And now another year has passed – quite unbelievable!

Having been on a bit of a role in relation to ice, detritus and sand wedge polygons last February, a number of events conspired to take my mind from matters related to this blog. The first occurred at the end of February last year when “I Beatrice” an earlier contributor to this blog died fairly suddenly. While I would of course have been saddened by such an event it would normally not have thrown me off course quite so much. But this blogger was very special - for “I Beatrice” was my dear sister Gillian and the last remaining member of the nuclear family within which I grew up in New Zealand. As I write more than 12 months later a persistent lump still comes to the throat.

The second reason why my attention had been so diverted, relates to another little project I have been working on for the past few years and which now seems to be coming to some sort of fruition. As a student I spent one of my summer breaks working as a labourer at the Benmore, Hydroelectricity project being developed near the remote and rather unremarkable little town of Otematata, at the centre of the South Island of New Zealand. Civil Engineering students in NZ were in the middle decades of the 20^th C often supported by bursaries provided by the Ministry of Works. In exchange for maintenance during our studies we were expected to work for the MoW in each of our vacations and for at least a 3 year period following graduation. My Otematata work training period was officially defined as working as a labourer to ensure that future engineers understood a little of what it was like to be grinding the concrete of walls where shuttering had been deficient, laying hot steel bars into fiendishly complex reinforcing schedules for floor slabs, laying post-stressing cables in penstocks, … Part of this particular training at Benmore was spent working within a scaffold gang constructing massive scaffold structures within what would eventually become the spillway gates. Looking back I cringe at the risks being taken with at the time H&S taking a pretty low priority. But having survived you may well be asking what on earth this has to do 50 years later with my neglect of a blog dealing with phenomena such as pingos, asphalt blisters, … Well curiously it has.

For the reason for my distraction has been to develop a new form of scaffold structure based not upon the use of heavy and normally rusty old steel tubes and couplers but upon lightweight and non-corrosive composite tubes and couplers. The last year has been particularly challenging for this project not least because one of the companies responsible for the maintenance of the offshore structures providing oil and gas from the N sea, have been trialling these new products in anticipation of replacing their current reliance upon steel products with those based upon our new composite ones. But perhaps I might provide more on all this in a later blog.