Stuck to a stained, gray padded seat in the speaking hall at yet another retail investment conference, the guy in front of you is falling asleep as the presentation on the main stage goes totally off the rails. It goes so badly wrong, dragging on for minute after endless tooth-achey minute, that you’re praying for lightning to strike and end the speaker’s misery. The irony is, the speaker kicked off by telling you that they’re going to present a very brief overview of what their company is up to -you know, just the highlights…the steaky sizzle…
A stained chair.
Bad corporate presentations are a missed opportunity for companies. The weird thing is, having paid thousands of bucks for a brief 15 minutes to pump their Tier 1 project, the way some companies present you wouldn’t think they gave a damn. Apparently, Mr CEO is doing the audience a favour by mumbling incoherently for 25 minutes, 10 minutes over their allotted time, eyes cast down at the monitor screen as their complex technical slides bludgeon the audience to a slow death. There are usually dozens of companies presenting each day, so you’d think they’d maybe want to make an effort to stand out, right?
High up in the mountains of northeast Türkiye -up where the borders of Georgia, Türkiye and Armenia meet- the terrane is alpine and rugged. The spectacular scenery is underlain by highly prospective volcanic rocks; the tell-tale rusty signs of possible sulphide mineralization scattered all over.
The first time I went up there I was with 2 other geologists; a pleasant, easy going Turkish chappy who I’ll call Ahmed, and an annoying German one who I’ll call Harald. Harald had strong opinions about bloody everything and wasn’t shy to share them; a stark contrast to Ahmet who was happy to be learning the exploration ropes from a couple of relatively experienced geologists. He tagged cheerfully along, breaking rocks with his hammer and chucking the better ones into sample bags for assay.
The mountains of northeast Türkiye. Glorious spot.
Bloody Germans
But Harald -good old Harald, every team has one- well, he was a know-it-all who always had a better way of doing things and wouldn’t let an argument die even when his aggravated British colleague was about to give him a good Schlag in the Mund. He also refused to drive the field truck (with hindsight, perhaps a good thing) which added to my workload because as the most experienced off-road driver in the group, the long drives along forestry roads fell to me. Harald aside, I was happy enough. The geology was excellent, the pay was good and the scenery even better, when you could see it through the heavy clouds that often blanket the region.
Apologies for the picture quality in this piece. I can’t get the old school photos out of the old photo album -they’re stuck down firm after 40 years under a sticky plastic film, so I had to take pictures of 40 year old photos.
Reputation: Sheep are stupid, defenceless and harmless creatures that mope about on hillsides doing not very much. They are good for two things: being eaten and producing wool.
Sheep. I like them but I also think they are complete idiots. I like them because a) they’re tasty when they’re young and lamby, and b) they’ve kept me amused through many long field days, providing a welcome low-IQ distraction from having to take notes about boring grey-green rocks in a sodden note book. But they are irredeemably stupid.
Too stupid to get a proper haircut
Animal lovers and cuddly vegans would have us believe they’re sentient, caring, intelligent beasts capable of protracted abstract thought. For example, here’s a glowing report card I found on an animal rights website:
“One example of their amazing intelligence is that sheep are capable of recognizing all kinds of faces. They recognize sheep in their flock and are aware when these sheep are missing. They can recognize “bully” sheep and get distressed when they come around. These sheep can even recognize the person who cares for them and the sheepdog that herds them! If the appearance of another individual is altered, the sheep have no problem still identifying who it is, and they can keep track of over 50 different sheep faces! If you make a sheep mad, chances are they are going to remember you and that event for over two years! Talk about a grudge.”
Oooh. Convincing eh? But I have to ask, have these mutton-loving snowflakes ever met a sheep? Leaving aside my vague disquiet at the the thought of a crew of grudge-bearing inked-up sheep casing my house at night and mugging the dog in the back yard, I don’t buy a word of it. They also claim that sheep have decent enough memories to form friendships and they feel sad when one of the flock is hauled off to Sam The Butchers for its final date with sausage machine. But everywhere I’ve worked, except down a mine -no sheep there, funny enough- I’ve only ever seen sheep, and their close cousins goats, studiously eating grass which is not what I’d call a challenging intellectual pastime. Hence, building on decades of keen science-based observation (trust me, I’m a geologist) I’m now 100% certain that they’re not the brightest knives in the animal cutlery drawer. They’re dumb as planks and the field researchers who call them smart have never actually interacted with a real sheep in a real field trying to do something that isn’t stupid or involving grass.
I was never really one for keeping a diary; I’m fundamentally too lazy, and not nearly introspective enough to sit down every day after my sausage-and-mash supper to scribble down the day’s events. I tried once when I was working in Turkey and ended up with half a dozen pages of forced, trite, verbal garbage about an ex-girlfriend that made me cringe when I read it back a few weeks later. I binned it. With hindsight, I wish I had kept at it because this blog relies largely on my rapidly fading memories of nearly 40 years in geology and mining. It’s become a sort of “hindsight diary” reliant on my decades-old impressions rather than in-the-moment detail.
This is why I never kept a diary.
The only time I did keep a regular diary, I had no idea that I was doing it. In 1996 I was sent to Iran by Anglo American to supervise a drill program at a gold project called Zarshuran in the north of the country. It didn’t go well. A perfect storm of awful rock conditions and stunningly inept drill company management had our number before we’d even started. We were doomed but we just didn’t realise it yet. The drillers were the most comical I have ever had the misfortune to hire; their lack of talent and common sense was a wonder to behold, and the managers couldn’t be trusted to sit the right way on a toilet. We only drilled 7 holes in 3 long, ball-breaking months of drilling and those holes cost us/me a whole world of pain and frustration, yielding shitty core recoveries and not enough data to make a firm decision on the future of the project.
Arsenic mining at Zarshuran
I faxed a routine daily drill report from our camp camp back to head office in London via a dodgy satellite phone at the camp: I had to lean out of the cabin window and press on a specific point on the antenna while it was operating otherwise it wouldn’t work, and it gave up functioning all together at sub-zero temperatures. As the late Iranian summer dragged into autumn, and we were only getting 1-2m core a day, the water pipes began to freeze overnight, and my daily reports got more and more fraught before the drilling finally ground to a halt in November as winter set it. I can only imagine how much the London team dreaded the daily chronicle of desperation spewing out of the fax machine. Happily, my boss at the time (thanks Dave) had the presence of mind to a) recognise that I was documenting my own slow decline into total lunacy, and b) to keep the daily reports and bind them together into a single document; an ad hoc diary of my misadventures which was presented to me at the office Christmas party later that year in Budapest. This piece is based on the daily faxes which I still have, 25 years later.
My last shift working as an underground geologist wasn’t planned. It just sort of happened. In October 1987, I had 1 month left on a 3-year contract in South Africa. I was looking forward to a change of scene: 3 years in Apartheid-era Transvaal was enough and I needed to get out. I was feeling disconnected from the UK and needed a London fix. I’d already applied to the University of Alberta to enrol for a master’s degree program and the signs were good that I was heading to Canada so mentally I was checked out.
I had the first 2 months of the rest-of-my-life all planned out. Young and stupid with an interest in history, I was off on a once-in-a-lifetime five-week trip backpacking around Egypt and Israel. And then it would be back to London to hang out with my girlfriend for a few months of beer, concerts, and fun! fun! fun! But first I had to negotiate the perils of the Last Shift.
Me in Egypt. Honest.
There was a lot of superstition surrounding the last underground shift. People didn’t telegraph their last one; they tended to keep it quiet. No need to tempt fate and encourage the Rockburst Gods or the Demons-who-make-shit-fall-on-your-head by blabbing about how it would all soon be over, right?
Hands up if you’ve heard of pseudotachylite? No? Neither had I until 1984 when – as a fresh faced geology graduate- I landed my first job underground in the South African gold mines. To be honest, I’d never heard of tachylite let alone pseudotachylite. One’s real and the other a poor copy? I didn’t have a clue. Then at 21 I started a 3-year contract working down a deep hole in the Witwatersrand Basin where pseudotachylite – which I’ll call PT because I can’t be arsed to write it out every time- became part of my every day geological life.
PT in all its glory. Photo from Kevin.
The Wits mines exploit ancient gold-bearing gravelly rocks accumulated in a huge sedimentary basin; a 2.7 billion-year-old accumulation of what were once sandstones and conglomerates but are now metamorphic quartzites. The basin was big, possibly 300km or more along its long axis and the experts tell us it looked a little bit like the photo below. Huge fan deltas formed where 5 or 6 rivers flowed into a large depression or basin.
Two years ago, in a moment of remarkable prescience for yours truly, I had an idea. Good ideas don’t come often to me so I had to act fast. Figuring (correctly) that COVID was going to last a while, I decided I needed something to look forward to other than a) pandemic weight gain and b) the weekly Okanagan doorstep wine delivery which was becoming a little too regular and comfortable. A walking trip would be ideal I thought, but when, where and who with?
Cornwall gives England the finger.
I contacted three good friends, all geologists like me, over WhatsApp.
Chaps, I said. We need to something to look forward to other than a) our pandemic weight gain b) and the weekly doorstep wine delivery.
Agreed, they said in a WhatsApp-in-unison sort of way.
So, says I, why don’t we book a walking trip in the UK for the summer of 2022? How about a week or two hiking along the Cornwall / Devon coast? If we book now we can pick the optimum window for a good old-fashioned sunburn, like mid-July to early August.
Oh yes. We’re in if you book it! they replied somewhat cryptically.
Righty ho. I replied. Will do.
We’re leaving (hopefully) on an Air Canada jet plane
In this brave new COVID world, the threat of infectious diseases is everywhere. So, when Father’s Day weekend came around just post-PDAC I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. I was sleeping in a partly finished bedroom, smelling slightly of ammonia, my face and hands covered with white spots. In a moment of rashness I’d told my wife -the mother of my 2 wonderful boys- I’d do anything for her so she sent me to Home Depot to buy a gallon of Pearl White Matt paint to freshen up the dreary basement bedrooms. A father’s work is never done.
Painting this gave me spots
PDAC is over for another year and the rigours of yet another 5 day trip to Toronto are finally behind me. It was good(ish) to get back in person to the concrete wasteland of Front Street: My colleagues and I skipped the on-line version in March 2021. Zoom fatigue was really beginning to bite so the thought of “standing” in a virtual booth for hours (which in reality meant sitting in my home office in boxers and a wrinkly shirt) waiting for e-Investors to google their way down Aisle 6 didn’t appeal.
Line Ups and More Damn Line Ups
In the week leading up to this year’s show, the Canadian press was replete with stories about the chaos at Lester Pearson airport in Toronto. Massive lines ups, lost luggage, absentee staff – CBC’s website would have us believe civilization was falling apart starting with Gate A36. Pierre Pollywotsit, the erstwhile conservative (the small c is deliberate) Prime Minister of Canada, even filmed himself striding purposefully -nay, manfully- through Lester Pearson pronouncing loudly and totally apolitically that it was the worst airport in the world. To which I can only say he’s never been to Karachi, Tehran, Newark, Leeds / Bradford, large chunks of Frankfurt airport, Manchester, Kabul and any one of a couple of hundred others. The man should get out more. Personally, I had no issues on arrival until that is we got to the baggage carousel and the de rigueur 50-minute wait for bags kicked in.
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.
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.
