I do like my metaphors, but that's just as well considering that virtually every Thought for the Day seems to be dealing with the same old news. And they certainly take longer to write than the news items themselves. On a good day I could finish one in a couple of hours, but on a bad day it could take six or seven. The difficulty is trying to squeeze everything down into 2 minutes (about 365 words for me). The first draft is several times that long, and then I have to remove what's unnecessary and flush it away like scum (not easy when the scum contains some of your favourite bits of phrasing or imagery). And what do you have left at the end of the process? Well perhaps, in the end, clean drinking water is actually more precious than any gold.

A bag of old coins found on a building site was put on special display at the Museum of London yesterday. Not just any old coins, of course – 1800 years old, Roman, mint condition, and 22 carat gold.

Gold has always fascinated humans, from before the Pharaohs and the Aztecs right through to Goldfinger and Fort Knox. Its value is linked to its rarity, but also to its purity, and the fact that unlike other metals it remains unaffected by the corrosive influences of nature.

Transmutation into Gold is at the heart of the Islamic science of al-kimiya, which traces its roots through ancient Greece and Alexandria to the Hermetic sciences. It is a way of looking at things based on the principle that ‘everything is in everything’, so the substance of things can be transmuted and their nature changed. It embraces the cosmos and the soul, and for the alchemist, the transmutation to be aimed for is the deliverance of the soul from bondage, and the soul’s transformation into gold.

With our modern materialistic view of science, we tend to scoff at the idea of alchemy nowadays, even as our understanding of substance is blurred by the weirdest of sub-atomic particles, coalescing together in strange bondings of probability to express themselves as what we call matter. But now as ever, science remains a way for us to understand the inner processes of the material world in order to apply that understanding to ourselves.

Qur’an says “God sends down water out of heaven, and the dry river-beds flow each in its measure, and the torrent carries a swelling scum; and out of that over which they kindle fire, wishing for ornamentation or ware, out of that rises a scum the like of it. So God strikes both the true and the false. As for the scum, it vanishes as jetsam, and what profits men abides in the earth. Even so God strikes His metaphors.”

Quran constantly requires man to question and to reflect, to look to the signs in the natural world for understanding, and apply that understanding not just to the universe, but to the meaning of our lives.