Week two (day 8) or if you prefer - Monday

Gorgeous or what !

Today's lecture is going to be about noise. It's bugged me for a few days and it was only this afternoon that I put my finger on it - there is nowhere quiet here, at all, anywhere, ever !

In bed at night the aircon is going flat out rattling away, fans going air blowing, things rustling. "Turn it off then" I hear you all shout at once. I tried that, at 2 in the morning early on in my stay. I woke up an hour later soaking wet and stuck to the sheets. It's 30 deg at night and I don't think any amount of acclimatisation would help me there - so the aircon stays on.

I went to sit out side for some peace one night but we are in a camp next to the airport and although there is very little civil traffic (Easyjet haven't discovered the delights of Basra yet) there are constant US helicopters taking off and hovering about and generally polluting my karma ! On top of that there is no mains power here so everything, and I mean everything, runs on generators. Big ones, small ones, red ones, two's, three's and even four's, and all of them going flat out all of the time in the background. I got to site thinking that I would be in the middle of the desert so how bad could it be ? It's a sodding great building site, with generators........ even the site office roof rattles during sandstorms !

The most peaceful place (if not the most comfortable) is in the back of the armoured landcruisers on the way to and from site. apart from the constant mumbling over the radio you can actually relax a little bit. Well, when I say relax I mean relax as much as you can wearing a flak jacket which all seem to have been made for people with a much slighter build, and they clearly gave not a moments thought to where they put the ceramic plates ! So all in all, there is no peace for the wicked !

Someone asked me to outline some of the decisions I have to make and today I had an interesting job to sort out. The site where I am has been cleared of all ordnance to a depth of 1.5m (the site is a km square) and 65m out from the boundary fence. It fell to me to get a local contractor in to quote me for installing posts with warning signs about minefields etc. every 100m around the perimeter of the whole site. Whilst the 3 of us (me him and one of my staff who speaks both languages cause he spoke no English and my Arabic currently runs to about 10 words and most of those revolve around food and drink) were discussing the practicalities it occurred to me that although the de-mined area was supposed to be clearly marked I just hope that when little Mohamed digs the first hole for the first post, he's not blown to pieces........ I think we will get the de-mining company in to go over the line with a thicker spray can - just to be on the safe side ! The picture shows some of the 1044 different pieces of ordnance which were collected from across the site. I suspect most of it was just abandoned rather than fired at anyone but it's still a fair pile when you put it all together.

Today's inventory looks very similar to yesterdays (and all the other days come to that):

4 cigars (although there is a very significant chance that I will go and sit on the step and have just one more in relative peace)

0 units (although I may be tempted to a bar tomorrow night for a leaving drink - and I mean just a drink - you wait and see.....)

0 dollars spent (this one is getting a bit monotonous - although I may have to buy a round tomorrow so we could change two birds with one stone !)

Visits to the gym - none. I have purposely taken a rest day after 8 straight days of hard work.

Weather - measure at 51deg on site today with no wind and staggering humidity (please Alla, a sandstorm to dry the air out a bit!)

Food - yesterday lunch at the site office (we had kebabs today........yyyyyyuuuummmmmmmmmyyyyyy !)

Right, must get on with doing nothing - later man !