TV, Get Off The Air!

Last night on Facefuck, I told Jamey I was going to write another Archaeological adventure chapter, but after today's shitty work I'm going to have a rant instead. We've been further reduced of ground to work on; since Tuesday we've been working on an area about ten meters square and I've had Sir Stanner's arse in my face all day (something most women in Wakefield would probably enjoy, but not me, no sir). Lauren has also been off sick, it could have had something to do with the Amazing Racist telling her that her hat was 'spiffing' or the fact that we are now surrounded on all sides by monkeys driving heavy machinery. And they're not even those clever trained monkeys that can use tools and shit. We are breathing in heavy diesel fumes and having to shout over the noise. I asked Kevin, the groundworker's Foreman, if the machines had a volume button and if they could turn them down a couple of notches, but my requests went unheeded. Added to all this was the incessant rain that G-Funk's weather circuits failed to register. Stanners though that some rain had got into his circuitry and damaged his electrics. Whatever, he didn't bring us in to shelter in the cabin.

'Yeah, it's that kind of rain that takes seven hours and fifty five minutes to get you wet, we can work through it...'

As Stanners and I were not in the best of moods all day we had our own rant about TV celebrities, which reminded me of how much I hate TV. In particular Top Gear. My Brother was home for a couple of days before heading out to Cuba for a month again. He was watching Top Gear as we were getting ready to go out for a drink. This particular episode had that little shit Richard Hammond driving a 4X4 Yuppie Cadillac in a race with a motorised kayak across Jökulsárlón, the beautiful glacier lake in South East Iceland. Obviously, that withered little cunt was driving across the land at the side of the lake, although the TV spectacle of watching him drown trapped in the locked vehicle in the middle of the lake would be something to set the video for. I watched this particular piece in absolute dismay. I've been to Jökulsárlón and it is an area of breathtaking outstanding natural beauty, it is one of the nicest places I have ever visited, the combination of sea, land and ice is unbelievable. I have watched seal colonies laid out on ice flows basking in the sun. When the weather was hotter I have watched ice broken off from the glacier float majestically by like an ocean liner in utter silence. It is one of Iceland's many beautiful high-points. So to have that little shitbag drive a gas-guzzling tank across the snow, churning up the gravel in order to win a race where the prize money comes out of license fee payer's pockets made me cry on the inside. Added to this was the fucking bellend that was thrashing through the water in the kayak. I was wondering how many of those seals appreciated the end result of the race after their colonies are broken up amidst panic. This is what Top Gear is all about, as long as the three presenters (that strutting cock Clarkson, that simpering cunt May and the hobbit motherfucker Hammond) get their fucking kicks they don't give a shit about anything else. The fucking idiot presenters ecological destruction doesn't stop there, they raced across the incredibly delicately balanced Makgadikgadi salt pans in Botswana, they have also churned up heather on Ben Tongue mountain in Scotland. When will the madness end?

LET'S OFF ROAD!!!

The problem is this, they are getting paid from BBC license payer's pockets to go and do all this stuff mainly just for kicks and in the name of entertainment. I don't know about you but I don't want to sit and watch someone else having fun at my expense. It's like giving all my records to someone else to listen to as I have to watch them through the window of a soundproof booth. Top Gear has become unfeasibly popular over the past few years. It used to be about cars and it never had a studio audience. Now it's just about the three tossers rolling about in their own shit while the crowd of baying imbeciles and invited sycophantic celebrities egg them on. It's totally dumbed down, it treats you and I as though we fall over our own feet anytime we attempt to stand up. It's obviously hitting the lowest common denominator button like a senile American President about to push the red button to launch atomic apocalypse on the Soviets.

'I'm the biggest cunt!'
'No, I'm the biggest cunt!'
'Seriously Jeremy, I'm the biggest cunt here!'
'OK, but I'm the biggest asshole!'
'No, I'm the biggest asshole!'
Ad Nauseum until end credits...

Further to this, Top Gear is not the only offender when it comes to insulting us. I have watched about forty five minutes of TV in the past week, two minutes was devoted to Top Gear as detailed above, twenty five minutes was devoted to Flight of the Conchords (brilliant, as ever) and the final eighteen minutes was all I could stomach of the hour long Andrew Marr's the Making of Modern Britain. It was a new series about about the Edwardian period and the lead up to the Great War. It covered the first powered flight, the Suffragette movement, the general strikes and welfare reform. It could have been brilliant. It could have been a real in depth look at an interesting historical period that changed the world forever. What we got was dodgy reconstructions, shaky camera work and Andrew Marr's impressions of Prime Ministers of the time. Andrew Marr is a political commentator not Rory Fucking Bremner. This is why I could only stomach fifteen minutes of this. and why I rarely watch TV anymore. Gone are the days of the brilliant documentary The Great War, a program made in the sixties and one that didn't treat it's audience as though they sucked on their feet like it was a hobby. Do me a favour, turn off your TV, let the powers that be know how you feel about this dumbed down, bite-sized, celebrity obssessed idiot lantern that sits in the corner of the room mocking you like the slack jawed imbecile that you're not!

Is there anything on the other side?

This day anything goes, burning bodies hanging from poles, I remember Halloween

I went back to work at Nostell Priory on Friday, Nick had called on Tuesday to ask if I could give a hand for the next couple of weeks. Although I am in the middle of setting up a business, a little extra money never hurts so I agreed but said I couldn't start until Friday. I was asked back because on the site the developers have lost all sense of reality and decided to they would be laying soak-aways and pavements outside of the already agreed footprint of the car park. The ground workers have moved in and begun construction of the car park site. Obviously these new areas are archaeologically sensitive areas and we need to be there not only to watch the machines but to excavate and record anything that comes up. When I left, it was a pastoral idyll, a sweeping view over cow littered fields. Majestic trees reaching towards the clear blue skies. A lush greenery rarely seen on archaeological sites. It felt good to be there, it was a tonic for the heart and mind. Detox for the soul.

How I left Nostell...

The site now resembles Isengard after the Orks move in. The site is being run over by massive 360 Earthmovers, Bulldozers and dumper trucks. It like being in the centre of some horrific future war where the Robots have risen against their human masters and built killing machines capable of destruction on an industrial level. We are the lowly human resistance cowering in our final 20m grid square, each moment could be our last as the War Droids move in.

How I returned to Nostell...

Friday night was my Cousin Sara and Shaun's Wedding reception. They'd got married in Jamaica a couple of weeks ago. I didn't go as I couldn't afford it, so it would have been churlish of me to miss the reception, even though I was on the guest list for the Cannibal Corpse gig at the Corporation that night (not that I'm bitter). In the event it was a great night, Sara was suitably pissed from the start, everyone was dressed in their wedding best and most of the party goers were up dancing to the tunes belted out by the fat Rod Stewart Lookalike DJ. It was a good chance to catch up with the family something I rarely get a chance to do as I get older. There was even the obligatory karaoke, with Rotherham's Boots the Chemist workers caterwauling to It's Raining Men.

No one butchers disco tunes like Rotherhamites!

The Evil Doktor Herr Clay had also asked me to go over to York to celebrate Halloween at a student party on the Saturday night. It was also to meet the woman he's been keeping in his Austrian dungeon for the past 23 years. Her name is Anna and she seems to have developed Stockholme Syndrome, as she was quite attached to the Evil Nazi Scientist. It was all set, Dr Clay was to come to Rotherham and pick me up on the way past. Twenty minutes before he was to pick me up I get the following text message: Change of plan bitch, I'm coming up to York by train. You OK to drive up? Sorry for the mix up, but don't pretend you're surprised... As ever; the best laid plans of Mice and John... Put John Clay into the mix of any scenario and the whole thing goes to rat shit as soon as you can say 'cake and arse party'. You'd think that someone who has spent so long in Germany perfecting diabolical machinations against humanity would have picked up some of that world famous Teutonic rigidity for organisation... I duly drove to York and met Herr Doktor Clay and his captive Anna, we then spent the next few hours running around getting various pieces for our costumes. The three of us went over to Aleisha's where were saying for the night, I smeared curry and then fake blood all over her walls and we set off to the party. It was a great bash, there were far more people there I knew than I excepted, the music was loud and booze was free, 99% of the punters had some costume on. I thought the best ones where the two short lads who came as hobbits.

This photo ably demonstrates Clay's cop-out costume (Crime scene) overshadowed by the lengths some people go to make a real effort...

And what did I go as? Well, I carried a toolbag filled with hammers, wore a fake beard and a blood splattered shirt. I accessorised with a bling necklace and three fingered dollar sign ring. Can you guess? I was Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Rapper...

If you know of a better 'ole... then go to it pt5

I'll continue with my holey memoirs. I saw Stella the other day and she told me 'I were rate enjoyin' it, then tha stopped wraytin' it.' So this prompted me to wrayte a bit more...

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...

Simon Jenkins is a Dog Bummer

I have just returned from a week in France so I thought I'd tell you all about that, also, you can read about last night's Damnation Festival, the highlights and lowlights of a day of METAL! First off though, France:

Moody battlefield cemeteries...

After Danny deciding he was going and then deciding he wasn't going about forty times, I travelled down to Brighton, stopping on the way to see Jo at Victoria Station, we had a jolly nice meal at Cafe Rouge, in order to get me ready for France. It was really good to see her again, albeit for an hour or so. I carried on to Brighton and met Justin ad Lucy at the station. Back at their gaff Bob (aka Sarah) called over (in a fucking sweet Reign in Blood t-shirt...) and in time so did Danny. After a wild drinking session, the bunch of us piled upstairs to play with Justin's gun collection.

Rule number one of gun safety, never point your weapon at someone else unless you intend on killing them...

We had to get the guns out from under Justin's bed where he'd hidden them in case the landlady came round and didn't take too kindly to her house being used as an arsenal. After more drinks and curry we hit the hay for the early morning rise for the trip to the ferry. The ferry journey was enlightened by a lovely Romanian girl who gave us all a massage for next to nothing. She offered to take me to a private room for my massage and I must say the offer was tempting... But I didn't fancy getting thrown overboard by the ship's crew for giving her undue attention. Arrival at Ocean Villas tea rooms was greeted by meeting the rest of the lads and lasses of NML and also Walter Rapp, the descendant of Jakob Hones, the body I discovered at Serre a few years ago. Shaking hands with the descendant of a body you have excavated is a humbling experience. After a look around Avril's museum and a buffet meal, Justin, Danny and I made for the place we were staying for the week, Snowden House:

Sixteen archaeologists crammed into a house packed with World War One Militeria makes for a great week!

By the time we had reached Snowden House the Irish Contingent of the team had arrived and we said fond hellos. I haven't seen many of them nearly two years and it was great to see everyone again. Even Simon, the Dog Bummer. During our stay in Snowden house we were over looked by this rather alarming looking fox:

David had to be physically restrained from trying to hunt this poor fellow

Unaware that Sunday was supposed to be a work day, Danny, Justin and I took off on a walk around a small part of the 1916 front line. The day was beautiful and we didn't want to waste it by working so we settled down for a snooze by one of the many CWGC cemeteries that dot the landscape of the North East France. It was the middle of shooting season and there were many French farmers walking around blasting anything that moved, so we didn't linger too long in anyone place for the fear of taking a peppering of buckshot.

The lanscape of a small portion of the 1916 battlefields

The main reason we were in France was to work on trenches that we had excavated in previous years. A few years ago, the Somme Association of Northern Ireland had bought Thiepval Woods opposite the Ulster Tower, Carol, the boss of the Somme Association had asked No Man's Land (of which I am part) to help out excavate the trenches that lay in the woods. This was in order for it to be turned into an interpretive visitor attraction for the growing tourist market in the area of the Somme. Actually it works as a non-profit attraction but tours of the trenches have to be booked at the Ulster Tower before hand and they are the only excavated original front line trenches that exist on the Somme Battlefields today.

A Mortar Pit, situated just behind the front lines, as excavated and reveted by NML and the Somme Association

Obviously the trenches need constant repair and rework in order that they don't collapse in on themselves. Over the past few years work has been done to revet and sandbag the trenches and this trip was another one of similar repair work. The trench which I had worked on for the most time was a second line trench system which had an associated dugout. The trench had cut through an early dugout, which had collapsed, possibly due to shell damage. We had quite a difficult time working out the sequence of events but a small amount of archaeology conducted on the end of the trench cleared up our confusion. I had small but crack (head) team under my supervision: Black Shining Heather, Dog Bummer Jenkins and Mo-Jo, we were augmented by the demonic sandbagging abilities of Douchebag Philips:

Area 8 team, left to right: Dog Bummer, Mo-Jo, Douchebag, Black Shining and self

We were so fucking great we had all our work done by Thursday morning a full day earlier than expected. The trenches looked fucking amazing and it was testament to everyone's hard work that we got it all completed so quickly.

Area 8 before

Area 8 after!

The rest of the week between work was taken up with drinking and playing Wings of War. The other highlight included Dr David Kenyon eating a plate of shredded carrots without using his hands for three euros. Like a fucking horse.

Go on Dobbin, get it in you..

As ever with trips to France, I come back with more things than I left with. I try to travel light but the return trip always has an increased weight bag. This time I returned with a hat that had been sitting in David's car for two years, a fake Iron Cross from the turfed out collection at the Waltham Gunpowder Mills, a pair of moleskin trousers from Steve and a pair of Army boots from Major Carling. All in all it was a great trip, especially since I haven't been out to France for eighteen months and haven't seen the Irish lot for even longer. I miss them all and it is the proof a of a great friendship that we can all get along as though no time has passed between our last meetings!

Proudly eating shit for NML since 2003

Last night was a night of something slightly different, Dave, Ross, Amy and I drove over to Leeds to spend the evening in the company of about a thousand social misfits and chronic masterbaters at the Damnation Metal Festival. We saw some great bands although the venue seemed to suffer from bad sound all the way through. I was gutted that the Romanian Negura Bunget didn't play, the singer had laryngitis apparently. I would have thought that should have only improved the performance... Rotting Christ were my overall highlight, their set was fucking great. I've been into them for over fifteen years, so to finally see them play live was great. They were full of energy as well and put on a blistering performance.

Rotting Christ, the angriest Greeks around...

The other highlight of the festival was the last ever performance by Mistress. I'd never heard them before but their set was fucking brilliant, with stage diving galore, just like it was 1991 again. The lowlight of the day was by far Akercocke, a British Black Metal band, a poor man's Emperor in their shit days. Dave said the singer and keyboardist looked like they worked in a call centre and the bassist was a homeless.

Akercocke? Shit Cock, more like

The other band I was really wanting to see was Jesu, the project Justin Broadrick formed following the split of Godflesh, as you no doubt already know. This performance was completely ruined by the sound engineer fucking everything up and playing the vocals and drums too loud in the mix. Jesu perform a delicately balanced soundscape of beautiful low-fi music and it needs to be mixed correctly to be able to appreciate Justin's incredible song writing abilities. The sound engineer should have been dragged out and shot. In the event I dragged myself out to go and watch Lock-Up, who's cover of Fear of Napalm was the highlight of their set.

Jesu: it could have been brilliant...

Just a Quicky

I'm going to give you baying wolves one final short post before I go off to France for the week. Before I start I have to give a big shout out to a big man; Owen, he gave me a shout on his radio show on Forge FM which he presents to a listenership of six people on Saturdays. He also asked if I'd plug his Blog for him, so here it is... 'Small and robust, the Owen is a cautious and ridiculous creature who can waste entire days just looking fantastic. He's been known to enjoy rocking and has more hair than you can comfortably imagine.' I had to do this or he would start crying again...

Owen: Idiot Savant

At work my last day's demands for cake fell on deaf ears, Lauren brought some Halloween biscuits and Wincey brought some cup cakes. There was no Cadbury's Celebrations from Sir Stanners though. He had brought Alice some when she left. I asked him why he hadn't brought me any and he said 'I like Alice.' He then poured insult on injury by offering me the last stale Jaffa Cake from the day before.

Not for you, Sotheran

The previous post's text message theme caused quite a stir amongst my six readers, so I thought I'd have a look at some of the other text messages which I have received over the past week. I tell a lie, the first one below I recieved quite a while back but saved it as it was so good. I present them all here and assure you every single one is a genuine text message that was sent to me by one of my friends, I won't tell you who sent which ones though...

Yeah. He's a moral guiding light, like Ghandi or Jesus. In fact i think the final judgement will be in the form of the jeremy kyle show. It says so in the bible. There's a sketch there. Or nuremburg in the style of jeremy kyle, imagine that. 'where i come from, son, we don't kill six million jews'.

well, he'll get what's coming to him. Next time either of us see him it'll be in a German Sheiss video, tied up and crying.

I didn't give it a second thought at the time. It was only when i got back to the day centre that I realised i was wearing the ceremonial headgear mother brought back from indochina. No wonder the children on the street were lobbing stones at me! I was dressed as mekohla, the dark spirit of war

Nothing in all my days with the medicine shows prepared me for what I saw that summer. Evil was brewing under the streets of pentonville and we all knew it. No one was quite sure how it would end least of all the so called leaders of our society... Oh, wait a minute, cash in the attic is about to start.

Yo yo yo! Yeah man i had a fine weekend, saw mudhoney ended up on the golf course...hows you?

I'm thinking of making a remake of Herbie but with explicit reference to the car's nazi origins

I'll allow you all to ruminate for a week on the meaning of all this...

Some corner of a foreign field...

I haven't updated for a wee while. That's because I've been either too busy or too tired, so suck it up. I was going to do the next part of my digging memoirs, but I've decided to write the next bit when I come back from France in a week. So you'll have to fucking wait, you impatient dogs.

What I will tell you about is... Tomorrow is my last day with Onsite, at least for the foreseeable future. The last couple of days have been pretty good. I have been digging out a large feature. But I have no idea what it is, so if you have any ideas, please let me know. But anyway, I found a fuck load of Roman pottery in it. Not only that but some of it was Samian ware. 'No shit!' I hear you say, but wait, there's more! It was not only Samian, but... Drum Roll... it was decorated! HOLY FUCKING SHIT! Yes, that's right, it was decorated. I couldn't believe it myself. We all had a look at it and it has two horses on it along with a wheel, so we reckon it's most likely a charioteer scene. Just like Ben Hur!

How I imagine the picture on the rest of the pot looks...

Anyway, I mention this because it beats the piece of shit Samain that Sir Stanners found the other week. Then he was all getting in my face about quality over quantity. I said now I've got quality and quantity, so shove that in your pipe and smoke it, you posh bastard.

Stanner's approach to modern professional archaeology

Speaking of professional approaches to modern archaeology, one of my sources (Deep Trowel) is working in Humberside (they want to call it East Yorkshire again, but if they change their name to Humberside once, they can fucking stick with it). He is having 'difficulties' with the staff there and their general lack of interest in the job. This is coupled with the fact that one of them is a pre-op transsexual who demanded his/her own toilet and vanity mirror, another turned up to work one Monday after several of his teeth fell out over the weekend and some others are camping on the site like they think it's still 1983 and everyone is working for the Ministry of Works. When I asked how things were going I received the following text message off 'Deep Trowel':

It's like babysitting spastic alligators at feeding time in a room with no lights whilst a stereo blasts Motörhead with a chicken fillet stapled to your forehead.

Aren't you glad you don't work in archaeology?

If you know of a better 'ole... then go to it pt4

As mentioned in the last post, I fucked off to France again before finally finishing with CRDS and Ireland, the first place I went was to these woods outside Thiepval:


Many times Justin, Luke, Danny and I had driven past these woods wondering what secrets they held. They marked, after all, the British front line and the jumping off point for the Irish 36th Ulster Division during the Battle of the Somme. You can see their memorial at the Ulster Tower directly north of the red circle. We would return to excavate the trenches here again and again in the woods over the following years, thanks mainly to the Somme Association's purchase of the land. It was during one of these sojourns that I 'found' a gas battery with my mattock blade...

Two of these Gas Canisters were empty, two were full. It was Russian roulette with a mattock...

After this trip we were commissioned by YAP Films of Canada to make a Battlefield Archaeology series, 'Finding the Fallen' (AKA Trench Detectives). We worked on several sites for this show, the first two at Forward Cottage and Bixschoote were outside of Ypres. as these sites were running concurrently I only worked at Forward Cottage:


You can quite clearly see X Track Cemetery to the east of the site. We always seem to be in close proximity to the dead when working in France. Because of the Flanders clay this site yielded really well preserved trench lines and artefacts, I even found a load of bullets that had been preserved in oil and looked like they'd only been dropped yesterday, not ninety years previously... The next site we worked on was at Beaumont Hamel:


We were literally outside the fence of the Canadian Memorial Park, the trenches of the park ran straight under the fence so it was quite easy to site our excavation trenches... In the satellite image the park is the large expanse to the west of the marked site. You can just about pick out the lines of the 'preserved' trenches in the park. This was a memorable site, not only for the ability to match trenches in the ground to named trenches on maps, but also for the discovery of our first latrine, still in situ (or shitu...):

Sometimes my job is shit...

The final site we worked on for this project was at Auchey-Les-Mines near Lille:


The smaller of the two circles shows where I started excavating the edge of one of the mine craters, one of several blown under the German Hohenzollem Redoubt during the Battle of Loos. The second larger circle shows where the excavation was moved to when we discovered a mass grave of German soldiers. Again further work led to the identification of one of the men, a certain Gefreiter Leopold Rothärmel of the 9th Coy, 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. This identification shows the importance of the work we do. This was a very difficult excavation, we worked in teams of four and took it in turns to work through the night, sleeping for an hour then working for an hour. We'd had looters on the site the previous night so thought it better to stay to deter further interference. It was probably the toughest (not just physically; psychologically as well) but one of the greatest things I have ever done. We were finished with this project but I wasn't finished with France, there is more to come later...

I'd left Ireland and had a job with the Cotswold Archaeological Trust. I was initially supposed to be going to work in Worcester, but instead despite my protestations I was thrust into Mid-Wales, to Four Crosses, close to Oswestry:


There was nothing wrong with site or the crew, all of whom were good eggs (Sam turned out not to be, but that is a different story...). I do remember Ian's method of trying to seduce Sam by eating his birthday cake whilst getting in her face with it. Not a very pleasant prospect: a hairy Viking reenactor with his beard covered in chocolate cake cracking onto you... The worst thing about this site was the cunt that owned the accommodation we were staying in; Cedric. He was a cunt of the highest order, ex-army wanker, a life-long career that had never seen him rise higher than Sergeant. There's something that works well in the army hierarchy that keeps the scum low. If you open the Oxford English Dictionary on the definition of 'Cunt', there is a full size picture of Cedric. He blamed me for his faulty cheap kettle that nearly burned my flat down. He wouldn't allow me to use his laundry room during the weekend so I could wash my work clothes and I had to get a taxi the eight miles to Oswestry since there is NO FUCKING PUBLIC TRANSPORT IN THAT SHITHOLE OF A LANDFILL THAT MASQUERADES AS A PRINCIPALITY THAT IS WALES!!! I hope he's dead.

Straight after the job finished in Four Crosses, I was herded out to Worcester to the original job I had been lined up to do:


As I have covered in a previous post, myself and the other lads were kept in a farm cottage about twenty miles outside of Worcester, the only bus we could get to site was one that got us into the city about an hour before work, or fifteen minutes after work started. Guess which bus we took? We would arrive fifteen minutes after everyone else, but to be honest the five of us did more work than the rest of the site put together anyway. One day the fuckhole (who's name I forget) who was running the site, had the audacity to ask me if we could all try to get in on time one morning. I reeled for a second and and rather than let fly a barrage along the lines of 'If Cotswold want to put us up in fucking house within the fucking boundaries of the fucking city rather than the next fucking county, then I'd be more than fucking happy to come into fucking work on time, as it is we are living in the middle of fucking nowhere so have little fucking choice about what fucking time the fucking bus arrives. Would you like me to have a word with the fucking transport department that organises the fucking bus routes and see if they can't get a more fucking convenient fucking bus timetable for you?' I merely explained the situation. I used words a five year old could understand with barely concealed rage.

How it feels to try to talk common sense to Archaeology Managers...

It was also in Worcester that I met Boba Fett, or at least the guy who dresses up like him in the Star Wars films: Jeremy Bulloch. He was signing in the local comic book store, so I took along a book for him to sign for a friend's birthday present (I swear, it wasn't for me...). At a loss for anything to talk to him about, I asked him if the voice in the Empire Strikes Back was his or not. He started giving me this massive discourse on what language the character was going to talk in and what he was going to say. After about fifteen minutes of this nerd barrage I was just wishing for a simple yes or no. After the heady excitement of Worcester I was Wales bound again. Cotswold had the big pipeline project that was trumpeted by the Welsh. Little realising that the pipeline was being built to pipe gas OUT of Wales, not into it. The dumb-backwards-sheepshagging-cousin-marrying-schoolchildren-burying wankers that the Welsh are.

Again the amount of pissy little sites which only had one post hole in a strip that was 20km long that we worked on along this route of the pipeline would be impossible to identify, so here is a picture of South Wales and our approximate position at any one given time... One memorable moment from this job was when Allan stayed over in the accommodation with me one weekend instead of going back to Cirencester, like the rest of the crew. On the Sunday evening, before everyone else returned, we rigged up a pair of trousers with boots attached and hung it from the stairwell to make it look like one of us had committed suicide... By the start of 2006 I'd had enough of living in company accommodation and moved up north to York to move in with Helena and Kelly. I also landed myself a job with Humber Archaeology in Beverly:


There was a guy on this site called Andy (not Frudd, another Andy) who always had a better story than anyone else. I was talking about the Watchmen comic one time, Andy was good mates with Alan Moore, they used to go drinking all the time. I mentioned Hawkwind, Andy had been their roadie through the seventies. We talked about the landings on the moon, Andy had singlehandedly attacked Mars and conquered the Martians... Nothing was free from his boasting. I wondered how an illustrious life as Andy's could end with such an ignoble end as scraping mud with a trowel and living in a Bed and Breakfast?

Andy, if it smells like it, then it probably is...

The site finished with Humber and money beckoned, money in the form of Network Archaeology. I'm going to leave this one until next time as it's a good one for stories of madness...