Having crashed and burned on the questions for this week, I turned my attention to the tutorial work: 'The Solid State'. Rather than being a particularly well-established government, this is in fact all about... solids. Reactions of solids (slow, unless heated to excitingly high temperatures), conduction in solids (good, bad or indifferent depending on how the electrons boogie about in the structure) and all the little fiddly exceptions to the rules which make chemistry so irritating.   For some reason this topic has failed to grip me. It's reasonably interesting, insofar as any tutorial where you have to copy out textbooks can be interesting, I just can't sit down to write the stuff. Oh well.
			The characters and situations in this diary are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happenings. Any resemblance to such things is coincidental, or just for humourous effect. All names have been chosen to implicate the innocent.