My First Field Trip

One day in early September 1981, my dad dropped me and my Berghouse backpack off at a scummy B&B at No. 14 Nightingale Road, Southsea, what was then the red-light district of Portsmouth.

Bye. He said, climbing back into our blue Chevette. See you at Christmas.

Righty ho. I replied stuffing the tenner he’d given me into my empty wallet.

And with that, I tumbled headfirst into a brave new world of post-secondary education, pubs, field schools, and student poverty.

Mrs. Smart

“Mrs. Smart’s B&B: No Vacancies” read the tired, unwelcoming sign in the window of the 3-story terrace house. Nicotine-stained lace curtains added a touch of brothel chic to the look.

Old Boot

A Monty Pythonesque old lady in her 60s, Mrs. Smart had apparently devoted her life to the art of being a miserable old boot dressed in moth ball-scented clothes. Her B&B catered to 3 types of guests with nowhere else to go.

There were students like me who’d applied to college late, and had missed the deadline for getting in to residence. Then there were Margaret Thatcher’s outcasts; people with mental health issues who were the unfortunate guinea pigs of the “care-in-the-community” program (which was code for fuck off out of our care home, you loony, and look after yourself however best you can.) The third species of guest was low ranking military types; sailors and squaddies on temporary shore leave who needed a bed for a few nights and washed up in Southsea.

Free At Last

As a newly minted student, I was full of the joys of freedom. I explored Portsmouth, drank copious amounts of beer and signed up for courses.

The highlight of my first week was a really bad bout of food poisoning from stale fish and chips I bought after a Friday night in the pub. I’d worked in a fish and chip shop for a year, so you’d think I could spot rancid fish, but no.

Drunk, I inhaled the slightly rubbery battered cod. Later that night, sobering up rapidly as my innards were squeezed out by a cold, fishy hand, I exhaled it again, although exhaled is perhaps not the right descriptive word. I physically couldn’t leave the bathroom for a night and spent 7-8 hours draping one end of my body or the other over the toilet bowl.

And They’re Off

Two weeks in to term 1, our class had its first geology field trip: off to the Isle of Wight we went.

It was a day trip – a quick jaunt across the Solent on a ferry with a short minivan drive across the Island to some classic outcrops to study sedimentology. We had to bring our own packed lunch, hammer and notebook. I was completely inexperienced, knew nothing about geology and was almost wetting myself with excitement at the thought of my first practical taste of the subject.

Lunch was an issue. The trip was on a Sunday, I had no kitchen, and everything was shut in Southsea. Undaunted, I sneaked some extra slices of sliced, white Mothers Pride bread at breakfast, smeared them with Mrs. Smart’s bulk-buy margarine (it was butter but not as we know it) and dribbled ketchup and brown sauce between the slices for a sandwich filling. They were truly vile, but I couldn’t have cared less.

It rained fine drizzle all day. As protection from the elements, I had my old waxed cotton Belstaff motor bike jacket, some horrible blue rain proof trousers, a cheap backpack, but no hat.

Mud and Rain

We trudged along the beaches on the island, listening to the profs describing the sedimentary rocks, getting progressively wetter.

The field class was split into 2 different streams: those with high school geology experience, and those without. I mistakenly ended up in the group of kids who’d studied A-level geology and was immediately out of my depth. High energy sedimentary environments, glauconitic clays, bivalve fossils.. it was all Greek to me, but I was happy enough and asked a lot of really dumb questions. Eventually the profs twigged that I was in the wrong group and stopped treating me like one of Mrs. Smart’s care-in-the-community guests.

Lunchtime arrived under low, grey clouds. The sandwiches were every bit as bad as I thought they’d be and I drooled jealously at the other students with their hard-boiled eggs, crisps, ham sandwiches and cans of Tizer. Back then I was a smoker, and my cigarettes (Rothman’s Kingsize) got totally soaked, which at 50p a packet was a blow to a poor student, so when I got home, I laid them out on the heater to dry.

Thumb Prints

The personal highlight of my day was when we were asked to sketch a cliff section and label the rock units. My drawing was spectacularly shit. My pencil was blunt, the notebook page was wet and I can’t draw to save my life. It was more of an engraving than a sketch.

The icing on the cake was when one of the lecturers -the elderly Dr Rothstein I believe it was- told me I had to colour in the rock units on my rapidly decomposing sketch to make it more realistic. He proceeded to smear a green-sandy smudge of wet beach mud all over my drawing with his large, puffy thumb. My scientific rendering of the geology ended up looking more like a used piece of toilet paper after a couple of failed flushes.

And that was it. My first field trip.

A week later, when my field notebook was marked for that assignment, the lecturer who graded it scrawled a red ink complaint in the margin of the cliff sketch page, which by now had dried up and stuck itself permanently to the pages either side. It tore when he tried to look at it.

Almost unreadable. Would be better without the muddy thumbprints read the comment.

Don’t Forget

Despite the muddy and rain, my first field trip led to a life long love affair with geology. How was yours? If you have a good story, I’d love to hear it via the comments below. Don’t forget to subscribe to urbancrows.com via the soggy subscription box at the top of my home page. You never know, it could lead to a life long love of badly written blogs. I’ll be sure to mail you earth science related tripe from time to time.