geophysics

K SerraSara

June 13, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I like the illusion of free will. That’s not to say that I suffer from the delusion of it. I’m not a solipsist nor am I totally convinced that reality exists. I base that uncertainty on some hallucinations I experienced, the most recent were in a hotel room in Venezuela. My brain overheated with a fever from pneumonia and my perception was that the objects in the room changed shape and perspectives. Or perhaps my brain malfunctioned and failed to re-create the reality I am used to.

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Bolivia I

June 2, 2020 by Simon Robinson 2 Comments

I have three episodes from Bolivia to share. Let this be the first.

Theman had an acute sense of the absurd such as we’d all get if only we could keep our eyes open.

I was lucky enough to work with Theman in two countries. He was technically proficient, an expert in his field and professionally, utterly dependable. He was a devil for the details, an incisive and dogged detective. Which are great attributes for a surveyor. And besides, he was great company to travel with.

We first met in the Andes, up on the altiplano in Bolivia and a few years later we had a second encounter in the deserts of Niger. We were three months in the one, six months, on and off, in the other. There was a lot of time to exchange old blusters and experience new absurdities.

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Deadly Acacia

May 20, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

There is an acacia tree in the front garden across the road from the Woodbastwick Road Junction in London’s SE26. I’ve seen it in full bloom in early March while I was walking London’s Capital Ring. Between Sydenham and Penge, it is adorned with bright yellow balls that appear light as feathers and grouped together into a conical habit. A tree that dresses to impress. A tree that’s worth seeing.

The day I saw it, it reminded me of the acacia in our back garden. An equally impressive tree that is generally purple. It sometimes shows greenish or yellowish or grey or brown. But as I said, it’s generally purple. We’ve recently shaped it into a topiarists ball. Once it was a wonderful place for two cats to hang out but they’ve moved on and now it’s great song perch for garden birds.

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News Zen

May 19, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

We have babies! How fitting for the 80th post!

This was the announcement of sorts from the pair of Coal Tits nesting in our kitchen. Not a few lines in the newspaper; it was more like low volume yet insistent, high pitched twittering coupled with a step-change in parental activity. We might have different views if this was a nest of rats.

Coal Tit in flight: 960 mm 1/4000 s f/6.3 ISO 3200

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Marking Time

May 18, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

There was a time in my life when I used to work on rotation. That meant that I would work overseas, away from home, sometimes for two months. I would have one month off in between assignments. Sometimes the two months would be extended to three and once, it became six. That six month rotation was followed by redundancy when another corporation bought my employer. The meant I needed to reinvent myself and I emerged months later as a self-employed geophysical consultant.

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Caspian Fishing

May 4, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

We’ll be walking to the Somme this day next year or perhaps the year after, pandemic dependent. The day’s walk will be mostly through lands occupied by Germany in 1916, east of the main battlefields of the Somme. We’ll walk south from Bapaume, passing Combles and finishing in Péronne. I look forward to the opportunity to visit some of the sites not out of macabre interest but to remind me just how fragile peace can be. Assuming things haven’t kicked off again in post-pandemic melt-downs.

Still under curfew, I trawled disk drives yesterday and recovered a lot of ‘missing’ photos. Among them were some memories of a month in the Caspian. Ironically, my first memory was my return journey.

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geophysics

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