Japan and Birmingham

I play a lot of music during the day as I work in my home office. It never ceases to amaze me the power of music. In particular, its power to evoke memories and trigger mood and emotional responses. If I want to meditate, I simply go to youtube these days and select a nice suitable piece of music and I am off to other spheres….. Today, I played some Japan. It has been a long time since I did and I was immediately transported back to Birmingham and 1979. My best friend at college – Steve – introduced me to Japan one afternoon at his flat. We were playing Dungeons and Dragons and he put one of their albums on. I loved the music and the deep rumbling of David Sylvian’s

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The Voice

Thinking about the haunted jacket incident has brought back a few other memories and, in the run up to Halloween, I think I will develop a theme of ghostly experiences over the coming days. In that vein, here is today’s true scary story. It was the summer of 1981. Bryan Adams was playing on the radio, the sun was shining and I was driving a brand new Ford Mustang. I was in Nova Scotia, Canada where I was doing my first season of fieldwork for my Ph.D. thesis. Things could not be better. I had applied for a couple of Ph.D. programs earlier that summer. The one at Strathclyde University in conjunction with the British Geological Survey in Leeds was the one I wanted for all sorts of reasons. Firstly,

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Nova Scotian Fieldwork

I was lucky enough to visit Nova Scotia three years running for 6-weeks at a time between 1981 and 1983 to do geological fieldwork there. Actually, I spent most of my time on Cape Breton Island in and around Sydney – a coal mining region as well as a little time in Joggins of which more later. I also managed to get to Montreal on one trip and Ottawa on another ostensibly to visit museums and examine specimens there. The trip in 1981 will always stay in my memory. I had to hurriedly pass my driving test in the UK to go because I would need a rental car to get around. With just 3-weeks to take off, I failed. For undue hesitation I recall! The instructor might have considered

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