To everyone who’s ever read anything on the Urbancrows blog. Sometime last week, the blog sailed past 50,000 hits: not readers, hits -so some are return users (why, oh why, would you come back…?) but either way, I’m a happy camper.
What he said.
I can’t thank anyone who’s ever read a piece of mine enough for making urbancrows successful beyond anything I could have imagined when I started it. My main aim when I kicked off was to record a few career stories for my kids, post some dumb opinions, and give vent to my sarcastic Englishman side while improving my writing at the expense of my reader’s rapidly eroding patience.
I succeeded with 2 of these objectives: my kids are yet to read a single story but I’ve definitely posted some pretty dumb, sarcastic pieces. Ho hum.
The Self-Isolation-Round-The-World-In-14-Days Tour
I flew in from Santiago a week ago with a plane load of worried Canadians heading home from their business trips, or cancelled cruises or their we-had-a-bit-too-much-adventure holidays.
The road in Chile goes on and on and on and on
The handy leaflet I was given at Toronto airport that passes for Canadian government COVID-19 screening tells me that I have to self isolate for 14 days, so now I’m effectively stuck in the house until March 30th.
Well, screw that. I’m an experienced world traveller with the constitution of an ox on steroids, and I’m simply not prepared to sit around, thumb up my bum, while the wonders of the world pass me by. So, the Urbancrows blog has embarked on an all expenses paid (funding source to be determined) virtual world tour to take in some of the sights I’ve always wanted to see. Madagascar, Mongolia, Chad – I’ve crossed them all off my bucket list already.
Regular readers will be pleased to hear (I hope) that I’ve been keeping an illustrated travel diary to while away the time spent on my virtual plane, sipping virtual bubbly in my virtual fully-reclinable First Class seat. I’ll be updating the diary everyday, so let’s dive in and see where I’ve been…
Day 9: The Lord Of The Rings
Today I visited the set of the Lord of The Rings in New Zealand -I read the book over and over as a kid & it’s one of my favourite films. I went dressed as Bilbo & they let me climb Sauron’s tower, which was only 12 ft high and wobbled alarmingly; something of a let down! A pathetic looking rubber “Smaug” flew over on the end of fishing line & grilled one of the extras but that’s why they call them extras I guess! Gandalf was smoking his wand (wtf?) & a bit out of it. His tobacco smelled funny.
The endless Chilean desert has claimed me this week. Five days tooling around the Atacama with 2 fellow geologists is a great way to avoid the zombie-market-COVID-19-toilet-paper apocalypse.
Indeed there is after last week’s meltdown.
The three of us have been self isolating in a Toyota 4×4, well stocked with pringles, sun screen, rancid boots and single-use water bottles. We’ve been looking at 2 silver mining projects between the Chilean towns of Taltal in the south, and Iquique in the north. The projects are roughly 400km apart as a hugely overworked crow flies, with nothing but desert and dust between them.
When it comes to piano concertos I’m a bit of a traditionalist. I prefer the early 19th and late 18th century pieces to their 20th century descendants. I suspect it’s because of the lyricism of the great European composers of that era, and – to be blunt- the whistle-along tunes they composed. If you ask me, a lot of 20th Century pieces involve too much noodling; great if you’re a musical theorist who understands what’s going on but not always so great to listen to for lay people like me. But hey, that’s just my opinion and what do I know?
Beethoven. Cheer up.You’re a genius.
There are 2 stand out concertos that I keep going back to. Both are popular and well known which is a slight departure in terms of the music I’ve been writing about on this blog.
Firstly, Beethoven’s wonderful Piano Concerto No 5, known as the Emperor concerto; a name given to it by the English publisher of the piece. And then there’s the boringly named Piano Concerto No. 1 by Chopin.
A couple of years back, I was walking with a friend through the Christmas market on the southern end of Hungerford Bridge in London. It’s an interesting, brutalist spot for a market, trapped between the muddy river, a massive bridge and the imposing late 1960s concrete arts bunker known as the Southbank Centre.
The Southbank centre.A kinder, artsier sort of brutal.
(I only found out recently that the Southbank centre was actually the vanguard of what was supposed to be a ground-breaking architectural redesign of London in the 1950s and 60s. The plan called for large parts of central London to be razed, including Soho and Whitehall, to be redeveloped with huge concrete office and residential blocks. Covent Garden was also slated to be flattened but the local residents organised and defeated the plan. Thank fuck it never happened.)
With Christmas just around the corner, towns and cities around the UK -and Canada too for that matter- begin to sprout outdoor Christmas markets like mushrooms on a cowpat. They pop up anywhere there’s space; row upon row of bland little wooden huts looking like the bastard offspring of a beach hut that’s had a one-night stand with a camp site toilet. I saw at least 6 different-but-exactly-the-same markets in the UK last week, scattered morosely around London, York and Harrogate. My wife and I are divided on the attractions of the seasonal markets. She loves them; me, less so..
Months back I went on a bit of a rant about my contempt for the myriad metaphysical powers that some people ascribe to crystals. Kundalini tickling, energizing chakras, transporting you to alternate dimensions – apparently there’s nothing a nicely formed kyanite crystal can’t unlock. And according to some charlatans believers, the common ore-forming minerals – the ones I’ve spent my career exploring for, like galena and chalcopyrite – also possess amazing restorative powers which I wish I’d known more about in my first incarnation as a humble field geologist.
It’s all bollocks as far as I’m concerned, but each to their own.
Then an old colleague, Kirsten, forwarded me a wonderful link to a comedy sketch about, yes you guessed it, crystal power mumbo-jumbo. I won’t bore you by trying to describe it; just click on the link and enjoy. Suffice to say, I have renewed respect for rose quartz.
(Update: If you’re outside Canada & having trouble viewing the video, my friend Karen sent me a second link that works in the UK. I’ve posted it below.)
The city of Quetta is a dump. It’s the provincial capital of Baluchistan, the western most province of Pakistan. It sticks out like a nasty looking spike, with Iran to the south and Afghanistan to the north. I was there in the late 1990s waiting for a government permit to head off road and up to the border region with Afghanistan to prospect for copper (see my earlier blog posts here and here) I waited about 3 weeks for the permit, which was finally granted after I hosted 15 or so officials from the ministry for lunch at a Chinese restaurant.
The Afghan border. I was waiting for a permit to go here. Sometimes I question the wisdom of my choices.
Fast forward to 2019 and now it’s not just a dump, it’s a bloody dangerous dump, rife with Islamic sectarian extremism. The Shia Hazara tribes have been targeted by Sunni militants leading to bombings, kidnappings and other nefarious goings on. To compound its problems, the region is also prone to major earthquakes. The last big one in 1935 killed an estimated 40,000 residents.
It’s that time of the year in BC. The weather’s gone all autumnal and
rainy – the fine, misty, miserable drizzle that gets in through any zip or seam.
The annoying damp spot on our kitchen ceiling, the one we can’t seem to fix, is
back to doing its soggy thing. Yes, it’s Hallo Fall! Hallo mildew!
But to coin an over-used British phrase… “Mustn’t grumble, aye, could be worse.”
We had a very pleasant summer this year. A lovely warm forest-fire-free summer. A few years back it was a different story. Fire season was in full force and the valley north of Pemberton, where our cabin is, was shrouded in a thick pall of foggy smoke. A vigorous blaze was raging up along the banks of Anderson Lake towards the town of Lillooet, about 30km away from our modest shack.
Two thousand years before Donald Trump’s underfunded (and, as yet, fruitless) efforts at walling in the US, the Romans were busy building walls on the outlying borders of their vast empire. In Scotland, they built the Antonine wall in AD142. It was a 63km long earth bank cutting east to west across the country at its narrowest point. And in today’s modern Germany, you can still see remnants of the Limes Germanicus, a partly-fortified frontier that used a combination of natural obstacles and wooden palisade to guard the northern border of the Empire from the dastardly unconquered Germanic tribes.
But Hadrian’s wall in northern England is probably the best known. It stretches for over 70 miles across hill and valley from the east coast of England, at Wallsend in the outskirts of modern day Newcastle, to Bowness on Solway on the west coast. Bowness is an isolated but attractive little village that’s periodically cut off from the rest of the country by high tides on the Solway Firth.
Hadrian’s Wall as it is today, Upper Denton nr. Carlisle.
