored. Oh, indeed, no.