Your Reserves or Mine?

Boys, let's hear it for the Good Guys! Their turn has come! Here is healthy distrust in the machinations of corporate politicians and associated hacks who flew-in on them for lunch, flew-off-the-handle in the afternoon and flew-out again before sunset. Here is the neon-spangled night of head office generated euphoria followed by the grey dawn of reality over a field of disillusion. Here are the Bad Guys folding tents, hunting down sacrificial lambs and claiming the bounty. Here also is wry humour, sharp insight, and not a little cynicism to spice up the menu. Here are tales of journeys made to some of the world's more remote and exotic corners. Here are adventures shared with a spectrum of peoples both wild and wonderful in their cultural diversity. Here are the highs and lows of endeavour at the sharp end of the business of mineral exploration. Here is that ultimate objective of (ugh!) estimating a sound ore reserve capable of supporting a mining project. Here are feet in the dirt, backs to the wind and faces to the elements, where extremes of heat, cold, depth and altitude all too often ruled the roost. Open the book boys! Let's all give the Good Guys a great big hand!

I have kept a daily diary through most of my working life. Dates and times for appointments, flight itineraries, and an occasional reminder note formed the bulk of my entries. Although thinly sown, such information was generally enough for me to be going on with. That at least was the situation until a day arrived (in mid 1986) when thoughts of continuing to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous corporate politics were no longer ennobling to my peace of mind.
From then on I formed an unfailing habit of writing up a daily account of my experiences. With the exception of parts of Chapter 2 of this book, the events, adventures, descriptions, conversations, attributions, perceptions and assessments on offer in the book are directly drawn from diary entries that I wrote as and when the said events and adventures etc. were actually taking place.
My heartfelt and grateful thanks are due to each and every colleague that I associated with, at all levels, during the years in which I worked for the Company under two consecutive masters. Many of my colleagues are mentioned in the pages of this book. I appreciated them then and I continue to value them now. My working life was the better for knowing them.
Of the very many hundreds of people that I associated with around the world in the course of my work, whether in work-related relationships or chance encounters or in friendship, I can list no more than half a dozen that I would rather not have known. That’s not bad!
Mr John Maher of the Institute of Latin American Studies was my expert guide along the rocky path leading me into the world of authorship and self-publishing. John laid out a road map, and gave me inspiration and a direction along which the only publishing pitfalls I fell into were those of my own making.
This book, as was also my first book, was designed and prepared in every detail by Corinne Orde and Romilly Hambling who together form Special-Edition Pre Press Services. Their kindness, style and expertise and the patience they showed me were all exemplary. Corinne’s skill in editing and improving the text and the finished work as a whole added so much to the final book, and could not have been of greater benefit to me.
The book was digitally set and registered for print-on-demand orders with key trade and Internet booksellers and distributors by Lightning Source UK Limited of Milton Keynes. LSUK’s total commitment to its clients demonstrated consistent professional excellence and personal consideration that could not be bettered.
My publisher’s mark, Creighton Books, was named for my grandparents, Jim and Eleanor Creighton, who hailed respectively from Toxteth in Liverpool and from Port Isaac in Cornwall. May they ever rest in peace.
The lines of verse that open each chapter of this book, apart than those for Chapter 1, were inspired by timeless masterpieces of English Literature. I didn’t so much have to adapt the originals, as to let them adapt themselves to the subject matter of the chapters they head. It would be impossibly pretentious of me to hope that the authors of the original gems of universal quality might look kindly on my use (or misuse) of their masterpieces – I can only trust that if they do turn in their graves it will be so that they may sleep more comfortably. I am grateful to them all, from the deep hearts core. The adaptations (chapter and verse) were made as follows: Chapter 2 – "If" by Rudyard Kipling; Chapter 3 – "Home-Thoughts, from the Sea" by Robert Browning; Chapter 4 - "Daffodils" by William Wordsworth; Chapter 5 – "Jerusalem (from ‘Milton’)" by William Blake; Chapter 6 – "Spring and Winter (ii)" by William Shakespeare; Chapter 7 – "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley; Chapter 8 – "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats; Chapter 9 – "On first looking into Chapman’s Homer" by John Keats (again!); Chapter 10 – "The Green Eye of the Yellow God" by J. Milton Hayes; Chapter 11 – "Morte d’Arthur" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. "Genesis", with which the book commences, took its motivation from the first chapter of the Bible - the Old Testament book of the same name. "Revelation", with which both this and the Good Book concludes, sprang from the sixth chapter of St John the Divine’s New Testament musings.
Any qualities that my book has are to the credit of everyone mentioned above. Its shortcomings are entirely to the detriment of me.