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The Conference Circuit

Normal service is resumed on the Urbancrows Blog. Lucky you.

October 2021 – the last day of the New Orleans Investment Conference. After 3 long days in the Hilton hotel on Poydrass Street I was into the home stretch. One more day and I’d be heading back to Raincouver and my relentlessly leaky kitchen roof. To maintain my laser focus on the job at hand -promoting my modest silver company- I decided fuzzily through drooping eye lids that a bucket of extremely strong coffee was called for. Off I went to the coffee shop.

*The Hilton on Poydras Street in NO. A design classic.*

Everything was going swimmingly. I’d been in the slow-moving java line for 30 minutes, sipping from a bottle of water, propped up at an alarming angle against a counter full of herbal tea boxes, chocolate covered beans and refillable mugs. I was drifting off into a terminal coma, convinced my time at the front of the line would never come when the man in front of me finally got to the counter. Leaning in close to the perspex-walled counter he uttered the words:

“I’d like a caramel frappacino with soy milk and no caramel. My wife doesn’t like the slimy feeling of the syrup.”

I snorted, narrowly avoiding spitting iced water all over his flabby, sweat-soaked back.

Amber Alert

Along the edge of the tideline.

Shuffling along the winter tideline, layered in strata of sweaters and a damp anorak, I finally spotted what I was looking for; a small, rounded translucent orange pebble maybe 1cm across. It winked seductively at me from a pungent bed of rotting seaweed. I was thrilled. It was my first piece of North Sea amber.

I didn’t find amber often, just regularly enough to keep me coming back to the beach near my home in all weathers, stumbling along -eyes to the ground- oblivious to the cold and rain.

*Portrait of the geologist as a young man about to get nerdy*

It was one of my nerdier phases as a kid -and God knows I had some really sad ones. When my teenage buddies were leafing through torn copies of girly magazines and puffing on illicit ciggies down the alley behind Woolworths in Ramsgate, I could be found grubbing about on the beach looking for fossils and amber. (Yeah, well, mildly inaccurate. I did have a well-thumbed magazine stuffed under the mattress and I had started smoking at 14, so all is not lost.)

Local Justice, Bulgarian Style

It’s Bloody Grim

By the start of 1995, I’d been working as a geologist for Rio Tinto *boo hiss* in Turkey for about 18 months. I was unhappy with the terms of my employment -which were rubbish- and to top it off, Rio decided that year to “localise” a lot of expat contracts. This meant slashing salaries and generally being dicks to anyone who wasn’t a full-time expat employee under an existing contract. Hence, I was feeling less than 100% devoted to them.

And then the cavalry arrived. Some drinking buddies who ran Anglo American’s Turkish office *Yay! Huzzah!* offered me a job in Bulgaria. The offer was substantially higher than my my pitiful Rio salary, so after a quick nose scratch and some judicious chin rubbing -it would’ve been impolite to say yes immediately- I signed the contract and enjoyed a jolly nice dinner with my new boss Owen and his wife. A few weeks later I was across the border in Sofia, renting a grotty communist-era 3rd floor apartment. It was tastefully decorated, painted Moscow-approved peppermint green, offset by bright orange tiles in the bathroom.

*Anglo’s eastern European team, mid 1990s. Many of these people no longer have hair*. *I do.*

Post-communism Sofia was grim. It was grey and shabby, full of miserable people who’s social system had collapsed. There was no produce in the shops in the winter and only a handful of semi-decent pubs and restaurants to take the edge off the cold grimness. The gorillas of organised crime were everywhere; muscle-bound pricks in black leather jackets and heavy gold necklaces, driving shiny new western sports cars in a city full of ratty Trabbies.

Sweaty Geologists

Late that summer, our small team headed to the southwest of the country close to the borders with Greece and Macedonia to explore for sediment-hosted gold. We rented a house in the town of Ognyanovo, owned by the local mayor. An interesting character in the Borat style, he would show up at odd times in the evening with a couple of local prostitutes in tow who were offered to us gratis. His treat. There were regular heated but polite discussions between him and my Bulgarian colleagues as we declined the entertainment, but I will admit we were more than happy to accept his home-made slivovitz (plum schnapps.)

War Graves Along The Wire Road.

Regular readers of this blog (both of you) might recall a few stories about my time in western Pakistan in the late 1990s. It was bloody amazing; rough country but an extraordinary experience, except for the nasty gut bug I caught which followed me back to Budapest and then set about exhausting the local toilet paper supply.

Would I go back there? No. It’s even more nuts today than the 1990s and back then it was bloody weird, with drug runners, Taliban incursions, nuclear tests and the odd hotel bombing thrown in for good measure.

I prospected for copper on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan; the long, straight east-west stretch in northern Balochistan. It’s an arbitrary frontier created in 1893 in the depths of the Great Game between Britain and Russia, pencilled in on a map of the subcontinent by one Sir Henry Mortimer Durand GCMG, KCSI, KCIE, PC.

*Sir Henry & Abdur Rahman getting ready to draw lines on a map.*

Sir Mortimer Pencil Line

Sir Mortimer served as the Foreign Secretary of India from 1884 to 1894. He was a stuffy looking British civil servant in the best up-tight Victorian tradition and about as pro-Empire as you could get. His pencil line legacy -originally known as the Durand line- ran for 1,660 miles, cutting through traditional tribal territories and largely ignoring the wishes of the local savages. Its intent was to demarcate the areas of political influence between the British in India and one Abdur Rahman Khan, the Afghan Iron Emir; the man who finally united Afghanistan’s warring tribes. The line still exists although it’s now the modern border between the 2 countries and it still ignores the traditional tribal territories.

Never Judge A Book

God, I Feel Old.

This is the second of 2 posts on the joys of interviewing & hiring geologists and engineers. See also Arms and the Man.

I’ve finally admitted an awful truth to myself; it’s 40 years since I left high school. In my head, I’m still a spotty 17-year-old idiot, albeit one who’s wondering why he suddenly has moobs, grey hair and a large, malignant bum growth called a mortgage. Give or take the odd break for post graduate studies, I’m now 37 years into my earth science career; 37 wonderful, peripatetic years of travel, strange alcoholic drinks, and disturbing intestinal nasties.

At Grammar School, I excelled in one thing and one thing only. Mediocrity. Sports? Too skinny and uncoordinated. Academics? Nah. I was a shit study and didn’t exactly thrive in the Hogwarts-style red brick school environment I was in; my exam results made the attainment of slightly-below-average-grades look like lofty ambition. Healthy living? Nope. I smoked from 14 years old, and me and my mates were in the pub as soon as we looked old enough and had sufficient moola to buy a pint and a bag of crisps. To paraphrase the great soccer player George Best, most of my money I spent on beer, ciggies and girlfriends and the rest I wasted.

*Travel. And lots of strange alcoholic drinks.*

Arms & The Man

Or, how to interview a heavily armed geologist.

This is the first of 2 posts on the joys of interviewing & hiring geologists and engineers.

Recruiting geologists for a project is a tricky business. For all sorts of reasons, someone who comes across well in an interview can be an absolute antisocial nightmare in the field; hygiene issues, weird sexual proclivities (see Geologists Gone Bad), fucked up political or religious opinions, drugs… the list of transgressions is endless, but the end result is always the same; someone sitting alone in a corner of the cook house while everyone else plays cards and throws things at them.

I’ve hired nose combers to work in Pakistan, Iran, and Bulgaria. The biggest success was a team of young Bulgarian geologists we hired in the mid-90s for Anglo American’s exploration office in Sofia. The 4 guys we picked have all forged decent careers in the international exploration industry. When we hired them, starting on maybe $250/month -good money in post-communist Bulgaria- they were thrilled to be working for a major mining company that wasn’t owned by a Russian oligarch. Each of the guys had a different skill set to add to our group -prospecting, logistics, drill program supervision and so on; a competent and adaptable project team that we used all over the world.

Yemen

A few years later I was back on the hiring trail again for the same company, this time working with a Turkish colleague, Yasar, to hire a small team of Yemeni geologists from the university in the capital city, Sana’a.

Rude Words & Geology

I was back home in Brexit land in October and again in November. In between moping on the forecourts of sucked-dry gas stations, getting rained on in Wales, and being depressed in downtrodden Stoke on Trent, I had plenty of time to ponder the curious world of British place names (as you do).

The UK is full of wonderfully rude place names; there are so many that one intrepid individual, Paul Taylor, recently embarked on a comprehensive tour of the smuttiest ones perched on a rather dodgy looking 50cc moped.

Mr. Taylor started in Shitterton and ended up -fittingly- in the pleasant hamlet of Bell End. Along the way he stopped in The Knob in King’s Sutton, Butthole Lane in Shepshed, Titty Ho, Cockermouth, and Minge Lane. Genius. I’ve been to Cockermouth, and yes, I admit I sniggered as we drove into the village past the name sign.

The disciplines of geology and mining are not without their double entendres, but remember, at best mining people are a beer-swilling puerile bunch not widely known for their intelligent, penetrating humour. True, there are plenty of words that will raise a chuckle from them, but it’s stuff that would make most normal people stare at each other in baffled incomprehension.

Drillholes, Magma & Megawatts

I bloody love Iceland

It’s full of rocks and puffins and volcanoes and ponies and geysers and more volcanoes and stuff. And it’s a geologist’s wet dream, although I don’t count sedimentologists as real geologists so you lot can stop nodding in agreement.

What right-minded nose comber can resist active volcanoes and recent lava flows still warm under foot? The Fagradalsfjall volcano, which has been erupting for a while now, haunts my erotic dreams at night – orange, fiery, sinuous rivers of lovely lava filmed in pornographic close-up slo-mo by kamakazi drones.

Scary Creatures

One of the joys of a career in geology is the opportunity it affords humble earth scientists to get closer to nature, David Attenborough style. Sometimes a bit too close. Here are a few stories on the nastier strains of wildlife that I’ve encountered myself, or stories that friends have told me. I’ve covered some already –tortoises, ostriches, polar bears etc.– so they won’t be rehashed here.

This list is NOT a top ten and it’s not arranged by level of threat or ability to cause painful death or injury. It’s simply a list of stuff that occurred to me after my mother-in-law (thanks Maureen) planted the idea for the post. If you have your own story, let me know via the comments.

Hairy Insect Things With Lots of Legs

In the field, anything with lots of hair, a bulbous pink abdomen and more than 4 legs should be studiously avoided, which is why I’d never vote for Boris Johnson.

If you ask me, the single worst insect nightmare is the camel spider, not actually a spider and not really a scorpion either. I touched on them in an earlier blog post. Giant sandy coloured fuckers with huge jaws, they lurk all over Africa and the Middle East, lying in wait to scare the shit out of arachnophobic people like me.

Expansionist Tripe

Social media is full of idiots. Doesn’t matter what topic you’re following -astronomy, koala bears, aliens or cross-dressing nuns – someone has a stupid fringe opinion that they’re going to try to ram down your throat.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is IMG_8892.jpg — *I’m a intellectual, innit?*

In a moment of rashness a few years back, I joined some Facebook geology groups. Learning Geology Community (53k members), Geology and Geologists (123k members), and Fossils Rocks & Minerals (27k members). I wanted to spread the word to all those lucky people about my blog (ha, ha, good plan), and maybe mentor a few newbie geologists. Thanks for the help Uncle Ralph!

It didn’t take long before I was filtering out posts from lazy students trying to get their homework done for free, and lots of “please tell me what is value?” posts with fuzzy photos of grubby little grey chunks they found in a field and think is a meteorite and not a grubby little grey chunk.

And I wasn’t the only one hoping to educate the masses. Pseudoscience posts soon started appearing in my feed; so-called geologists lurking on the dodgy fringes of our fair science, pushing an alternate version of geological reality. Flat-earthers, creationists, climate change deniers- it’s a long list- but one flavour pops up far too often for my liking.

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The Conference Circuit

Normal service is resumed on the Urbancrows Blog. Lucky you.

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