Where was I? Oh yes, I'd moved to York, living with Kelly and Hel and just quit working for Humber in Beverley. Bring yourself up to speed here. I was offered a few more weeks working for Humber; we'd discovered most of medieval Beverley under the unexcavated area of site in the last week of the job (as is the usual case with archaeology...). I had to decline as I'd already agreed to start work with Network Archaeology in the North Yorkshire Dales. Oh! How I wished I'd stuck with Humber... You may recall, Network were the company that piled into Ireland and created a ratshit pile on the N2 project that CRDS had to clear up. Alarm bells should have been ringing, but I was lured by money:
The job was similar to the Welsh Pipeline that I had worked on with Cotswold; so again the picture here is a representative of the area in which we were working. I should have known something was up when we were required to be on site for twelve hours a day. This didn't include the hour drive to site every morning and hour drive home, which we were not paid for. This was because, as usual with archaeology, the HR people had accommodated us in a village an hour away from the site, rather than looking for somewhere close to work. Bodies on site, not hearts and minds, is the catch phrase for most archaeological companies. Everybody was tired, especially the drivers, minutes became precious, we had about two hours to ourselves at night. In which time I had to prepare food, eat and get washed, leaving just enough time to stare at Imogen Thomas on Big Brother for an hour before bed and doing it all again.
Thanks Imogen, you helped me through the bad times...
This is where I first met Sir Stanners, we became close friends due to our hatred of pretty much everyone else we were working with. The two of us were housed together for a short while and we would just bitch about all the other cunts we were working with. It was one massive freak show, the entire 1983 Ministry of Works digging circuit had joined Network for the job. There were the stoned out hippies that had missed the seventies. They'd all lived through it, but they just weren't aware of it happening around them they were so whacked out of it on goofballs. It was like Ken Kesey's Magic Bus has tipped up and unloaded on the side of the site. The Nether-Kennet Acid Test had turned on, tuned in and dropped out in North Yorkshire.
'Hey dudes! Get on the bus, quick, I hear network are hiring for the summer!'
The entire archaeological operation seemed to be fumbling about under the smoke screen of the killer drug Marijuana. There was so many people smoking on that site it was ridiculous. I think there was only Stanners and I that were not on the 'evil weed'. There was a point that the Pipeline contractors came up with the idea of random drug tests for all staff including us. I was quite in favour, after all, we were working along side heavy plant and welding operations. The site was littered with massive concrete pipeline fittings. I wasn't keen on people operating heavy machinery after having been drinking or smoking the previous night. The news reached us and there was pandemonium amongst the archaeologists. There were calls that it was against our human rights, that we should protest against this infringement on our privacy. Let's all make a stand against 'The Man'. Basically nobody wanted to lose their jobs after being tested positive, which ninety percent of them would have done... Sir Stanners and I just laughed at the paranoid wrecks of humanity before us. Network broke me as an archaeologist and as a human being. I quit, I took the money I made in the short while I worked there and took a break from working. As the money dwindled I had to bite the bullet and find another job. With an intense hatred of commercial archaeology I took a temporary job working for Gamestation in their factory:
This was three months of further madness, mumbling Joan, that poison dwarf Dawn, the neanderthal Metal head with a receding hairline he was refusing to acknowledge, Jose and the rigged election and the Polish day with the 'frenetic' translations of Polish to help us all integrate. I finished here in time for a move back home to Rotherham after a trip to Morocco with Nathan. Back in my parent's gaff I was stuck for a job until I saw ARCUS advertising for work in South Yorkshire and Leeds. I sent in a CV and was called by the office. Can you guess which job they offered me? The one that was ten minutes from my house, or on the site I would have to get up at five am to get to? As usual no one in the office had read my CV and they offered me the job in Leeds. I told them about where I was living and that it would be easier for me to get to Templebrough as it was just over the hill from where I was located. It was like a light bulb had been turned on somewhere in the darkness of the ARCUS office. So I ended up on a Roman Fort outside of Rotherham:
The true horror of this site is now buried under an industrial building. It was in the midst of shitty cold and wet winter, working on a clay site, excavating V shaped ditches whilst being constantly harassed by the digger driver and his banksman about how little we were getting paid. Mind you, there were some good people on this site, most of whom I was to work with again over the next few months; I met Lauren, Clare, Linzi, Mike, Izzie and the Serial Killer Scott here. Scott and I went on to work at Smithfield Carpark in Sheffield after we'd finished:
You can actually see one of the trenches we cut through the concrete in the satellite image. There is very little to say about this site except that nearly three years on the site still has yet to be developed. Next up was Broad Street:
Yes, it's a block of flats, but it wasn't when I worked there. The housing development had been halted by Paul who was conducting the watching brief before the buildings were being erected. He'd stopped the construction as he claimed he'd discovered medieval buildings on the site. This is how he sold the site to me when I arrived on my first Monday. It quickly became apparent that he was way out of his depth and the 'Medieval' walls turned out to be a 19th century factory boundary wall. He told me it dated to 1649 as that was when Sheffield Castle was pulled down and the sandstone blocks that made up the foundations were obviously stone from the walls of the castle. The fact that it had a bottle from about 1850 sticking out of it seemed to bypass Paul. The 'late medieval' road had modern hardcore in it's construction and appeared on a 19th century Ordnance Survey map.
Sheffield Castle circa 1267
The site was contaminated with diesel and we all refused to work in a trench where the stuff was leaking out. I fondly remember all the staff standing on the edge of site watching Paul try to shovel clean the edge of the trench with his one good arm (the other one had been kicked by a horse over the preceding weekend, it probably disliked him as much as we did), whilst diesel ran over his boots. Great days. There is a blog's worth of stories about Paul and not just from this site, I have been told of his past work. He was working along with his twin brother (a transvestite vicar, I shit you not) and they would frequently have wrastlin' matches on the spoil heap. The two were placed far away from the rest of the site on an area they couldn't harm and on the Friday site tour they would duel with mattocks rather than explain what they had done the previous week. The site director would just walk away with the phrase 'Thank you, once again Gentlemen, for your valuable insights.'
Would you trust a site to this man? No, me neither... The site finished and we all moved inside to work on the post excavation, everyone else mainly cleaned pottery from the site, whilst I sat and did sudokus and forced everyone to listen to Kraftwerk. I scored myself a job in Singapore but that portion of my memoirs is reserved for the next part...
