. . . CatWithNoName

Just to clarify…

On Saturday I got off the train early, cos I like to cycle. I stopped by Sainsbury’s supermarket on the way to pick up some food. At the cycle parking area a boy of 10 or so - give or take a couple of years - came along and told me he liked my bike. That’s the perfect pickup line for me, y’know. So I decided to show off a wee bit and show him how it folded. He was young and not chav-like so I didn’t feel intimdated and unwilling to discuss my bike or its features lest it get damaged or stolen. A girl of similar age came along - perhaps a sister or friend - on her bike, and started to chat as well. She asked me if I’d fallen off my bike recently, noticing the graze on my knee. We chatted a little bit longer, and then I left and went to the supermarket to get food.

When I got home I mentioned the encounter to Darren. The kids were way nicer than most young people that I see around Worksop - many of them are intimidating and will be horrid to you if you dare even glance their way. I once looked at a girl for too long - apparently - whilst walking past her and got spat at, a coin thrown at me, and HER yelling at me and calling me a hooligan. A group that lives near us used to dawdle around in car parks on stolen bikes regularly (I know this because one of the bikes in question had belonged to me before it went walkies)…. On the train some younger people seem to think that just because their mobile phone CAN play music on the speakerphone, it SHOULD be playing awful tinny music at all times. Rude? What, really? It’s illegal? Why’s that? I did actually overhear the train conductor in a conversation like that with a girl who was using her mp3 speakerphone thingy…. she seemed to be playing innocent, as though she honestly had no idea that playing your own music out loud in a public place might be unpleasant for others.

Most of the time, encounters with young people (by which I guess I mean mid teens or younger) are unpleasant. I’m not saying that most young people in Worksop and surrounding areas are horrid - I imagine that they just get themselves noticed less or they stay inside / are kept inside more than the rowdy variety.

So when one happens to encounter two young people who are actually inquisitive and nice, rather than rude or intimidating, one might remark upon it… no? *l* I was also suprised by their age - I don’t tend to see many kids their age out and about on their own. I don’t think that it’s particularly negligent of parents to let kids out at their age - kids are smarter than a lot of parents give them credit for, I reckon, and they need to get some experience with life BEFORE they turn 18 and get turfed out to uni or work or whatever they wish to do. The only negligent thing I could see was the fact that the boy was obviously allowed to run around without a top on all summer and was deeply tanned, but considering the amount of tanning salons in Worksop, I guess a lot of parents don’t even think that encouraging skin cancer in their child is negligence…

Remarking that I can like children if they aren’t horrible, scary, rude, etc after having spoken quickly to two nice children in no way consitutes an announcment that I want to have kids anywhere in the imminent future *lmao* so stop reading into things!!

Day 3: Wednesday already

The week was sneaking by far too quickly for my liking. We went out to the dig site and started to record and then dig out this feature. What you see in the pic is actually what was left after we removed it. It was a strange area of greyish clay with small flecks of charcoal in it. It was actually virtually empty of anything interesting - small bits of bone were found but only at the edges where it blended with other features.

After the morning tea break we took our muddy boots off and headed towards the clean offices about 4 or 5 minutes away for our pottery lecture. We got shown selections of pottery - there was quite a lot of pre-historic stuff at the laboratory from a different dig. Prehistoric pottery’s main feature is its crappyness - it generally looks like caked mud, or dog biscuits… we then progressed forwards through time, looking at roman pottery, of which my favourite has to be Samian ware. It’s smooth and pretty and a lot nicer than most modern stuff in my opinion… *l* After the Roman period pottery goes all nasty and crappy again, and slowly techniques get rediscovered and pottery nicer. There’s loads of stuff covered in various green glazes that were apparently lovely and poisonous - containing lead, for example.

We got to hand around a lot of ancient and invaluable pottery. I couldn’t help but imagine some ancient and nearly whole bit of pottery smashing on the floor and being ruined. I didn’t feel un-clumsy enough to be trusted with that sort of thing really *l*. At work under my desk (and it’s not only me, I do feel obliged to point out) there are quite a few large suspiciously coffee coloured stains… I’m not sure who’s done more, me or Henry my team leader. Once when Adam spilled his coffee he actually said “oops, I’ve done a Yo”. So… as I was saying, I’m not the most sure-handed of people. I didn’t break anything this time though.

After the pottery lecture and lunch we had to do loads more recording. The dimensions of the feature we’d excavated had to be recorded against the grid the site had been divided into with the help of lots of measuring tapes and a plum-bob. The plans were filled out with hachures to indicate the slopes and gradients of the cut. (I had to look for the correct spelling of hachure for ages). We photographed it with the red and white pole thingy for a scale, and we used levels to record how high the various bits of it were.

We did a training experiment with the levels first of all to make sure we’d not record rubbish, which took prettymuch all afternoon, but we were please to find we were pretty accurate at the end of the exercise. After that it was time to go back to our accommodation already! We sere lazy and spent most of the evening in our rooms. I nipped out to the laundrette to do some laundry and was lucky enough to get caught in an astounding downpour. I ran the short distance from the laundrette to our room but still managed to get quite soaked.

Day 2: Rain

We had rain forecast for prettymuch the whole week, and I think we were kept off the dig site almost all day on Tuesday. If I recall correctly we started the day by washing finds. All finds that are found are put into a labelled tray whilst still muddy. With the help of bowls of water, toothbrushes, long sticks, etc, we cleaned mud off of the various shards of animal bone, pottery, building material, and oystershell in some of these boxes. I had the dubious privelige of getting a huge cow jawbone to clean - it’s not exactly every day you have the chance to grab a toothbrush and brush a cow’s teeth, let alone one that’s been dead for hundreds of years…. Oystershell was very difficult to clean without ruining it - it was very flaky.

After teabreak - they were hilariously religious about taking their breaks - we strolled over to a different building nearby and had a lecture on small finds. “Small finds” differ from “finds” basically cos they’re more interesting - things like coins, metal, glass, worked bone, etc. We got divided into groups and had finds passed about among us, which we had to try to identify or guess the purpose of. My group was given a slightly evil one to identify - a “bone socketed point” that no one knows the purpose of. We guessed it might be to do with threading or making rope…. We also got a ceramic toy - when I was in NZ we used to call the game knucklebones, in israel its name would roughly translate to “five stones”, and I’ve seen it called jacks (which involves a ball, knucklebones doesn’t) as well, but I’m not sure if that’s primarily an american thing?

Darren’s group got pins and a pinner’s bone, which were very difficult to identify. His group also got another weird thing - ceramic wig curlers, which they couldn’t identify either. About the only thing that they got that was easy to identify was a bone domino.

Others things given to various groups were a bit of bone that had been used as an ice skate, tips of antler that weren’t used for anything - scrap ends, basically. There was some gorgeous glass - which goes opaque and shiny as it degrades. It didn’t look at all like glass as we normally know it, but it was very pretty.

After the lecture and lunch we were put on residue sorting. Soil samples from the site are taken, put in a sieve, and jet washed. Some of it’s put in the 5 mm sieve - so small stuff washes out - and some is put in a 1 mm sieve - meaning prettymuch only the dirt is washed out, and loads of utterly TINY things have to be sorted with tweezers. All the big bits had been sorted out by the time we sat down with the trays. I don’t recall the categories we sorted very well… possibly there was oranic matter (charcoal, small dried bits of cess, seeds, etc), bone, shell, small finds, and stone. Most of the stuff I sorted was uninteresting and fell easily into one of theose categories. Two things of note that I found was part of a bead - something pale and yellowish, like a bone or bit of ivory, I guess, and a bit of a fossil that looked kind of like a thin bead. Archaeologists don’t care about fossils, apparently. They like old but not that old. *L* One of the sorters suggested that I might have found a bit of crinoid. That appears possible, but if it was part of a crinoid, it was only a single tiny disc. Darren found a fleck of green (presumably metal) that several archaeologists ummed and ahhed about, and ended up taking it to the head guy, Toby. He took it, pointed over to a wall somewhere, saying “look over there!” and whilst everyone as distracted he threw the anonymous green speck up into the air, to be lost forever. Poor Darren *l*. Apparently it was too utterly tiny to draw any conclusions or evidence from.

The sun decided to show its face after all, so after the afternoon tea break we did make it out to site. We loves the mud, we do. This time we got to work on the area we’d work on for the rest of the week that had been too wet and dangerous on monday. Some of the water-filled holes are very deep - old wells, for example - so you really DO need to exercise care around them. We just had time to start cleaning the ground before we got rained off the site again. I was quite please to notice some strange dark circles cut into the reddish soil I was cleaning. When I pointed one ofthem out to Ben (a trained archaeologist, who supervises the placements who supervise us) he said they looked like stake holes, and that he’s not noticed them before. I was delighted to discover a stake hole all by myself on my second day!! I even have a pic of it.

The rain only made us leave site a few minutes before closing time so there wasn’t really any time to start anything else before the end of the day. We walked aout town a bit, bought me another book to read, (Excession: Ian M. Banks) and the second X-files series box set. Then we picked up some sandwiches at M & S and went home, prettymuch spending the whole evening in our room lazing about and watching aliens abduct people.

Day 1: Lectures and Mud.

The first day we woke up at about 730 am - a long sleep in for me, considering I normally get up at 6 am. I’d have gotten up later still - I normally take about 7 - 9 minutes to get ready in the morning *l* but Darren needs longer to get ready - so I read quite a bit after I got up. I had a sore back from the cramped bed, but as soon as I started walking about that seemed to go away.

We met at 0830 in the main courtyard by the accomodation. A group of about 15 or 20 of us headed to the bus stop. At this point Darren and I decided to get a weekly bus pass rather than cycle, since it seemed like the sociable thing to do… and the passes were cheap, too. £14 for unlimited travel within York is pretty good. The bus service we took from the university ran every ten minutes for most of the day. What more could you ask for?

We arrived and got introduced quickly to everyone who was in our group. We were given the introductory lectures (which took all morning) on the history of the site and the basics we needed to know before digging. The person who gave the lecture was due to leave at any time, as his wife was “about to drop a sprog” as one of the others put it. He didn’t get a call during the lectures though so thankfully we weren’t forgotten quickly as he had to run off… Apparently she did have the child in the earlier hours of the next morning.

During lunch we ran off into town, where I hurriedly bought some steel toe capped boots - our site counted as a contruction site and steel toecapped boots, hard hats, and yellow vests are a legal requirement, which I hadn’t been aware of. Stoopid foreigners. Darren also took the chance to buy a fleece and a pair of waterproof trousers that were nice and breathable. Once we’d done all this and bought lunch we raun out of lunchtime, so all I had was a quick few bites of my sandwich before we went on site. The area our group was supposed to be working on was utterly waterlogged, so we worked on a different area that afternoon, cleaning back the soil to look for any obvious features or “contexts” as they were known. Any finds we found at that point couldn’t count for much, since they were loose on the topsoil rather than clearly embedded and stratified. We still did find some bone and a bit of a nail, as well as a few bits of pot.

We had to clean our feet off very carefully when we were leaving the dig site and going back to the main warehouse, which was across the street - the local council wouldn’t have taken kindly to a large track of mud between the dig site and the warehouse for some strange reason… Our trowels came in quite handy for digging into the tread of our boots.

We stopped at the White Swan (or was it back swan? I can’t remember…) afterward for a quick drink with everyone else. It was one of those sucky pubs that had nothing I like to drink so I ended up with a crappy orange juice. We chatted with one of the placements and - small world as it is - I found out he used to work for HBoS, so he actually knew who FSC were and what I did as a job.

We cleared out after not too long, headed home, and ate dinner at the pub near the uni campus again. We also managed to get our rooms sorted - two adjacent, unoccupied rooms in the “quiet house”. The move didn’t take long since we’d only been in our other room one night. I don’t think we actually went into the other room apart from once at the start and once at the end to take / put back the bed. Once we had two single beds side by side I slept faaaaaaaar better.

We were chagrined to find out that the uni didn’t have a wifi connection available, we couldn’t use the cabled connection without a uni logon, and there was almost no signal in my 3g usb modem! Mostly we ended up just reading in our free time even though we had darren’s mum’s laptop and my Eee.

Day 0: Arrival

Sunday 17th August - This is Day 0 since it’s only a half day really, and we didn’t start the course until the Monday. We’d decided to take both of our bikes, and had reserved spaces for them on the train services that required reservations. Bizzarely, you HAD to reserve seats if you reserved bike spaces - but the seats we were given were generally in coach D or E, and the bikes were carried on coach P. All of our train journeys were 25 minutes or less, so we basically had to ignore the seat reservations and stand about in the first class coach entryways - several first class coaches were between the standard class coaches and the bike coaches - because if we actually sought out our seats all the way down the other end of a LONG train we’d probably reach them just in time to have to head back to coach P to collect the bikes again.

The journey was three legs - longer than is really needed to York but all that seemed to be available on Sunday. Worksop to Retford was just a local service we take all the time, then we had a ten minute hop from Retford to Doncaster, and last of all another quick ride to York. The lady who let our bikes in to the storage coach at Doncaster had a little bit of a fit at us for not informing the local train station staff “well in avance” about the bikes. Darren and I both kind of wondered what the point of reservations were if not to inform the train staff in advance that we intend to take bikes on the train…? We’re crazy types though. I hope the lady in question was just having a bad day that day, cos if she’s always like that she’s truly shite at the whole “customer service” concept.

Once we got to York we found out that the maps we had been provided with as part of the welcome pack were actually quite rubbish and lacking in detail. This is the sort of annoying thing you can’t know in advance - you see a map and think “good, a map, I won’t need to print one”. You don’t generally think “What if they sent me a useless map that doesn’t show all of the streets we might need to take, only main throughfares?” Consequently we had a bit of fun (not) finding our way to where we needed to be. It was suckier than just navigation difficulties, since we were walking the bikes - Darren had a laptop bag and a large backpack and didn’t want to risk jostling the laptop and coldnt really bike loaded down with everything anyway. I’m more of a “pack light” person so I just had the backpack I normally use for work and for walking / cycling / purtymuch everything. We were right about to pull into the back of a pub carpark to try and use my Eee to establish where we needed to go when we realised we were back on a street that was on the map again. We were probably walking for a couple of hours all in all, which I did NOT find fun because the cursed recurrent injury to the side of my knee was remind me that it wasn’t happy about the walking. I need to get a doctor’s appointment, really, again :(((((. I’ve been having this problem for over half a year and I’m at the point where I daren’t go on fun walks in case it decides to cause me grief again. Even running short distances on soft mats - as at martial arts - sometimes causes it to ache. The plan for this wednesday, logicially, is to bike rather than walk. I can’t even remember the last good walk or bike I did - I think it was probably before Lolo and Judith came over, which is far too long ago.

When we found the university campus area we were staying at, we went to the reception, as we’d been instructed. The guard guy at reception told us that everyone had cleared off to the pub and they’d left names and two keys for two people who were yet to show up. You’d think the names would be Yo and Darren… but Darren wasn’t on the list, so we only got one key. This wasn’t bad in itself, except that the rooms were made for single occupants with single beds, which would be squishy with two people. We’d hoped to take the bed from one room and stick it beside the bed in the other room… there was no use arguing with the guard who was only following intructions though, so we dropped our stuff off and headed down to the pub where everyone was supposed to be.

We couldn’t find anyone at the pub, so we decided to sit down and eat a meal. Whilst eating we saw people come in from the back and realised we’d not checked in the beer garden for archaeologists. Duh. There were probably 20 or more of them sitting out the back, so we joined them, chatted a bit about what was going to happen, who we were and they were, laughed at Bonekickers, etc….

The Placements were generally students who were on the dig for several weeks or even 2 or 3 months for experience, or cos they wanted to, or whatever… they were the ones who spent the most time with us training us a,d showing us what to do, where to dig, etc. They were also responsible for generally keeping the accomodation rooms ready for new trainees. A couple of them promised to sort out the fact that we only had one room and not two, so when we went back to the accomodation we went to the reception again, and the Placements convinced reception to give up another key.

When we got to the door of the accomodation neither of the two keys that we’d been given would open the door. They were the magnetic card type, so we took them back to reception and got them reprogrammed. This got us in the building, and I went to the door of the second room we’d been given, opened the door…. and quite scared two people who were watching tv in there. Oops. We apoogised and then left them alone to their business.

Rather than go to reception a 4th time that night, we decided to sleep in the single bed…. and that’s the end of Day 0.